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Bulk Data Affirmative - JDI 2015
Michael Tang
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FISA Court Presiding Judge Rosemary M Collyer Response to Chairman Nunes
Pest Analysis for Google
TSCM Sweep Guide
A Simple Guide to TSCM Sweeps
Perspectives for Cyber Strategists on Law for Cyberwar
Atlanta Police Department's "Occupy Atlanta Plan of Action"
1AC Plan
Are You on the List MAIN CORE
Academic projects RFID Based
SAT Corp Monics Brochure
2nd Circuit Ct. Concurring Opinion
00284-20020919 eff FISCR brief
Nevada Sagebrush Archives 02/11/2014
proposal.docx
Project Mannequin, Part 1
FI - 13-284 - Feb 1 2014
Take a Glimpse of The Other Side of the Game
right to privacy essay
Premium Static Security Guarding Services World Wide by Nsa Global Security Services
**AFF**
Inherency
Repeal of 215 doesnt solve legislation is necessary to limit XO 12333
Tye 14
John Napier Tye. July 18, 2014. The Washington Post. Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on
Americans http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/meet-executive-order-12333-the-reagan-rule-that-lets-the-nsa-spy-onamericans/2014/07/18/93d2ac22-0b93-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html (John Napier Tye served as section chief for Internet
freedom in the State Departments Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from January 2011 to April 2014. He is now a
legal director of Avaaz, a global advocacy organization.)
From 2011 until April of this year, I worked on global Internet freedom policy as a civil
servant at the State Department. In that capacity, I was cleared to receive top-secret and
sensitive compartmented information. Based in part on classified facts that I am prohibited by
law from publishing, I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the
collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than
under Section 215. Bulk data collection that occurs inside the United States contains
built-in protections for U.S. persons, defined as U.S. citizens, permanent residents and
companies. Such collection must be authorized by statute and is subject to oversight from
Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The statutes set a high bar for
collecting the content of communications by U.S. persons. For example, Section 215
permits the bulk collection only of U.S. telephone metadata lists of incoming and
outgoing phone numbers but not audio of the calls. Executive Order 12333 contains no
such protections for U.S. persons if the collection occurs outside U.S. borders. Issued by
President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations, 12333 is not a
statute and has never been subject to meaningful oversight from Congress or any
court. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, has said that the committee has not been able to sufficiently oversee activities
conducted under 12333. Unlike Section 215, the executive order authorizes collection of
the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons. Such persons
cannot be individually targeted under 12333 without a court order. However , if the contents of
a U.S. persons communications are incidentally collected (an NSA term of art) in
the course of a lawful overseas foreign intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of
the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It does not require that the
affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the volume
of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained. Incidental
collection may sound insignificant, but it is a legal loophole that can be stretched
very wide. Remember that the NSA is building a data center in Utah five times the size of the
U.S. Capitol building, with its own power plant that will reportedly burn $40 million a year in
electricity. Incidental collection might need its own power plant. A legal regime in which U.S.
citizens data receives different levels of privacy and oversight, depending on whether it is
collected inside or outside U.S. borders, may have made sense when most communications by
U.S. persons stayed inside the United States. But today, U.S. communications increasingly
travel across U.S. borders or are stored beyond them. For example, the Google and
Yahoo e-mail systems rely on networks of mirror servers located throughout the
world. An e-mail from New York to New Jersey is likely to wind up on servers in Brazil, Japan
and Britain. The same is true for most purely domestic communications. Executive Order
12333 contains nothing to prevent the NSA from collecting and storing all such
communications content as well as metadata provided that such collection
occurs outside the United States in the course of a lawful foreign intelligence
investigation. No warrant or court approval is required, and such collection never need
be reported to Congress. None of the reforms that Obama announced earlier this year will affect
such collection.
The Freedom Act did nothing and warrantless NSA surveillance continues.
Napolitano 6/10 (Andrew, 6/10/15, a former judge of the Superior Court of New
Jersey, is an analyst for the Fox News Channel. He has written seven books on
the U.S. Constitution.Lies the government is telling you
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/10/andrew-napolitano-freedom-act-fails-tocurtail-nsa/ , Google, DOA 6/23/15) //kbuck
Last week, Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined President Obama in congratulating themselves for taming the National Security Agencys
voracious appetite for spying. By
permitting one section of the Patriot Act to expire and by replacing it with
the USA Freedom Act, the federal government is taking credit for taming beasts of its own
creation. In reality, nothing substantial has changed. Under the Patriot Act, the NSA had access to
and possessed digital versions of the content of all telephone conversations, emails and text
messages sent between and among all people in America since 2009. Under the USA Freedom
Act, it has the same. The USA Freedom Act changes slightly the mechanisms for acquiring this bulk data, but it does not
change the amount or nature of the data the NSA acquires. Under the Patriot Act, the NSA installed its computers
in every main switching station of every telecom carrier and Internet service provider in the United States. It did this by getting Congress to immunize the
carriers and providers from liability for permitting the feds to snoop on their customers and by getting the Department of Justice to prosecute the only
CEO of a carrier who had the courage to send the feds packing. In order to operate its computers at these facilities, the NSA placed its own computer
analysts physically at those computers 24/7. It then went to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court and asked for search warrants
directing the telecoms and Internet service providers to make available to it all the identifying metadata the times, locations, durations, email addresses
and telephone numbers used for all callers and email users in a given ZIP code or area code or on a customer list. The first document revealed by
Edward Snowden two years ago was a FISA court search warrant directed to Verizon ordering it to make available to NSA agents the metadata of all its
customers more than 113 million at the time. Once the court granted that search warrant and others like it, the NSA computers simply downloaded all
the USA Freedom Act, the NSA computers remain at the carriers and service providers
switching offices, but the NSA computer analysts return to theirs; and from there they operate
remotely the same computers they were operating directly in the Patriot Act days . The NSA will continue to
that metadata and the digital recordings of content. Because the FISA court renewed every order it issued, this arrangement became permanent.
ask the FISA court for search warrants permitting the download of metadata, and that court will still grant those search warrants permitting the
downloading. And
the NSA will continue to take both metadata and content. The Supreme Court has
ruled consistently that the government must obtain a search warrant in order to intercept any
nonpublic communication. The Constitution requires probable cause as a precondition for a
judge to issue a search warrant for any purpose, and the warrant must particularly [describe] the
place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Because this is expressly set forth in the Constitution
itself, Congress and the president are bound by it. They cannot change it. They cannot avoid or evade it. Probable cause is evidence about a person or
place sufficient to permit a judge to conclude that evidence of a crime will probably be found. Both
the Patriot Act and the USA
Freedom Act disregard the probable cause standard and substitute instead a government need
standard. This is, of course, no standard at all, as the NSA has claimed under the Patriot Act and the FISA court bought the argument that it
needs all telephone calls, all emails and all text messages of all people in America. Today it may legally obtain them by making the same claim under the
USA Freedom Act. When politicians tell you that the NSA needs a court order in order to listen to your phone calls or read your emails, they are talking
about a FISA court order that is based on government need not a constitutional court order, which can only be based on probable cause. This is an
insidious and unconstitutional bait and switch. All this may start with the NSA, but it does not end there. Last week, we learned that the FBI is operating
low-flying planes over 100 American cities to monitor folks on the streets and intercept their cellphone use without any search warrants. Earlier this
week, we learned that the Drug Enforcement Administration has intercepted the telephone calls of more than 11,000 people in three years without any
search warrants. We already know that local police have been using government surplus cell towers to intercept the cellphone signals of innocent
automobile drivers for about a year without search warrants. How dangerous this is. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It applies in good
times and in bad, in war and in peace. It regulates the governed and the governors. Yet if the government that it regulates can change it by ordinary
legislation, then it is not a constitution but a charade. Suppose the Congress wants to redefine the freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion or the
right to keep and bear arms, just as it did the standards for issuing search warrants. What is the value of a constitutional guarantee if the people into whose
hands we repose the Constitution for safekeeping can change it as they see fit and negate the guarantee? What do you call a negated constitutional
guarantee? Government need.
Capitalism Adv
1AC Adv Shell
The NSA monatizes private data
Lenzner, 13
(Robert, 9/23/13, Previous Forbes Senior Editor, ATT, Verizon, Sprint Are Paid Cash By NSA For Your Private Communications
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/09/23/attverizonsprint-are-paid-cash-by-nsa-for-your-private-communications/ DOA
6/24/15, Google,) //Kbuck
The National Security Agency pays AT&T T -0.36%, Verizon and Sprint several hundred million
dollars a year for access to 81% of all international phone calls into the US , according to a leaked
inspector generals report, which has been reported by the WashingtonPost, AP, and the New York Review of Books. In fact., this
secret report says that NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies, underscoring that the U/S. has the home-field
advantage as the primary hub for worldwide communications, the New York Review of Books reported in its August 15 issue.
These secret cooperative agreements reveal that NSA pays surveillance fees to telcos and phone
companies were first made public by Edward Snowden, the former NSA administrator, now resident in Russia. AT&T
charges $325 for each activation fee and $10 a day to monitor the account, according to the AP.
Verizon charges $775 per tapping for the first month and then $500 a month thereafter, according
to the Associated Press today. The article reported that Microsoft MSFT -0.6%, Yahoo YHOO +0.74% and Google refused
to say how much they charged to allow the government to tap into emails and other non-telephonic communications. In a separate
report the Washington Post reported that
NSA pays the telcos roughly $300 million annually for access to
information on their communications; where and when they occurred, the identity of the person called and how long the
conversation lasted. This surveillance is accomplished by tapping into high volume circuits and packet-switched networks. The
ability to obtain this information was authorized by the US Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, passed in 1994 by
the Clinton administration. While $300 million for giant telephone companies is only a slight fraction of their overall revenues, it is
quite a shocking revelation to think that the telcos consumers pay every month to hook them up with the world are also being paid by
the U.S. government to maintain watch over our daily communication whether over wired instruments or unwired communications
equipment like I pads and cell phones. Snowden recently released information by means of a slide which revealed that the government
was able to access real-time-data on the live voice, text, e-mail, or internet chat services, in addition to analyzing stored data. (like
your Facebook account)
Commodification of privacy is neoliberal trading a fundamental human
right for capital gain is the epitome of neoliberal ideology.
Giroux, 14
Henry A Giroux 10 February 2014, Henry Giroux, is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. Giroux received his
doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University; Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State; http://www.truthout.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state //Kbuck
*We dont endorse that glang
The revelations of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden about government lawlessness and corporate spying provide a new meaning if not a revitalized urgency and relevance to George Orwell's dystopian fable 1984.
Orwell offered his readers an image of the modern state that had become dystopian - one in which privacy as a civil virtue and a crucial right was no longer valued as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving democracy. Orwell was clear that the right to
privacy had come under egregious assault. But the right to privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation of individual rights. When ruthlessly transgressed, the issue of privacy became a moral and political principle by which to assess the nature, power
and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. As important as Orwell's warning was in shedding light on the horrors of mid-20th century totalitarianism and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on citizens, the text serves as a brilliant but limited metaphor for
mapping the expansive trajectory of global surveillance and authoritarianism now characteristic of the first decades of the new millennium. As Marjorie Cohn has indicated, "Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass
metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use." In his videotaped Christmas
message, Snowden references Orwell's warning of "the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us,"2 allowing the state to regulate subjects within the most intimate spaces of private life. But these older modes of surveillance, Snowden elaborates,
however, are nothing compared to what is used to infringe on our personal privacy today. For Snowden, the threat posed by the new surveillance state can be measured by its reach and use of technologies that far outdate anything Orwell envisioned and pose a much
greater threat to the privacy rights of citizens and the reach of sovereign powers. He reiterates this point by reminding his viewers that "a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all - they will never know what it means to have a private moment to
themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought."3 Snowden is right about the danger to privacy rights but his analysis fails to go far enough in linking together the question of surveillance with the rise of "networked societies," global flows of power and the emergence
of the totalitarian state. In a world devoid of care, compassion and protection, privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. The democratic
ideal rooted in the right to privacy under the modernist state in which Orwell lived out his political imagination has been transformed and mutilated, almost beyond recognition. Just as Orwell's fable has morphed over time into a combination of "realistic novel," real-life
privacy has been
redefined through the material and ideological registers of a neoliberal order in which the right
to privacy has succumbed to the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism's
unending necessity to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of
daily life visible and subject to data manipulation.5 In a world devoid of care, compassion and protection,
privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good
or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. In a world in which the worst excesses of
capitalism are unchecked, privacy is nurtured in a zone of historical amnesia, indifferent to its
transformation and demise under a "broad set of panoptic practices." 6 Consequently, culture loses its power
documentary and a form of reality TV, privacy has been altered radically in an age of permanent, 'nonstop' global exchange and circulation. So, too, and in the current period of historical amnesia,
as the bearer of public memory in a social order where a consumerist-driven ethic "makes impossible any shared recognition of
common interests or goals" and furthers the collective indifference to the growth of the surveillance state.7 Surveillance
become a growing feature of daily life. In fact, it is more appropriate to analyze the culture of surveillance, rather than
address exclusively the violations committed by the corporate-surveillance state. In this instance, the
surveillance and
security state is one that not only listens, watches and gathers massive amounts of information
through data mining necessary for identifying consumer populations but also acculturates the
public into accepting the intrusion of surveillance technologies and privatized commodified
values into all aspects of their lives. Personal information is willingly given over to social media
and other corporate-based websites and gathered daily as people move from one targeted web site
to the next across multiple screens and digital apparatuses .
As Ariel Dorfman points out, social media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the
most benevolent of platitudes and reasons, all the while endlessly shopping online and texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the streets, commercial establishments and workplaces to
the schools our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports, stores, sporting events and the like. Yet the most important transgression may not only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting of
information but also in a culture that normalizes surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and enticements for consumers who use the new digital technologies and social networks to simulate false notions of community and to socialize young people into a culture of
security and commodification in which their identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of private addictions, self-help and commodification. Surveillance feeds on the related notions of fear and delusion. Authoritarianism in its contemporary
manifestations, as evidenced so grippingly in Orwell's text, no longer depends on the raw displays of power but instead has become omniscient in a culture of control in which the most cherished notions of agency collapse into unabashed narcissistic exhibitions and
confessions of the self, serving as willing fodder for the spying state. The self has become not simply the subject of surveillance but a willing participant and object. Operating off the assumption that some individuals will not willingly turn their private lives over to the
spying state and corporations, the NSA and other intelligence agencies work hard to create a turnkey authoritarian state in which the "electronic self" becomes public property. Every space is now enclosed within the purview of an authoritarian society that attempts to
govern the entirety of social life. As Jonathan Schell points out: Thanks to Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL,
Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the
already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses
and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others. This other self has become de facto
public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it for commercial purposes. Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex. Every
human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook or some other social network. Social cynicism and societal indifference accelerate a broken culture in which reason has been replaced by consumer-fed hallucinatory hopes.9 Surveillance and its
accompanying culture of fear now produce subjects that revel in being watched, turning the practice if not the threat posed by surveillance into just another condition for performing the self. Every human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook
or some other social network. Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the endless public display of the self. Zygmunt Bauman echoes this sentiment in arguing that: These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that
frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to
wring out and tear away the secrets from behind the ramparts of privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody's shared property and a property everybody wishes to share. Everything that moves is monitored, along with information that is endlessly
amassed and stored by private and government agencies. No one, it seems, can escape the tentacles of the NSA or the spy agencies that are scouring mobile phone apps for personal data and intercepting computer and cellphone shipments to plant tracking devices and
malware in them.11 Surveillance is now global, reaching beyond borders that no longer provide an obstacle to collecting information and spying on governments, individuals, prominent politicians, corporations and pro-democracy protest groups. The details of our daily
lives are not only on full display but are being monitored, collected and stored in databanks waiting to be used for commercial, security or political purposes. At the same time, the right to privacy is eagerly given up by millions of people for the wonders of social
networking or the varied seductions inspired by consumer fantasies. The loss of privacy, anonymity and confidentiality also has had the adverse effect of providing the basis for what Bauman and David Lyons call the undemocratic process of "social sorting," in which
different populations are subject to differential treatment extending from being protected by the state to being killed by drone attacks launched under the auspices of global surveillance and state power. Privacy is no longer a principled and cherished civil right. On the
contrary, it has been absorbed and transformed within the purview of a celebrity and market-driven culture in which people publicize themselves and their innermost secrets to promote and advance their personal brand. Or it is often a principle invoked by conservatives
who claim their rights to privacy have been trampled when confronted with ideas or arguments that unsettle their notions of common sense or their worldviews. It is worth repeating that privacy has mostly become synonymous with a form of self-generated, nonstop
performance - a type of public relations in which privacy makes possible the unearthing of secrets, a cult of commodified confessionals and an infusion of narcissistic, self-referencing narratives, all of which serve to expand the pleasure quotient of surveillance while
normalizing its expanding practices and modes of repression that Orwell could never have imagined. Where Orwell's characters loathed the intrusion of surveillance, according to Bauman and Lyons, today We seem to experience no joy in having secrets, unless they are
the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of researchers and editors of TV talk shows, tabloid front pages and the....covers of glossy magazines.Everything private is now done, potentially, in public - and is potentially available for public
consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet 'can't be made to forget' anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone
cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people's views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. Orwell's 1984 looks subdued next to the current parameters, intrusions, technologies and disciplinary
apparatuses wielded by the new corporate-government surveillance state. Surveillance has not only become more pervasive, intruding into the most private of spaces and activities in order to collect massive amounts of data, it also permeates and inhabits everyday
activities so as to be taken-for-granted. Surveillance is not simply pervasive, it has become normalized. Orwell could not have imagined either the intrusive capabilities of the the new high-powered digital technologies of surveillance and display, nor could he have
envisioned the growing web of political, cultural and economic partnerships between modes of government and corporate sovereignty capable of collecting almost every form of communication in which human beings engage. What is new in the post-Orwellian world is
not just the emergence of new and powerful technologies used by governments and corporations to spy on people and assess personal information as a way to either attract ready-made customers or to sell information to advertising agencies, but the emergence of a
widespread culture of surveillance. Intelligence networks now inhabit the world of Disney as well as the secret domains of the NSA and the FBI. I think the renowned intellectual historian Quentin Skinner is right in insisting that surveillance is about more than the
violation of privacy rights, however important. Under the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy, but the fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary power it no longer seems interested in contesting.
And it is precisely this existence of unchecked power and the wider culture of political indifference that puts at risk the broader principles of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself. According to Skinner, who is worth quoting at length: The
response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it's true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my
point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the
mercy of arbitrary power. It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.14 The dangers of the
surveillance state far exceed the attack on privacy or warrant simply a discussion about balancing security against civil liberties. The latter argument fails to address how the growth of the surveillance state is connected to the rise of the punishing state, the militarization
of American society, secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, a growing culture of violence, the criminalization of social problems, the depoliticization of public memory, and one of the largest prison systems in the world, all of which "are only the most concrete,
condensed manifestations of a diffuse security regime in which we are all interned and enlisted."15 The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system with its "urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every
communication of any sort on the planet"16 can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the rise in super-max prisons, the hypermilitarization of local police forces, the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the United States.17 The reach of the surveillance culture can also be seen in the use of radio chips and GPS
technologies used to track a person's movements across time and space. The point of no return in the emergence of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus is not strictly confined to the task of archiving immense pools of data collection to be used in a number of illegal
ways.18 It is in creating a culture in which surveillance becomes trivialized, celebrated, and legitimated as reasonable and unquestioned behavior. Evidence that diverse forms of public pedagogy are sanctioning the security state is on full display in post-Orwellian
America, obvious in schools that demand that students wear radio chips so they can be tracked.19 Such anti-democratic projects are now also funded by billionaires like Bill Gates who push for the use of biometric bracelets to monitor students' attentiveness in
classrooms.20 The normalization of surveillance is also evident in the actions of giant Internet providers who use social messaging to pry personal information from their users. The reach of the surveillance culture can also be seen in the use of radio chips and GPS
technologies used to track a person's movements across time and space. At the same time, cultures of surveillance work hard to trivialize the importance of a massive surveillance environment by transforming it into a source of entertainment. This is evident in the
popularity of realty TV shows such as "Big Brother" or "Undercover Boss," which turn the event of constant surveillance into a voyeuristic pleasure.21 The atrophy of democratic intuitions of culture and governance are evident in popular representations that undermine
the meaning of democracy as a collective ethos that unconditionally stands for social, economic, and political rights.22 One example can be found in Hollywood films that glorify hackers such as those in the Matrix trilogy, or movies that celebrate professionalized
spying and the unwarranted
collection of personal information from people who have not broken the law in the name of national security and
for commercial purposes is a procedure often adopted by totalitarian states.
modern spying and the government agents using their omniscient technological gizmos to fight terrorists and other forces of evil. What is lost in the culture of surveillance is that
Scenario 1 is Capitalism
Capitalism causes social slavery to capital humans very consciousness
turned into a means for profit while money takes precedent over the value of
Marsh, 95
Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, PhD from Northwestern University (James, Critique Action and Liberation, p 277)
Ideally, nature, workers'
own bodies, and the world around them, should be the vehicle of their
conscious self-expression. In estranging human beings from object and process, capitalism
estranges them from their own consciousness. It turns consciousness into a means of individual life or
mere physical existence. Rather than living to work the worker works in order to live, to keep
body and soul together. That which should be a means becomes an end, and that which should be the end becomes a means. Rather
than nature being the environment in which human beings freely, consciously express themselves and realize themselves, nature is
Consciousness ceases to be an end and becomes a means to the realization of
profit. Use value, the capacity of products for fulfilling real human needs, in capitalism becomes
subordinate to the product's exchange value, the abstract labor time as measured in money. The consciousness
of everyone, even the capitalist, is alienated in the pursuit of profit. Money becomes an all-consuming
god devouring everything in its path. In this institutionalized reification in which things become more
turned against them.
important than consciousness, what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities arises. Human
beings forget that they are
the source of value in their wealth and think that it is the source of their value.
We have an A priori ethical obligation to reject capitalism utilitarian
rationale cant account for the degraded life chances of billions across the
globe capitalism makes its victims anonymous, destroying the ability to find
value in life and makes impact calculus impossible
Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences at University College, Northampton, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-16
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political
responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of todays global capitalism and its obscene
naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world . Against
the standardized positions of postmodern culture with all its pieties concerning multiculturalist etiquette Zizek is arguing for a
politics that might be called radically incorrect in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions and focuses instead on the
very organizing principles of todays social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For
far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the
likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the
transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is
almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the
prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism
can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting
the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can
end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial
prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizeks point is
rather that in rejecting economism we
should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the
lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook
Marxs central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to
conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What
is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal
capitalism is one whose universalism fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed
violence that excludes vast sectors of the worlds population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology
attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were
simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed
create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor
ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant . That is to say, the human cost in terms of
inherent global poverty and degraded life-chances cannot be calculated within the existing
economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz, the
patronizing reference to the developing world. And Zizeks point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalisms
profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a
culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily
sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek
argues for a new universalism whose
primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on
exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a
hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizeks universalism is that it would not attempt
to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a glitch in an otherwise sound matrix.
Scenario 2 is privacy
Privacy is necessary to individual autonomy and freedom
Sadowski 13
(Jathan, 2/26/13, Sadowski studies applied ethics and the human and social dimensions of science and technology at Arizona State
University.) Why does Privacy Matter? One Scholars Answer DOA 6/22/13, Google,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/why-does-privacy-matter-one-scholars-answer/273521/ // kbuck
Our privacy is now at risk in unprecedented ways, but, sadly, the legal system is lagging behind
the pace of innovation. Indeed, the last major privacy law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, was passed in 1986!
While an update to the law -- spurred on by the General Petraeus scandal -- is in the works, it only aims to add some more protection
to electronic communication like emails. This
still does not shield our privacy from other, possibly nefarious,
ways that our data can be collected and put to use. Some legislators would much rather not have legal restrictions
that could, as Rep. Marsha Blackburn stated in an op-ed, "threaten the lifeblood of the Internet: data." Consider Rep. Blackburn's
remarks during an April 2010 Congressional hearing: "[A]nd what happens when you follow the European privacy model and take
information out of the information economy? ... Revenues fall, innovation stalls and you lose out to innovators who choose to work
elsewhere." Even though the practices of many companies such as Facebo.ok are legal, there is something disconcerting about them.
Privacy should have a deeper purpose than the one ascribed to it by those who treat it as a
currency to be traded for innovation, which in many circumstances seems to actually mean
corporate interests. To protect our privacy, we need a better understanding of its purpose and why
it is valuable. That's where Georgetown University law professor Julie E. Cohen comes in. In a forthcoming article for the
Harvard Law Review, she lays out a strong argument that addresses the titular concern "What Privacy Is For." Her approach is fresh,
and as technology critic Evgeny Morozov rightly tweeted, she wrote "the best paper on privacy theory you'll get to read this year." (He
was referring to 2012.) At bottom, Cohen's
argument criticizes the dominant position held by theorists and
legislators who treat privacy as just an instrument used to advance some other principle or value,
such as liberty, inaccessibility, or control. Framed this way, privacy is relegated to one of many
defenses we have from things like another person's prying eyes, or Facebook's recent attempts to ramp
up its use of facial-recognition software and collect further data about us without our explicit
consent. As long as the principle in question can be protected through some other method, or if privacy gets in the way
of a different desirable goal like innovation, it is no longer useful and can be disregarded. Cohen
doesn't think we should treat privacy as a dispensable instrument . To the contrary, she argues privacy is
irreducible to a "fixed condition or attribute (such as seclusion or control) whose boundaries can
be crisply delineated by the application of deductive logic . Privacy is shorthand for breathing
room to engage in the process of ... self-development." ADVERTISEMENT What Cohen means is that since
life and contexts are always changing, privacy cannot be reductively conceived as one specific
type of thing. It is better understood as an important buffer that gives us space to develop an
identity that is somewhat separate from the surveillance, judgment, and values of our society
and culture. Privacy is crucial for helping us manage all of these pressures -- pressures that
shape the type of person we are -- and for "creating spaces for play and the work of self[development]." Cohen argues that this self-development allows us to discover what type of society we want and what we
should do to get there, both factors that are key to living a fulfilled life. Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger make similar arguments
in a recent articleon the value of "obscurity." When structural constraints prevent unwanted parties from getting to your data, obscurity
protections are in play. These protections go beyond preventing companies from exploiting our information for their financial gain.
They safeguard democratic societies by furthering "autonomy, self-fulfillment, socialization, and
relative freedom from the abuse of power." In light of these considerations, what's really at stake in a feature like
Facebook's rumored location-tracking app? You might think it is a good idea to willfully hand over your data in exchange for
personalized coupons or promotions, or to broadcast your location to friends. But consumption -- perusing a store and buying stuff -and quiet, alone time are both important parts of how we define ourselves. If how we do that becomes subject to ever-present
monitoring it can, if even unconsciously, change our behaviors and self-perception. In this sense, we will be developing an identity
that is absent of privacy and subject to surveillance; we must decide if we really want to live in a society that treats every action as a
data point to be analyzed and traded like currency. The more we allow for constant tracking, the more difficult it becomes to change
the way that technologies are used to encroach on our lives. Privacy is not just something we enjoy. It is
something that is
necessary for us to: develop who we are; form an identity that is not dictated by the social
conditions that directly or indirectly influence our thinking, decisions, and behaviors; and decide
what type of society we want to live in. Whether we like it or not constant data collection about everything we do -- like
the kind conducted by Facebook and an increasing number of other companies -- shapes and produces our actions. We are
different people when under surveillance than we are when enjoying some privacy. And Cohen's
argument illuminates how the breathing room provided by privacy is essential to being a complete, fulfilled person.
Repression of freedom is intrinsically tied to political violence this is the
most likely scenario for death
Rummel, 2
(R.J., 11/23/02, professor of political science at university of Hawaii, DOA 6/25/15, Google, Freedom Minimizes Political Violence
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.CHAP5.HTM ) //Kbuck
The daily news always seems to be about internal (or domestic) political violence somewhere in the world. Constantly someone is trying to replace their ruler by violence, revolt against their government, rebellion against some government policy, or civil war to achieve independence. In July 2000 there were about forty nations in which these violent, political confrontations were occurring. I briefly discussed civil wars in Sudan and Burma in Chapter 1; Somalia's clan wars in Chapter 2; and the Civil War in Russia after the Bolshevik
of a feel for how violent this internal political
conflict can be. You may not realize that such violence has been more destructive of human lives
than has been international war. The probability of a person being killed in an international
war is less than that of dying in internal political violence , such as revolution, guerrilla
warfare, rebellion, civil war, and riots. This is not even taking into consideration government genocide
and mass murder like that of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao,
). Of the ten wars the United States has fought,
including World War II, none killed more Americans than died in its Civil War .
. While Mexico therefore had elections, they
usually were a faade. Competition for office was not free and open, political opponents were
assassinated, and the fear of government officials and their supporters limited political speech
coup of 1917 and the numerous rebellions against Mao's collectivization and "Great Leap Forward" in the last chapter. The question naturally follows: why do human beings constantly kill each other in this way? Before answering this, I want to give you more
which itself has totaled more dead than all internal and international wars together, and is so important that I will devote the next chapter to it. China has lost tens of millions of people in her own civil wars, and her Taiping Rebellion in the mid-
Nineteenth Century alone might have killed as many as 40,000,000 Chinese; and the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalist government and the communists cost almost 2,000,000 battle dead (see Table 1.1 of my China's Bloody Century
You have already seen the mass killing going on in Sudan and Burma. And, the Mexican Revolution was
equally bloody, killing over many times the number that died in the American Civil War; and the Russian Civil War was one of the bloodiest of the Twentieth Century, killing about 1,4000,000 people, not counting the famine deaths and mass murder on all sides. A close look at the Mexican and Russian revolutions should show why people who share citizenship can kill each other on such a massive scale. Looking at Mexico first (see contemporary map and statistics, and world map), the roots of its revolution lie in the rule of Porfirio
Daz, a former general who in 1876 rebelled against President Sebastin Lerdo de Tejada and seized power. Mexicans later elected him to the Presidency and, except for one term, consistently reelected him, sometimes without opposition, until revolutionaries forced his exile in May 1911
. Daz tried to
conciliate various groups, such as the Catholic Church, landed interests, and big business, and he was particularly committed to the economic growth of Mexico. He promoted foreign investments and ownership, eased the transfer of public lands to private hands, and helped concentrate the ownership of land for more efficient usage. He caused some one million families to lose their land, including the ancestral lands of some 5,000 Indian communities. By 1910, when the revolution broke out, fewer than 3,000 families owned almost all
of Mexico's inhabitable land, with over 95 percent of the rural population owning no land at all. Nearly half of these landless lived on large privately owned farming or ranching estates or plantations, called haciendas. These sprawled across much of Mexico, containing about 80 percent of the rural communities. Some were huge; one being so large that a train took a day to cross its six million acres. Deprived of their land, impoverished and unemployed, the mass of Indians and peons (the unskilled laborers or farm workers of Latin
America), were a huge pool for authorities and landowners to exploit. And so they did. Under Daz, profiteering police and government officials protected greedy landowners and pitiless labor contractors. This enabled the venal, corrupt, and ruthless to ensnare Indians and peons in a nationwide system of chattel slavery and indebted labor. One of the main methods used for enslaving peons on haciendas were to advance them money. While it was usually small amount, the peon found it almost impossible to repay. His wages were
abysmal because of the ready availability of impoverished peons in the countryside, and living costs were, by hacienda contrivance, high. For example, usually he only could buy his necessities at the company store, since bosses paid him in coupons or metal disks that only the company store would accept. Running away from this forced labor was not an option. If he did, the police would search for him, usually catch him, and return him to the hacienda. Then, as a lesson to others, he would be whipped publicly, sometimes even to
death. Moreover, debt was by law inherited, passed down to a peon's sons on his death, so his sons also could become indebted slaves through no fault of their own. But the peon could become indebted in ways other than through the hacienda. He was enmeshed in a system of Mexican customs and laws that encouraged, if not required, that he spend more money than he had. For example, baptism demanded a fiesta, a priest, and liquor, the cost of which the peon could only cover by pledging his future wages. This was also true for the
cost of tools, a wedding, and a baby's birth. Whether on the hacienda or not, usually to the poor and landless a debt was forever; and once in debt, the peon had no rights. The debt holder by law had all the power, which on the hacienda was over life and death, as surely as though these peons were slaves in ancient Rome. Besides indebted peons, haciendas had another source of such slaves. Hacienda bosses would entice impoverished and landless Indians and other peons into signing contracts to work on plantations about which the
workers knew nothing; upon arrival, they would discover that there was no escape. Another source was the police, who would arrest and jail the poor and those dispossessed of land for trivial or trumped-up charges, and then sell them to hacienda owners. Yet another source was a police-round up of such people, as though they were cattle, followed by their deportation to a hacienda to work until they died. In some areas, these round-ups were the routine--even a matter of government policy. Local officials would contract with a
hacienda to supply so many peons per year, and district political boss, or jefe politico, often fulfilled his contract by kidnapping and selling young schoolboys for fifty pesos each. There were some comparatively good haciendas, to be sure. There owners still forced the peons to work, and would whip to maintain discipline and order, but treated them with the paternalistic civility accorded to personal slaves. These haciendas were the exception, however. Normally, they were hellish for the peon, whose life on them was usually short and
miserable. The owners had them whipped for the slightest infraction, and when their work slowed for whatever reason. They were sometimes whipped to death. After all, they were cheap to replace, and the police showed no concern over their murder. On many haciendas, the peon's misery went far beyond whipping. Hacienda bosses would often rape the peon's wives and daughters, and would force the prettier ones to be their concubines. Nor did all the haciendas provide enough nutritional food, for their peons in the field, changes of
clothing, bath facilities, or toilets. Because of this ill treatment, many of these peons soon died from disease, exposure, and exhaustion, deaths that can only be classed as murder. In some places, such as Valle Nacional, the forced labor system became at least as deadly as that which afflicted the forced laborers in the Soviet gulag and Nazi labor camps at their worst, but within guarded haciendas instead of work camps surrounded by guns and barbed wire. The bosses especially mistreated those Indians enslaved on the haciendas, and
they often were among the first to die. We can see this with the Yaqui Indians, for example, of whom about two-thirds died in the first year on a hacienda, on some hacienda few would survive for two years. For the Mayas, another Indian nation, the haciendas were killing them at a greater rate than they were being born. But bosses also badly mistreated non-Indian peons, and in three months on one large hacienda near Santa Lucrecia, they killed more than half of 300 new workers. In another hacienda, the Valle Nacional, out of some
15,000 new workers taken on in one year, bosses killed about 14,000 within seven or eight months. I would doubt this incredible death rate were it not for the words of Antonio Pla, general manager of a large portion of the tobacco lands in Valle Nacional: "The cheapest thing to do is to let them die; there are plenty more where they came from." Said one of the police officers of the town of Valle Nacional, "They die; they all die. The bosses never let them go until they're dying." Even the process of deportation to the haciendas was
lethal, particularly for Indians. Soldiers seized and deported Yaqui Indians to work on haciendas as slaves at the rate of 500 a month. This was even before Daz decreed that the War Department must capture and deport every Yaqui Indian to Yucatn, wherever found and no matter the age. As many as 10 to 20 percent died during deportation, especially if the trip were a long one, and involved the military herding the deportees over mountains by foot. Sometimes whole families would commit suicide rather then endure the deportation
and slave labor that lay at the end. Out of a rural population of nearly 12,000,000 in 1910, possibly 750,000 had unknowingly contracted themselves into slavery on haciendas in southern Mexico; possibly over 100,000 on the Yucatn peninsula. The far more prevalent debt bondage possibly enslaved an additional 5,000,000 peons, or about an unbelievable near 41 percent of the total population of Mexico. This by far exceeds the amount of outright slavery you have seen in Sudan and the forced labor in Burma. Compare this to
American slavery in 1860 just before the Civil War, where there were 3,951,000 slaves, or 12 percent of the population. What in effect was slavery in Mexico is most comparable to the slavery of ancient times, and, yet, it happened in our time, during the youth of some people alive today. Were this lethal slavery all, it would be enough to condemn this reprehensible government and provide justification for the coming revolution. But there is more. This slave system necessarily depended on a certain amount of terror and resulting fear.
Each of the states of Mexico had attached to it an acordada, a picked gang of assassins. They quietly murdered personal enemies of the governor or jefe politicos, including political opponents, critics, or alleged criminals, no matter how slight the evidence against them. For example, officials gave the son of a friend of Daz, and a member of the acordada, two assistants and the instructions to "kill quietly along the border" any person he thought connected to the opposing Liberal Party. But much killing also was public and directly
carried out by officials. In 1909, for example, they summarily executed sixteen people at Tehuitzingo, and on a street at Velardena, officials shot several people for holding a parade in defiance of the jefe politico. They forced twelve to thirty-two others to dig their own graves with their bare hands before shooting them. In the state of Hidalgo, officials buried up to their necks a group of Indians who had resisted the government taking their lands, then rode horses over them. And so on and on. From 1900 to 1910, this government
probably murdered more than 30,000 political opponents, suspects, critics, alleged criminals, and other undesirables. Daz's policies obviously provided opportunity for the venal and corrupt, and security and help for the rich and well placed. As long as they went along with the system, bureaucrats, officials controlling government largess, and the upper middle-class and wealthy profited from Daz's rule. Even the industrial worker was only slightly better off. Moreover, Daz seemed to encourage foreign exploitation of the country,
which angered many well-off Mexicans. Now, also, intellectuals were promoting among the lower class a sense of exploitation. And the government's muscle, its army, was small, corrupt, and inefficient. Given all this, rebellion was inevitable, and it did happen, several times. The first successful one was led by Francisco Madero in 1910 and launched the Mexican Revolution. A member of the upper middle class, as most revolutionary leaders are, he believed in a liberal constitutional government. Indians and peons understandably
supported him, and his leading general was the former bandit chief, Pancho Villa. Madero won major victories against government forces and encouraged other rebellions throughout the country. In May 1911, the government collapsed, Daz fled into exile, and Maderos took over the presidency. Leading a revolution is one thing. But rebuilding a government is quite another. In office, Maderos turned out to be ineffective, especially in promoting changes to the system. He did, however, give peons and workers free reign to air their
grievances and seek change. This did not sit well with the Mexican elites, who saw this freedom, added to the disorders still plaguing the country, as endangering their property. In early 1913, the general commanding the Mexican army in Mexico City, Victoriano Huerto, rebelled against Maderos and, joining hands with other rebel groups, forced him to resign. General Huerto then made himself president, and in a few days, someone assassinated Maderos. Huerto's presidency was even worse. He was disorganized, repressive, and
dictatorial, and instigated the most violent phase of the revolution. Separate rebel forces, Villa's among them, took violent action to restore constitutional government in three northern states. In the south, Emiliano Zapata organized and generated a peon rebellion demanding land reform. President Wilson of the United States tried to help these rebellions by embargoing arms to General Huerto, resulting in the American Navy's temporarily taking over Veracruz to stop a shipment of German arms, while allowing the rebel constitutionalists
to buy them. Eventually, constitutionalist forces closed in on Huerto, and he escaped into exile in July 1914. Still, even the constitutionalists could not establish a stable government, nor could they agree among themselves on what was to be done and by whom. Therefore, civil war again broke out in December 1914. Finally, by the end of 1915, one of the rebel leaders, Venustiano Carranza, captured control over most of Mexico and, despite the refusal of some other rebel leaders, including Zapata (assassinated in 1918) and Villa, to
accept terms, took over the government and kept control until 1920. Carranza never brought about the reforms he had promised, and in 1920, Alvaro Obreg6n, one of Carranza's most effective generals during the civil war, threw him out of power and eventually had himself elected president. Though dictatorial, Obreg6n brought relative stability, order, and change to Mexico. What I left out of this sketch of the Mexican Revolution is the amazing violence, ruthlessness, and cruelty on all sides. In the opening years of this rebellion, for
example, in the north government forces simply shot all captured rebels, showing no mercy. When in later years of the war President Carranza ordered General Gonzlez to destroy the Zapatista "rabble" in Morelos, his troops burned down whole villages, destroyed their crops, marched women and children into detention camps, looted factories, devastated the local sugar industry, and hanged every male they could find. They left a wasteland behind them. Rebels were equally vicious and often extended their butchery to top
government officials and supporters. A case in point was their seizure of the town of Guerrero. They murdered all captured federal officers, along with the town's top Daz supporters and officials, including the judge, jefe politico, and postal inspector. The rebels raped at will. In Durango, for example, the U.S. ambassador reported that fifty women "of good family" killed themselves after rebels raped them. Villa himself forced "his attentions on a Frenchwoman," creating an international incident. When rebels captured and held Mexico
City in 1914, they pillaged homes and businesses, and shot police officers and political opponents, and hung those they suspected of crimes. In one case, they hung three people outside a police station, with signs announcing their crime--one was a "thief," a second a "counterfeiter," but the sign on the third said, "This man was killed by mistake." From the beginning of the revolution, the forces of the Villistas and Zapatas had shown disregard for human life. When in 1910 Pancho Villa captured the town of Torren he killed 200
Chinese members of a race he and his followers much despised. Nor did he have high any regard for the lives of his own troops. Once, when as an American journalist was interviewing him, a drunken soldier yelling nearby disturbed Villa. So while continuing his conversation, he pulled out his gun, looked out the window, and shot the man. Their officers were no better, but among them stands out Rodolfo Fierro, who, it is said, once personally executed 300 prisoners, pausing only when he had to massage his bruised trigger finger.
Often, these rebels were simply bandits and murderers legitimized by a cause. In one especially heinous case, a rebel leader captured a coal train in a tunnel, burned it, and then waited for a passenger train to run into the wreckage so that he could loot the train of gold and rob passengers of their valuables. With the collapse of the Daz regime, many state governors and federal generals no longer obeyed the central government. During the Carranza presidency they in effect became warlords, some levying their own taxes, some refusing
to turn over federal revenues, some ignoring federal laws and orders they did not like. Some became bandits, looting territory or states under their control; some bandits became generals controlling little states of their own. High military officers would loot and kill as they wished, even in Mexico City. Over all of Mexico for as long as a decade, all these warlords and rebel armies may have slaughtered in cold blood at least some 400,000 people; perhaps even over 500,000--more than have died in combat in all American foreign wars.
Before and during the revolution, the government used a detestable conscription system. With the choice of who would be drafted left to the local jefe politico, graft and bribery were endemic. If a man had the money, he could buy himself out of the draft or bribe officials. Even worse, those who criticized the regime, those who tried to strike, or those who otherwise annoyed officials found themselves drafted. The army served the function of a forced labor camp for poor and undesirables, and so became known as "The National ChainGang." During the revolution, the government used press-gang methods extensively. In one case, for example, seven hundred spectators at a bullfight were grabbed for the army; in another case one thousand spectators from a big crowd watching a fire were abducted, including women that they forced to work in ammunition factories. In Mexico City people were afraid to go out after dark, even to post a letter, since it literally could result in "going to the cannon's mouth." Soldiers so conscripted received little training, and officers threw
them into combat as so much expendable equipment--there were always replacements, including even criminals, vagabonds, beggars, and, of course, Indians and peons. Rebels and Indians easily killed all. Because of the graft among their officers, these soldiers often got little medical care and little food. Some would die of starvation, many of disease. One example of this was in the territory of Quintana Roo, where before the revolution an army of 2,000 to 3,000 soldiers was in the field, continuously fighting the Maya Indians. These
soldiers were almost all political suspects and therefore really only armed political prisoners. According to a government physician who served as the chief of sanitary service for the army in this territory, over a two-year period all the soldiers, over 4,000, died of starvation while General Bravo, their commanding officer, stole their unit's commissary money. This is murder. And from 1900 through the first year of the revolution, aside from combat deaths, by the army's treatment of its conscripts it so murdered nearly 145,000 of them. In
total, during the revolution because of battle, massacre, execution, and starvation, probably 800,000 Mexicans died. Nearly 1,200,000 more probably died from influenza, typhus, and other diseases. In fact, the overall toll from all causes might even be closer to 3,000,000, given the population decrease for these years. For my breakdown of the toll, see Table 16.1 of my Death By Government. **** The Russian Revolution that began while that in Mexico was still going on was no less bloody, and like that in Mexico, to understand it we
will have to begin several years before it took place. In 1894, with the death of his father, Alexander III, the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, came to power. He was a dedicated autocrat opposed to any liberal tendencies in Russia, a view strongly shared by his wife, Princess Alexandra. He was also an absolute Russian nationalist who imposed a policy of Russification throughout the empire, which in the west included Poland and Finland. He was also, as were many of his officials and Russians in general, anti-Semitic, and he overtly
supported anti-Semitic activity. Russians economically and culturally discriminated against their 5 to 7 million Jews, and government anti-Semitism encouraged and helped legitimize the periodic pogroms that swept Russian cities and towns. Officials allowed incendiary anti-Jewish propaganda to be published on government printing presses; and just stood by while gangs attacked Jews and their property. From 1900 to the abdication of the czar and the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, at least 3,200 Jews were murdered
throughout Russia. In line with its general suppression of freedom, officials killed and massacred others as well, such as shooting two-hundred demonstrating workers in the Lena gold field. The most important massacre of these years occurred in January of 1905 when in St. Petersburg soldiers shot down 1,000 peaceful demonstrators. This "Bloody Sunday," as it became known, catalyzed what was a revolutionary situation into outright revolution. In the years leading up to Bloody Sunday, Russia had been in turmoil. Strikes, student
demonstrations, and peasant disturbances were frequent. Several revolutionary movements were violently seeking reform, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, who organized protests and tried to incite the masses. Because of Bloody Sunday, student demonstrations became almost continuous, revolutionary groups organized huge strikes, and in many region peasants rebelled. Bombings and assassinations were widespread. This culminated in a massive general strike that finally persuaded Nicholas II and his
officials to compromise. They issued the so-called October Manifesto that promised civil liberties, a new duma--legislature--with actual power to pass and reject all laws, and other reforms. The manifesto went far toward turning the government into a constitutional monarchy. It split the opposition into moderates willing to accept it and radicals believing it hardly went far enough. The radicals fought on--in the next year alone terrorism by the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Socialist Revolutionaries
Maximalists caused 1,400 deaths and still another 3,000 in the year following that. But the Manifesto ended the 1905 revolution. Throughout the years leading up to and following this revolution, the monarchy fought the revolutionaries in one district or another with harsh regulations, newspaper closings, arrests of editors, and, for six months, even summary court martials with almost immediate execution. The records of overall executions tell the story of these tumultuous years and the monarchy's response. From 1866 to 1900 officials
executed no more than 94 people, perhaps as few as 48; from 1901 to 1904 it executed nearly 400 people; from 1905 through 1908 the number rose to 2,200; and from 1908 through the remaining years of the monarchy, executions might have reached 11,000. Nonetheless, considering the revolutionary activity and the bombings, assassinations, and disturbances involved, the violent deaths would have been surprisingly low for an empire this huge and diverse and with its bloody history had it not been for World War I, its treatment of
ethnic Germans and POWs, and the massacre or extermination of rebellious nations and groups in the empire's southern periphery. In 1915, the Duma expropriated all the property of the 150,000 to 200,000 Germans living in Zhiton-tir Gubernia and deported as many as 200,000 to the east under such conditions that 25,000 to almost 140,000 died. The worst killing took place in the Kirghiz Kazak Confederacy. Following Russian orders local authorities murdered Turkish-speaking Central Asian nomads outright, or after robbing them of
their animals and equipment, drove them into the winter mountains or desert to die. Except for some who escaped across the border into China, authorities may have murdered as many as 500,000 nomads. There also was the killing by Armenian volunteers wearing Russian uniforms, but serving as irregulars with the Russian army. When Russia invaded the eastern provinces of Turkey during the war, these Armenian irregulars sought revenge against the Kurds for their murder of Armenians in Turkey, and possibly murdered hundreds of
thousand Kurds between 1915 and 1916. The responsibility of the Russian army for this is unclear, but at least it bears some onus for these deaths. Worst of all, and for which the Russian Monarchy bears full responsibility, was its treatment of 2,300,000 German, Austro-Hungarian, Czech, and Turkish prisoners of war. Surely the Russian people suffered greatly during the war. There were wide-scale shortages of necessities, and resulting localized famines; medical services had always been poor and deteriorated during the war, resulting
in the spread of disease. Moreover, Russian soldiers themselves suffered from hunger, poor medical care, and unsanitary conditions, perhaps 1,300,000 alone dying of disease. Russia was in no shape, therefore, to treat POWs with the care Britain, for example, could give them. Nonetheless, even taking this into account, Russian-held POWs were abysmally mistreated and died in transit to camps and in the camps themselves by the tens of thousands. Just consider that during the transportation of POWs to camps they might be locked in
railroad cars or wagons for weeks. In one case, for example, officials kept two hundred Turkish POWs suffering from cholera in sealed wagons for three weeks until they reached their destination--140 died, sixty were scarcely alive in the filth. Weakened by hunger and sickness during the long trip, prisoners then might have to plod 10 to 30 miles to their final camp, with some dying on the way. Reaching camp provided no security, since the conditions in many were lethal. During the winter of 1914-15, just on one camp 1,300 men
died, over half of the camp's POWs. When the doctors complained about the number of deaths to a general who came on a tour of inspection, his answer was that still more men died in the trenches. During this same winter in the Novo Nikolayevsk camp, the prisoners were lucky even to be able to sleep on rotten straw and especially to get a blanket. Camp doctors had no medicines or surgical appliances; they did not even have soap. Sick and healthy lay together indiscriminately, and often water was not to be had for days, or would
drip from icicles onto their straw beds. No wonder that when typhus broke out it spread rapidly and prisoners died in huge numbers. Only when these epidemics threatened the Russians themselves did they finally allow captive officers to help their men. In total, the Russian monarchy probably was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 POWs. Since officials knew about the conditions in the camps and could have done much to alleviate them, this was as much murder as the death of 3,000,000 Soviet POWs in Nazi concentration camps
during World War II. By 1917, the war was going so badly for the Russians that many troops refused to fight and whole units were deserting, while on the home front there was continuous turmoil, including general strikes, and massive demonstrations against the war and the monarchy--just on March 8 alone 30,000 people were on the streets demonstrating. Nicholas II's cabinet tried to dismiss the Duma it had called into session to deal with the crisis and thought responsible for much of the unrest, but instead of dissolving some
members set up a provisional cabinet, in effect a rebel provisional government. Nicholas II and his Cabinet had lost all power to effect events--the Russian Revolution had begun. Events moved fast as one military unit after another joined the rebels, including the czar's own guards that under orders from the provisional government took the Empress and her children into custody. And on March 14, France and England, Russia's allies in the war, recognized the provisional government as the legal government of all Russia. Thus under
tremendous pressure, having lost crucial support of the aristocracy, his troops, and foreign powers; no longer able to control the streets, Nicholas II abdicated. The day before the abdication, the provisional government formed a new one to be headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. This government and the subsequent one of Aleksandr Kerensky, a democratic socialist who took over as Prime Minister in July, inherited a country in economic and political chaos, with a near total breakdown in government authority and military morale, frequent
strikes, plots, and the opposition of diverse, radical revolutionary groups. Not the least of these were the Bolsheviks founded and led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who already in July had organized an unsuccessful uprising in Petrograd. Kerensky's government itself was disorganized, feared a coup from the right, and was quite unable to move against those openly plotting to seize power from the left. Originally the left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Lenin's Bolsheviks were a small, uncompromising, and militant
group of dedicated Marxist communists. Their incredibly small number, considering subsequent events, was clear when the first all-Russian Congress of Soviets had been held, and in which only 105 out of 1,090 delegates declared themselves as Bolsheviks. In November 1917, with the powerful Petrograd garrison remaining neutral, Lenin seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd. Since this was the seat of Kerensky's shaky government, and he had only 1,500 to 2,000 defenders to match the 6,000 to 7,000 soldiers, sailors, and Red Guards
Lenin's Bolsheviks had thrown together, they easily overthrew the government. Widely unpopular, however, and faced with strong political opposition, Lenin at first made common cause with the Left Social Revolutionaries, a militant, socialist group, in order to survive, centralize power, and consolidate this communist revolution; and in 1919 Lenin adopted the name Communist Party for the Bolsheviks and their political allies. To fight this forceful takeover of the government, generals throughout the Russian empire created whole
armies; some led by anti-Russians and nationalists, some by anti-communists, some by pro-monarchists or pro-authoritarians, some by advocates of democracy. These so-called White armies were a direct threat to the new Communist Party and its so-called Red Army. Moreover, in the areas the communists controlled the clergy, bourgeoisie, and professionals opposed them. The urban workers, who had been communist allies at first, also soon turned against them when they saw that the communists had taken over the Soviets (elected
governing councils) and would not yield power to worker unions or representatives; and peasants, who also were especially supportive when the communists began to divide among them land taken from the aristocrats' estates and rich landowners, turned to outright rebellion when the communists forcibly began to requisition their grain and produce. In the first year-and-a-half of Lenin's rule, in 20 provinces alone, there were 344 peasant rebellions. Up to early 1921, there were about 50 anti-communist rebel armies. For example, in
August 1920, the starving peasants of the Kirsanov District, Tambov Province, rebelled against the further extortion of grain by the communists. The rebellion soon spread to adjoining districts and destroyed Party authority in five of them. Under the command of Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov, the rebellion became a full-scale, armed insurrection. He created two armies of Red Army deserters and revolting peasants, and by February 1921, he had as many as 50,000 fighting men, including even internal guard units. Until defeated in
August 1921, he controlled Tambov Province and parts of the provinces of Penza and Saratov. Many such rebellions broke out throughout the now named Soviet Union, although few were as dangerous to Communist Party control. Even in 1921, the Cheka (secret police) admitted 118 risings. This Peasant War, which just as well could be called a Bread War, continued even after the White armies were defeated. It was so serious that even in 1921 one Soviet historian noted that the "center of the [Russian Republic] is almost totally
encircled by peasant insurrection, from Makno on the Dnieper to Antonov on the Volga." White armies and peasant rebellions aside, even in the urban industrial areas communist control was precarious, at best. What saved Lenin and the Party was their Red Terror. By 1918, Lenin already ordered the wide use of terror, including inciting workers to murder their "class enemies." According to Pravda, the Party organ, workers and poor should take up arms and act against those "who agitate against the Soviet Power, ten bullets for every
man who raises a hand against it.... The rule of Capital will never be extinguished until the last capitalist, nobleman, Christian, and officer draws his last breath." Understandably, there was a wave of arbitrary murders of civil servants, engineers, factory managers, and priests wherever the communists controlled the country. Mass shootings, arrests, and torture were an integral part of covert communists policy, and not simply a reaction to the formation of the White armies. Indeed, the Red Terror preceded the start of the Civil War. After
an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918, he legalized the terror, and directed it against "enemies of the people" and "counter-revolutionaries," defined primarily by social group and class membership: bourgeoisie, aristocrats, "rich" landowners (kulaks), and clergy. The Party's organPravda helped launch this expanded Red Terror with this cry for blood: "Workers, the time has come when either you must destroy the bourgeoisie, or it will destroy you. Prepare for a mass merciless onslaught upon the enemies of the
revolution. The towns must be cleansed of this bourgeois putrefaction. All the bourgeois gentlemen must be registered, as has happened with the officer gentlemen, and all who are dangerous to the cause of revolution must be exterminated.... Henceforth the hymn of the working class will be a hymn of hatred and revenge." Lenin's Red Terror operated through a variety of official organs, including the People's Courts for "crimes" against the individual, the Revolutionary Courts, and the various local Chekas for "crimes" against the state.
Lenin also gave the right of execution to the Military Revolutionary Tribunals, Transport Cheka, Punitive columns, and the like. Communists jailed actual or ideologically defined opponents, tortured many barbarously to force them to sign false confessions, and executed large numbers. For example, communists executed a butcher in Moscow for "insulting" the images of Marx and Lenin by calling them scarecrows (a clear "enemy of the people"); or threatened to shoot anyone in Ivanovo-Vornesensk who did not register their sewing
machines (obvious "counter-revolutionaries"). A communist functionary issued an order in Baku that local officials should shoot any telephone girl who was tardy in response to a call (doubtless "sabotage"). With information that an Aaaron Chonsir in Odessa was engaging in "counter-revolutionary activities," the Cheka looked through the street directories to find his address. Finding eleven people with the same name, they arrested all, interrogated and tortured each several times, narrowed it down to the two most likely "counterrevolutionaries," and since they could not make up their mind between them, had both shot to ensure getting the right one. Obviously, the Revolution was still immature--in the late 1930s Stalin would have had all eleven shot. And so communists shot vast numbers of men and women out of hand: 200 in this jail, 450 in that prison yard, 320 in the woods outside of town; even in small outlying areas, such as in the small Siberian town of Ossa Ochansk in 1919, they massacred 3,000 men. And this went on and on. As late as 1922, the
communists executed 8,100 priests, monks, and nuns. This alone is equivalent to one modern, jumbo passenger jet crashing, with no survivors, each day for 32 days. Moreover, the communists showed no merci to prisoners taken in clashes with the White armies and often executed them. They even shot the relatives of defecting officers, as when the 86th Infantry Regiment went over to the Whites in March 1919, and the communists killed all the relatives of each defecting officer. Places reoccupied after the defeat of one White army or
another suffered systematic blood baths as the Cheka screened through the population for aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and supporters of the Whites. When The Red Army captured Riga in January 1919, for example, communists executed over 1,500 in the city and more than 2,000 in the country districts. When defeated White General Wrangel finally fled with his remaining officers and men from the Crimea, the Red Army and Cheka may have slaughtered from 50,000 to 150,000 people during reoccupation. Undeniably, the Whites
themselves carried out massacres, killed prisoners, and were guilty of numerous atrocities. But these were either the acts of undisciplined soldiers or ordered against individuals by sadistic or fanatical generals. Lenin, however, directed the Red Terror, against entire social groups and classes. Then there was the Peasant War, which although it tends to be ignored in the history books, was no less vicious than the Civil War. In village after village, in the guise of requisitioning food, communists tried to plunder the peasants, which
understandably resulted in pitched battles, massacres, and frequent atrocities. Just in July 1918, twenty-six major uprisings began; in August forty-seven; and in September thirty-five. The communists fiercely fought the Peasant War over the full length and breadth of the new Soviet Union from 1918 through 1922, and at any time there were apparently over one hundred rebellions, involving thousands of peasant fighters. If, of course, any "enemies of the people" were captured or surrendered, the communists were likely to kill them out
of hand; they also massacred those who had helped the rebels, provided food and shelter, or simply showed sympathy; they leveled some villages "infected with rebellion," slaughtered inhabitants; and deported remaining villagers north, many to die in the process. About 500,000 people were killed in this Peasant War, half from combat and the other half murdered by the communists. The effect on food production was catastrophic and, as described in Chapter 4, was the main cause of a severe famine in which 5,000,000 people starved
to death or died of associated diseases. The number of combat deaths in the Civil and Peasant Wars, and not a result of mass murder, was likely about 1,350,000 people. Although a fantastic toll by normal standards, this was a fraction of the total killed during this period, as I will show. With the growing strength and generalship of the Red Army, and the lack of unity and a common strategy and program among the opposing White armies and peasant rebels, by 1920 Lenin and Communist Party had surely won the Civil War. And
through the Red Terror they also had secured the home front. The terror eliminated or cowed the opposition and enabled Lenin to stabilize the Party's control, assure its continuity and authority, and above all, save communism. (Here is a map of the resulting western Soviet Union for 1921-1929,and the present world map) Lenin bought the success of the Red Terror at an added huge cost in lives. Not only did the communists shoot political opponents, class "enemies," "enemies of the people," former rebels, and criminals, but they shot
even those poor citizens guilty of nothing, fitting under no label but hostage. For example, in 1919 the Defense Council commanded the arrest of members of the Soviet executive committees and Committees of the Poor in areas where snow clearance of railway lines was unsatisfactory. Officials were to shoot these hostages if the snow were not soon cleared away. The number murdered throughout Soviet territory by the Red Terror, the execution of prisoners, and revenge against former Whites or their supporters, as a conservative
estimate, was about 500,000 people, including at least 200,000 officially executed. All these are added to the probable 250,000 murdered in the Peasant War. Lest you dismiss all those communist executions during these years as the traditional Russian way of handling opposition, Czarist Russia executed an average of 17 people per year in the 80 years preceding the Revolution--17! From 1860 to 1900, Soviet sources give only 94 executions, although during these years there were dozens of assassinations. And in 1912, after years of
revolts, assassinations of high officials, bombings and anti-government terrorism, there was a maximum of 183,949 imprisoned, including criminals; less than half the number executed, not imprisoned, by the communists during the Civil War period. Lenin and his henchmen did not shrink from their carnage. They not only accepted this incredible blood toll; they proclaimed the need for one many times higher. Consider the September 1918, speech by Grigory Zinoviev, Lenin's lieutenant in Petrograd: "To overcome our enemies we
must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated." To those killed in the Red Terror and Peasant War we must add those that died from the brutal regime in the new concentration and labor camps or in transit to them. Lenin created these camps in July 1918, with a Party decree that officials must compel inmates capable of labor to do physical work. This was the beginning of the
deadly, communist forced labor system--gulag--which we could as well call a slave labor system, and which became as deadly as some of the most lethal haciendas for forced laborers in pre-revolutionary Mexico. Within a year, Party decrees established forced labor camps in each provincial capitol and a lower limit of 300 prisoners in each camp. The communists established the first large camps on the far north Solovetsky Islands. In August 1919 telegram, Lenin made the criteria for imprisonment in such camps clear: "Lock up all the
doubtful ones in a concentration camp outside the city." Note the word "doubtful," rather than "guilty." From the beginning, the communists intentionally made the conditions in some of these camps so atrocious that prisoners could not expect to survive for more than several years. If prisoners were not executed, they often were caused to die from beatings, disease, exposure, and fatigue. The communists occasionally emptied camps by loading inmates on barges and then sinking them. With all this misery, you would think that at least a
court had tried and sentenced prisoners, but no. Reread Lenin's telegram, above. A simple bureaucratic decision sent people to these camps. By the end of 1920, official figures admitted to 84 such camps in 43 provinces of the Russian Republic alone, with almost 50,000 inmates. By October 1922, there were 132 camps with about 60,000 inmates. During this revolution period, 1917-1922, the communists probably murdered 34,000 inmates in total. Overall, in the Red Terror, the Peasant War, the new concentration and labor camps, and
the famine reported in Chapter 4 of which, conservatively estimated, the communists are responsible for half the deaths; Lenin and Party probably murdered 3,284,000 people, apart from battle deaths. When these are included, this revolution cost about 4,700,000 deaths, or about 3 percent of the population. This is almost twice that from all causes in the American Civil War--1.6 percent I give a full accounting of the this Civil War toll in Table 2.1 from my Lethal Politics. **** Although few have been as violent, twentieth century
To answer these questions, I have listed in Table A.19
(from the Appendix) those nations with violence in 1998-1999. Table 5.1 here (also from the
Appendix) provides a contingency count of the level of a nation's freedom versus its violence ,
almost all internal. To determine the tables, I divided 190 nations into four groups in terms of their level of freedom; and similarly, but independently, in terms of their level of violence. The
table then answers the question as to how the level of a nation's freedom matches up with its level of violence . We can then answer this by looking
at Table 5.1. From it we then can see that out of the 47 nations that had extreme violence, 31 of them, or 66 percent,
were unfree (Table A.19 lists these nations). This, while no free nations had any high violence. Then consider who had none or low violence. It was
mainly the free nations: of the 47 nations with none or low violence, 74 percent were free. All unfree nations had some sort of violence , none at
the low level. To see especially the relationship between freedom and violence, look at the count
of nations in the diagonal cells from the low for free nations to the high for unfree. By far, they
always have the highest count, as they should if there is the close relationship between freedom
and violence pointed out in this chapter. Of course, all this may be by chance. But this is tested by the chi square statistic at the bottom of the table, which shows that the odds of
getting these results by chance is greater than 10,000 to 1. By now, it seems obvious. The one ingredient that
bloody internal violence has in common is that the people that usually suffer from it also must
endure being enslaved. Liberal democracies had little internal political violence . But, you may object, these results
were only for one year and that could have been an odd year. To answer this objection, I have collected internal conflict statistics for 214 governments (regimes), 1900 to 1987, selected to best represent the
revolutions, civil wars, violent coups, and rebellions number in the hundreds.1 What sense can we make out of all these? Does the fact that the Mexican and Russian people were not free have anything to do with this revolution?
calculated the average number killed for democracies,
authoritarian regimes (people are partly free), and totalitarian ones (no freedom ), and listed the results in Table 5.2 from
my Power Kills; and plotted the results in Figure 4.1 shown here. As you can see, the stark difference in average internal violence between
democracies and those nations whose people have no freedom holds up even over these eightyeight years. For internal violence, therefore, there is this very important correlation. <blockquote The
more democratic freedom a people have, the less severe their internal political
violence.</blockquote This is a statistical fact. To assert that freedom minimizes such violence does not mean that freedom necessarily ends it. Some rioting, terrorism, and even
variation among nations in their development, power, culture, region, and politics;
civil war, might still happen. Freedom is no guarantee against this. But in the world at large, with all the issues people and governments may fight over, we have no proven and useful means of ending every kind of
we now know that we can sharply reduce such violence to the mildest and
smallest amount possible, and that is through freedom.
internal political violence forever, everywhere. But,
How do we understand this power of democratic freedom? Many believe that the answer to this is psychological and personal. They think that free societies educate people against the mass killing of their neighbors; that free people are not
as belligerent as those elsewhere; that they have deep inhibitions to killing others, as went on in Mexico and Russia, for example, or as you saw in Burma and Sudan; and that free people are more tolerant of their differences. There is much truth in all this, but commentators often neglect the social preconditions of this psychological resistance to political violence. The answer is that the social structure of a free, democratic society, creates the psychological conditions for its greater internal peace. You will recall from earlier chapters that
where freedom flourishes, there are relatively free markets, and freedom of religion, association, ideas, and speech. Corporations, partnerships, associations, societies, leagues, churches, schools, and clubs proliferate. Through your interests, work, and play, you become a member of these multiple groups, each a separate pyramid of power, each competing with the others and with government for your membership, time, and resources. You can liken these pyramids to what you would see from a low flying plane looking across the
downtown of a city and out to the suburbs. Some buildings are very tall, some short, and others away from the downtown area, are close to the ground. If you imagine each building standing for some group's power in a free society, you have a good analogy to how a free people disperse power. Surely, in contemporary societies the government will be the tallest and largest building of all, with some other buildings close in size. One might be a church, as in Israel or a Catholic democracy; another big building might be some corporation,
like Microsoft in the United States. Other buildings might be some powerful political party, wealthy and influential family, or some group like a labor union. While each group is distinct and legally separate, their memberships overlap and crosscut society. As stockholder, political party member, contributor to an environmental group, worker, tennis player, churchgoer, you belong to many of these groups. Your friends and coworkers probably belong to some of the same groups, but also to some different ones. Similarly, in a free society
the critical social distinctions of wealth, power, and prestige are subdivided in many ways. Few people are high on all three. More are low on all three, but these people are not close to a majority. Most people have different amounts of wealth, power, and prestige. Even Bill Gates, while the highest on wealth, does not have the prestige of a top movie actor or popular musician, or the power of the judge that has now decided to break up his Microsoft because of its "monopolistic practices." Even the President of the United States, despite
his great power and prestige, is only moderately high on wealth. And the adored movie actor will be high in prestige and moderately high in wealth, but low in power. All this pluralism in your group memberships and in wealth, power, and prestige cross pressures your interests and motivations. That is, your membership in separate groups cuts up into different pieces what you want, your desires, and your goals, each satisfied by a different group, such as your church on Sunday, bowling or tennis league on Tuesday night, factory or
office for 40 week-day hours, parent teacher association meeting on Wednesday, and, family at home. These interests differ, but overlap, and all take time and energy. Moreover, you share some of these interests with others, and which others will differ depending on the group. For all free people across a society, there is a constantly changing criss-cross of interests and differences. For you, therefore, to satisfy one interest requires balancing it against other interests that you have. Do you take the family on a picnic this weekend, play
golf with your friends, do that extra work that needs to be done around the house, or help your political party win its campaign? This cross pressuring of interests is true of a democratic government as well. After all, a democratic government is not some monolith, a uniform pyramid of power. Many departments, agencies, and bureaus, make up the government, each staffed with bureaucrats and political appointees, each with their own official and personal interests. Between all are many official and personal connections and linkages
that serve to satisfy their mutual interests. The military services coordinate their strategies and may even share equipment with other departments and agencies. Intelligence services will share some secrets and even sometimes agents. Health services will coordinate their studies, undertake common projects with the military, and provide health supplies when needed. So multiple shared and cross-pressured interests sew together a democratic government itself. And these interests are shared with nongovernmental interest and pressure
groups, and will be cross-pressured by them as well. Because of all these diverse connections and linkages in a democratic society, politicians, leaders, and groups have a paramount interest in keeping the peace. And where a conflict might escalate into violence, as over some religious or environmental issue, people's interests are so cross pressured by different groups and ties, that they simply cannot develop the needed depth of feeling and single-minded devotion to any interest at stake, except perhaps to their families and children.
Keep in mind that for a person to choose in concert with others in a group to kill people or destroy their property demands that they have an almost fanatic dedication to the interest--the stakes--involved, almost to the exclusion of all else. Yet there is also something about democratically free societies that is even more important than these violence reducing links and cross pressures. This is their culture. Where people are free, as in a free market, exchange dominates and resolves conflicts. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." "You
give me that, and I'll give you this." Money is often the currency of such exchange, but also so are people's privileges of one sort or another, benefits, positions, and so on. But except where such exchange is so standardized that there is little room for bargaining, as in buying a hamburger at the local fast food restaurant, in a democracy people soak up certain norms governing their conflicts. These are that they tolerate their differences, negotiate some compromise, and in the process, make concessions. From the highest government
officials to the lowest worker, from the consideration of bills in a legislature to who does the dishes after dinner, there is bargaining of one sort or another going on to resolve an actual or potential conflict. Some of this becomes regularized, as in the bargaining of unions and management in the United States structured by the Labor Relations Board, or that given by tradition that dictates in some families that the wife will always wash the dishes. But so much more involves bargaining. Therefore, in a free society a culture of bargaining,
what you might call an exchange or democratic culture, evolves. This is part of the settling in that takes place when a nation first becomes democratic. Authoritarian practices, doing things by orders, decrees, and commands sent down a hierarchy, gradually gets replaced by many hierarchies of power and the use of bargaining and its techniques of negotiation and compromise to settle conflicts. Free people soon come to expect that when they have a conflict, they will negotiate the issues and through concessions and the splitting of
of this structure of freedom, this spontaneous society, as F.A. Hayek called it in his Law,
Legislation, and Liberty, is then to inhibit violence as you have seen, and to culturally dispose
people to cooperation, negotiation, compromise, and tolerance of others.
differences, they will resolve it. The more years a democracy exists, the more its people's expectations become hardened into social customs and perception. No matter the conflict, people who have been long democratically free do not expect revolution and civil war. For most important, they see each other as democratic, part of one's in-group, one's moral, democratic universe. They each share not only socially, in overlapping groups, functions, and linkages, but also in culture.
Just consider the acceptance and application of the Constitution of the United States and Congressional rules in settling in 1999 that most
serious of political conflicts, whether President Clinton would be fired from office. This supremely contentious dispute that I sketched in Chapter 3, this most potentially violent issue, was decided with no loss of life, no injuries, no destruction of property, no disorder, no political instability. Similarly for the even more potentially violent, month long dispute over the outcome of the 2000 American presidential election. Above all examples I might give, these two more than any other, show the sheer power of a democratic institutions and
culture to cause you to peacefully resolve your social and political conflicts. But this is, so to speak, one end of the stick. This spontaneous society explains why a free people are most peaceful in their national affairs, but why should those societies in which people are commanded by absolute dictators, where people are most unfree, be most violent? The worst of these dictators rule their people and organize their society according to ideological or theological imperatives. Be it Marxism-Leninism and the drive for true communism as in
the Russian Revolution, socialist equalitarianism as in Burma, racial purity as in Nazi Germany, or the realization of God's will as in Sudan, the dictators operate through a rigid and society-wide command structure. And this polarizes society. First, the competing pyramids of power--church, schools, businesses, and so on-- that discipline, check, and balance each other and government in a free society do not exist. There is one solid pyramid of power, with the dictator or ruling elite at the top, with various levels of government in the
middle and near the bottom, and with the mass of powerless subjects at the bottom. Second, where in a free society separate cross-cutting groups service diverse interests, there is now, in effect, only one division in society: that between those in power who command and those who must obey. In the worst of these nations, such as Pol Pot's Cambodia, to be exemplified in the next chapter, Kim Il-sung's North Korea, Mao's China, and Stalin's Soviet Union, as seen in the last chapter, you could only work for the Communist Party, buy
food from its stores, read newspapers it publishes, see its movies and television programs, go to its schools, study its textbooks, and prey at a church it controlled. This sharply divides society into those in power and those out of power, into "them" versus "us." This aligns the vital interests of us versus them along one conflict fault line traversing society, as a magnet aligns metal filings along its magnetic forces. Any minor gripe about the society or politics is against the same "them," and when one says "they" are responsible for a
problem or conflict, friends and loved ones know exactly whom is meant--the whole apparatus of the dictator's rule: his henchmen, police, officials, spies, and bureaucrats. Since this regime owns and runs near everything, any minor issue therefore becomes a matter of the dictator's power, legitimacy, or credibility. A strike in one small town against a government owned factory is a serous matter to the dictator. If he shows weakness in defense of his policies, no matter how localized, the strike can spread along the us versus them fault
line and crystallize a nation wide rebellion. So the dictator must use major force to put it down. For the people, such a strike may be symbolic, and a display of resistance they should support, and therefore, the strike still may spread along the fault line between the dictator and people. Anyhow, the regime cannot afford to let any resistance, any display of independence, anywhere in the country by anybody, go unchallenged. Even a peaceful demonstration, as in Burma and China, must be violently squashed, with leaders arrested,
. As a culture of accommodation is a corollary of freedom, a culture of
force and violence is a theorem of dictatorial rule.
tortured for information, and often killed. So rule is by the gun; violence a natural concomitant. But, there is more to this
Where such rule is absolute, this is also a culture of fear--not knowing when someone might perceive you as doing something wrong and report you to the police, doubt whether authorities will use your ancestors or race or religion as a black mark against you;
and insecurity about the lives of your loved ones, who authorities may drag off to serve in the military, cause to disappear because of something they said, or make some sexual plaything. The fear exists up and down the dictator's command structure as well. The secret police may shoot a general because of his joke about the "Great Leader," or they may jail and torture top government functionaries because of a rumored plot. The dictator himself must always fear that his security forces will turn their guns on him. Where power becomes
absolute, massive killing follows, and rebellion is a concomitant. There also are partly free regimes like a monarch ruling according to tradition and custom, as in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia; or an authoritarian one, as in Mexico before its revolution in which arranged elections and compliant military, police, and rich landowners kept the dictator in power. Power is this case is more dispersed, and some freedoms do exist. And therefore, the average violence is less than in those nations in which the people have no freedom. If, however, the
authoritarian rule is especially unjust and despicable, as it was in Mexico, the resulting violence can be quite bloody. Regardless, as you have seen, the correlation holds. The less free a society and the more coercive commands dominate it, then the greater the polarization and culture of fear and violence, and the more likely extreme violence will occur. In the last chapter, I showed that by promoting wealth and prosperity, your freedom is a moral good. Here, you see that freedom also promotes nonviolence and peace within a nation.
This is also a moral good of freedom. It is another moral reason why you should be democratically free. Political violence within nations is only one form of violence, however. There is another form, far more deadly than any other form of violence, and that is genocide and mass murder. I need a separate chapter to deal with this.
Violations of freedom must be resisted at all costs thats key to VTL
Petro, 74
Professor of Law at NYU [Sylvester, Toledo Law Review, Spring, p. 480, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200304/0783.html]
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 importance 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 principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare,
then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.
2AC Solves Cap
NSA Surveillance is a rampant form of capitalist
domination trading individual privacy for capital gain is
the epitome of neoliberal ideaology.
David Price 7/1/14 - http://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/the-new-surveillance-normal/ The
New Surveillance Normal (senior reporter for the monthly review) // kbuck
The National Security Agency (NSA) document cache released by Edward Snowden reveals a
need to re-theorize the role of state and corporate surveillance systems in an age of neoliberal
global capitalism.
ideologies of surveillance
are undergoing rapid transformations, and the commodification of metadata (and other
surveillance intelligence) transforms privacy. In light of this, we need to consider how the NSA
and corporate metadata mining converge to support the interests of capital This is an age of
converging state and corporate surveillance
surveillance programs raises the possibility that the state
intelligence apparatus is used for industrial espionage in ways that could unite governmental
intelligence and corporate interestsfor which there appears to be historical precedent The
convergence of the interests, incentives, and methods of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the
corporate powers they serve, raise questions about the ways that the NSA and CIA fulfill their
roles, which have been described by former CIA agent Philip Agee as: the secret police of U.S.
capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of U.S.
companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.
While much remains unknowable to us, we now are in a world where private communications are legible in previously inconceivable ways,
. Like other features of the political economy, these shifts develop with apparent independence of institutional motivations, yet corporate and spy
agencies practices share common appetites for metadata. Snowdens revelations of the NSAs global
1 There is a long history in the United States of overwhelming
public opposition to new forms of electronic surveillance. Police, prosecutors, and spy agencies have recurrently used public crisesranging from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, wars, claimed threats of organized crime and terror attacks, to marshal expanded state
surveillance powers.2 During the two decades preceding the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress periodically considered developing legislation establishing rights of privacy; but even in the pre-Internet age, corporate interests scoffed at the need for any such protections. Pre
2001 critiques of electronic-surveillance focused on privacy rights and threats to boundaries between individuals, corporations, and the state; what would later be known as metadata collection were then broadly understood as violating shared notions of privacy, and as
exposing the scaffolding of a police state or a corporate panopticon inhabited by consumers living in a George Tooker painting. The rapid shifts in U.S. attitudes favoring expanded domestic intelligence powers following 9/11 were significant. In the summer of 2001,
distrust of the FBI and other surveillance agencies had reached one of its highest historical levels. Decades of longitudinal survey data collected by the Justice Department establish longstanding U.S. opposition to wiretaps; disapproval levels fluctuated between 7080
poll suddenly found only 44 percent of respondents believed widespread
governmental wiretaps would violate Americans rights.4 Public fears in the post-9/11 period reduced concerns of historical abuses by law enforcement
and intelligence agencies; and the rapid adoption of the PATRIOT Act precluded public considerations of why the Pike and Church congressional
committee findings had ever established limits on intelligence agencies abilities to spy on Americans. Concurrent with post-9/11 surveillance expansions
percent during the thirty years preceding 2001.3 But a December 2001
was the growth of the Internets ability to track users, collecting
metadata in ways that seductively helped socialize all to the normalcy of the
loss of privacy. The depth of this shift in U.S. attitudes away from resisting data collection can be seen
in the publics response in the early 1990s to news stories reporting the Lotus Corporations plans
to sell a comprehensive CD-ROM database compiled by Equifax, consisting of Americans
addresses and phone numbers.
This news led to broad-based protests by Americans across the country angry about invasions of privacyprotests that lead to the cancellation of the product which produced results less
intrusive than a quick Google search would provide today. Similarly, a broad resistance arose in 2003 when Americans learned of the Bush administrations secretive Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Under the directorship of Admiral John Poindexter, TIA
planned to collect metadata on millions of Americans, tracking movements, emails, and economic transactions for use in predictive modeling software with hopes of anticipating terror attacks, and other illegal acts, before they occurred. Congress and the public were
outraged at the prospect of such invasive surveillance without warrants or meaningful judicial oversight. These concerns led to TIAs termination, though as the Snowden NSA documents clarify, the NSA now routinely engages in the very activities envisioned by TIA.
Four decades ago broad public outrage followed revelations of Pentagon, FBI, and CIA domestic surveillance campaigns, as news of COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and a host of illegal operations were disclosed by investigative journalists and later the Pike and Church
Committees. Today, few Americans appear to care about Senator Dianne Feinsteins recent accusations that the CIA hacked her offices computers in order to remove documents her staff was using in investigations of CIA wrongdoing.5 Americans now increasingly
accept invasive electronic monitoring of their personal lives. Ideologies of surveillance are internalized as shifts in consciousness embedded within political economic formations converge with corporate and state surveillance desires. The rapid expansion of U.S.
electronic surveillance programs like Carnivore, Naruslnsight, or PRISM is usually understood primarily as an outgrowth of the post-9/11 terror wars. But while post-9/11 security campaigns were a catalyst for these expansions, this growth should also be understood
two decades brought an accelerated independent growth of corporate and governmental electronic
surveillance programs tracking metadata and compiling electronic dossiers. The NSA, FBI,
Department of Defense, and CIAs metadata programs developed independently from, and with
differing goals from, the consumer surveillance systems that used cookies and consumer discount
cards, sniffing Gmail content, compiling consumer profiles, and other means of tracking
individual Internet behaviors for marketing purposes.
within the context of global capital formations seeking increased legibility of potential consumers, resources, resistance, and competitors.6 C o n v e r g e n c e
of State and Corpora te
Public acceptance of electronic monitoring and metadata collection transpired incrementally, with increasing acceptance
of corporate-based consumer monitoring programs, and reduced resistance to governmental surveillance. These two surveillance tracks developed with separate motivations, one for security and the other for commerce, but both desire to make individuals and groups
legible for reasons of anticipation and control.
global capitalism. While much remains unknowable to us, we now are in a world where private communications are legible in previously inconceivable ways, ideologies of
surveillance are undergoing rapid transformations, and the commodification of metadata (and
other surveillance intelligence) transforms privacy. In light of this, we need to consider how the
NSA and corporate metadata mining converge to support the interests of capital. This is an age of
converging state and corporate surveillance. Like other features of the political economy, these shifts develop with apparent independence of institutional
motivations, yet corporate and spy agencies practices share common appetites for metadata. Snowdens revelations of the NSAs global surveillance programs raises the
possibility that the state intelligence apparatus is used for industrial espionage in ways that could
unite governmental intelligence and corporate interests for which there appears to be historical
precedent. The convergence of the interests, incentives, and methods of U.S. intelligence agencies,
and the corporate powers they serve, raise questions about the ways that the NSA and CIA fulfill
their roles, which have been described by former CIA agent Philip Agee as: the secret police of
U.S. capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of U.S.
companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.1 There is a long history in the United States of
overwhelming public opposition to new forms of electronic surveillance. Police, prosecutors, and spy agencies have recurrently used public crisesranging from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, wars, claimed
threats of organized crime and terror attacks, to marshal expanded state surveillance powers. During the two decades preceding the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress periodically considered developing legislation
establishing rights of privacy; but even in the pre-Internet age, corporate interests scoffed at the need for any such protections. Pre2001 critiques of electronic-surveillance focused on privacy rights and threats to
boundaries between individuals, corporations, and the state; what would later be known as metadata collection were then broadly understood as violating shared notions of privacy, and as exposing the scaffolding of
a police state or a corporate panopticon inhabited by consumers living in a George Tooker painting. The rapid shifts in U.S. attitudes favoring expanded domestic intelligence powers following 9/11 were significant.
In the summer of 2001, distrust of the FBI and other surveillance agencies had reached one of its highest historical levels. Decades of longitudinal survey data collected by the Justice Department establish
longstanding U.S. opposition to wiretaps; disapproval levels fluctuated between 7080 percent during the thirty years preceding 2001.
3 But a December 2001New York Times poll suddenly found only 44 percent
of respondents believed widespread governmental wiretaps would violate Americans rights. Public fears in the post-9/11 period reduced concerns of historical abuses by law enforcement and intelligence
agencies; and the rapid adoption of the PATRIOT Act precluded public considerations of why the Pike and Church congressional committee findings had ever established limits on intelligence agencies abilities to
spy on Americans. Concurrent with post-9/11 surveillance expansions was the growth of the Internets ability to track users, collecting metadata in ways that seductively helped socialize all to the normalcy of the loss
of privacy. The depth of this shift in U.S. attitudes away from resisting data collection can be seen in the publics response in the early 1990s to news stories reporting the Lotus Corporations plans to sell a
comprehensive CD-ROM database compiled by Equifax, consisting of Americans addresses and phone numbers. This news led to broad-based protests by Americans across the country angry about invasions of
privacyprotests that lead to the cancellation of the product which produced results less intrusive than a quick Google search would provide today. Similarly, a broad resistance arose in 2003 when Americans learned
of the Bush administrations secretive Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Under the directorship of Admiral John Poindexter, TIA planned to collect metadata on millions of Americans, tracking
movements, emails, and economic transactions for use in predictive modeling software with hopes of anticipating terror attacks, and other illegal acts, before they occurred. Congress and the public were outraged at
the prospect of such invasive surveillance without warrants or meaningful judicial oversight. These concerns led to TIAs termination, though as the Snowden NSA documents clarify, the NSA now routinely engages
in the very activities envisioned by TIA. Four decades ago broad public outrage followed revelations of Pentagon, FBI, and CIA domestic surveillance campaigns, as news of COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and a host of
illegal operations were disclosed by investigative journalists and later the Pike and Church Committees. Today, few Americans appear to care about Senator Dianne Feinsteins recent accusations that the CIA hacked
her offices computers in order to remove documents her staff was using in investigations of CIA wrongdoing. Americans now increasingly accept invasive electronic monitoring of their personal lives. Ideologies
of surveillance are internalized as shifts in consciousness embedded within political economic formations converge with corporate and state surveillance desires. The rapid expansion of U.S. electronic surveillance
programs like Carnivore, Naruslnsight, or PRISM is usually understood primarily as an outgrowth of the post-9/11 terror wars. But while post-9/11 security campaigns were a catalyst for these expansions, this
6Co nvergence of State
The past two decades brought an accelerated independent growth of
corporate and governmental electronic surveillance programs tracking metadata and compiling
electronic dossiers. The NSA, FBI, Department of Defense, and CIAs metadata programs
developed independently from, and with differing goals from, the consumer surveillance systems
that used cookies and consumer discount cards, sniffing Gmail content, compiling consumer
profiles, and other means of tracking individual Internet behaviors for marketing purposes. Public
growth should also be understood within the context of global capital formations seeking increased legibility of potential consumers, resources, resistance, and competitors.
and Corporate Metadata Dreams
acceptance of electronic monitoring and metadata collection transpired incrementally, with increasing acceptance of corporate-based consumer monitoring programs, and reduced resistance to governmental
surveillance. These two surveillance tracks developed with separate motivations, one for security and the other for commerce, but both desire to make individuals and groups legible for reasons of anticipation and
The collection and use of this metadata finds a synchronic convergence of intrusions, as
consumer capitalism and a U.S. national security state leaves Americans vulnerable, and a world
open to the probing and control by agents of commerce and security. As Bruce Schneier recently observed,
surveillance is still the business model of the Internet , and every one of those companies wants to
access your communications and your metadata.7
But this convergence carries its own contradictions. Public trust in (and the economic value of) cloud servers, telecommunications providers, email, and search engine services suffered following revelations that the public statements of Verizon, Google, and others
had been less than forthright in declaring their claims of not knowing about the NSA monitoring their customers. A March 2014 USA Today survey found 38 percent of respondents believed the NSA violates their privacy, with distrust of Facebook (26 percent) surpassing even the IRS (18 percent) or Google (12 percent)the significance of these results is that the Snowden NSA revelations damaged the reputations and financial standing of a broad range of technology-based industries. 8 With the assistance of private ISPs, various
corporations, and the NSA, our metadata is accessed under a shell game of four distinct sets of legal authorizations. These allow spokespersons from corporate ISPs and the NSA to make misleading statements to the press about not conducting surveillance operations under a particular program such as FISA, when one of the other authorizations is being used. 9 Snowdens revelations reveal a world where the NSA is dependent on private corporate services for the outsourced collection of data, and where the NSA is increasingly reliant
on corporate owned data farms where the storage and analysis of the data occurs. In the neoliberal United States, Amazon and other private firms lease massive cloud server space to the CIA, under an arrangement where it becomes a share cropper on these scattered data farms. These arrangements present nebulous security relationships raising questions of role confusion in shifting patronclient relationships; and whatever resistance corporations like Amazon might have had to assisting NSA, CIA, or intelligence agencies is further
compromised by relations of commerce. This creates relationships of culpability, as Norman Solomon suggests, with Amazons $600 million CIA data farm contract: if Obama orders the CIA to kill a U.S. Citizen, Amazon will be a partner in assassination. 10 Such arrangements diffuse complicity in ways seldom considered by consumers focused on Amazon Primes ability to speedily deliver a My Little Pony play set for a brony nephews birthday party, not on the companys links to drone attacks on Pakistani wedding parties. The
Internet developed first as a military-communication system; only later did it evolve the commercial and recreational uses distant from the initial intent of its Pentagon landlords. Snowdens revelations reveal how the Internets architecture, a compromised judiciary, and duplexed desires of capitalism and the national security state are today converging to track our purchases, queries, movements, associations, allegiances, and desires. The rise of e-commerce, and the soft addictive allure of social media, rapidly transforms U.S. economic
and social formations. Shifts in the base are followed by shifts in the superstructure, and new generations of e-consumers are socialized to accept phones that track movements, and game systems that bring cameras into the formerly private refuges of our homes, as part of a new surveillance normal. 11 We need to develop critical frameworks considering how NSA and CIA surveillance programs articulate not only with the United States domestic and international security apparatus, but with current international capitalist formations.
While secrecy shrouds our understanding of these relationships, CIA history provides examples of some ways that intelligence operations have supported and informed past U.S. economic ventures. When these historical patterns are combined with details from Snowdens disclosures we find continuities of means, motive, and opportunity for neoliberal abuses of state intelligence for private gains. T h e
N S A
t h e
P r o m i s e
I n d u s t r i a l
E s p i o n a g e
The NSA is not the only government-based
international hacking unit spying on global competitors. In China, the Shanghai Chinese Peoples
Liberation Armys Unit 61398 purportedly targets U.S. corporate and government computers,
with hacking campaigns supposedly seeking data providing economic or strategic advantage to
Following Snowdens NSA revelations, several foreign leaders expressed outrage and displeasure upon learning that the NSA had spied on their governments and corporations, yet there has been little consideration of the meaning of the NSAs industrial spying
Chinese government or private businesses. Israels Cyber Intelligence Unit (known as ISNU, or Unit 8200) has been linked to several political and economic hacking operations, including the Stuxnet worm and a recent attack on the lyse Palace. While many Western analysts take for granted that such economic espionage networks exist elsewhere, there is little analysis of the possibility that the NSAs surveillance will be used by rogue individuals or agencies seeking economic advantages. Yet the leveraging of
such information is a fundamental feature of market capitalism. Last January, Snowden told the German ARD television network that there is no question that the U.S. is engaged in economic spying. He explained that, for example, if there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and theyll take it. 12Snowden did not elaborate on what is done with such economic intelligence. Snowden has released
documents establishing that the NSA targeted French politicians, business people and members of the administration under a programme codenamed US-985D with French political and financial interests being targeted on a daily basis. 13 Other NSA documents show the agency spying on Mexican and Brazilian politicians, and the White House authorized an NSA list of surveillance priorities including international trade relations designated as a higher priority than counterespionage investigations. 14 Leaked NSA documents
include materials from a May 2012 top secret presentation used by the NSA to train new agents step-by-step how to access and spy upon private computer networksthe internal networks of companies, governments, financial institutionsnetworks designed precisely to protect information. 15 One leaked NSA PowerPoint slide mentions the US$120 billion a year giant Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras with a caption that many targets use private networks, and as the Brazilian press analysis pointed out Petrobras computers
contain information ranging from details on upcoming commercial bidding operationswhich if infiltrated would give a definite advantage to anyone backing a rival bidderto datasets with details on technological developments, exploration information. 16 In response to Snowdens disclosures, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted the NSA collects financial intelligence, but claimed it was limited to searches for terrorist financial networks and early warning of international financial crises which could
negatively impact the global economy.17 In March 2013 Clapper lied to Congress, claiming that the NSA was not collecting data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.18 He has more recently claimed the NSA does not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf ofor give intelligence we collect toUS companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line. 19 Over the course of several years, the NSAs Operation Shotgiant hacked
into the servers of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Shotgiant initially sought to learn about the Peoples Liberation Armys ability to monitor Huaweis clients communications, but the NSA later installed hidden back doors in Huaweis routers and digital switchesthe exact activities that the U.S. government had long warned U.S. businesses that Huawei had done. 20 Such operations raise the possibility of the NSA gaining knowledge to be used for economic gain by the CIA, NSA employees, or U.S. corporations. When
pressed on these issues, a White House spokesperson claimed we do not give intelligence we collect to U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line. Many countries cannot say the same. After this NSA operation was revealed, Huawei senior executive William Plummer noted that the irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us. 21 There are many historical examples of intelligence personnel using information
acquired through the course of their work for personal gain, such as selling intelligence information to another power. But what we need to focus upon is a qualitatively different phenomenon: the use of such information for corporate profit or market speculation. In 1972, while investigating Nixons presidential campaign finance irregularities, the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee discovered documents indicating that Northrop had made a $450,000 bribe to Saudi Arabian air force generals to help secure a $700 million Northrop
F-E5 jet contact. Retired CIA agent Kim Roosevelt (then running a multinational consulting firm operating in Saudi Arabia) denied any involvement in these bribes, but the investigation uncovered documents establishing that Roosevelt used his CIA connections for financial gain. The Senate subcommittee examined correspondence from Kim Roosevelt and Northrop officials, finding repeated references to my friends in the CIA who were keeping him posted about the moves of commercial rivals. 22 After the subcommittee focused
its attentions on other more significant instances of CIA illegal activities, Roosevelt faced no legal consequences for these activities. The most rigorous study to date documenting intelligence data being used for economic gains in stock market trading was recently published by economists Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu. The authors developed empirical measures to determine whether classified knowledge of impending CIA operations has historically been used to generate profits in this manner. 23 Dube, Kaplan, and
Naidu recognized that most regimes historically overthrown by CIA coups had nationalized industries that were once privately held by international corporations; post-coup these industries returned to the previous corporate owners. Therefore, foreknowledge of upcoming coups had a significant financial value in the stock market. The authors developed a series of measures to detect whether, during past CIA coups, there were detectible patterns of stock trading taking advantage of classified intelligence directives, which were known
only to the CIA and President. Their study selected only CIA coups with now declassified planning documents, which attempted to install new regimes, and in which the targeted pre-coup governments had nationalized once-private multinational industries. They sampled five of twenty-four identified covert CIA coups meeting these three criteria: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (19601961), Cuba (failed Bay of Pigs coup, 1961), and Chile (1973). Daily stock returns of companies that had been nationalized by the governments
targeted by CIA coups were used to compare financial returns before presidential coup authorizations and after the coups. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu found that four days after the authorization of coups their sample of stocks rapidly rose (before public awareness of these coming secret coups): for Congo there was a 16.7 percent increase on the day of the authorization, and a 22.7 percent return from the baseline four days later. The Guatemala stocks showed a 4.9 percent increase upon coup authorization, a 16.1 percent increase four
days later, and 20.5 percent seven days later; the Iranian stocks rose 7.4 percent four days after authorization, 10.3 percent seven days later, and 20.2 percent sixteen days later. They found evidence of significant economic gains occurring in the stock market, with the relative percentage benefit of the coup attributable to ex ante authorization events, which amount to 55.0% in Chile, 66.1% in Guatemala, 72.4% in Congo, and 86.9% in Iran. 24 Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu concluded that private information regarding coup authorizations
and planning increased the stock prices of expropriated multinationals that stood to benefit from regime change. The presence of these abnormal returns suggests that there were leaks of classified information to asset traders. 25 By focusing on trading occurring at the point of the top secret presidential authorizations, they found that gains made from stock buys at the time of authorizations were three times larger in magnitude than price changes from the coups themselves. 26 It remains unknown whether those profiting were lone
individuals (either CIA employees or their proxies), or whether these investments were conducted by the CIA to generate funds for its black ops. We do not know how such past measures of intelligence-insider profiteering do or do not relate to the NSAs present global surveillance operations. While Snowden released documents (and stated that more will be forthcoming) indicating NSA surveillance of corporations around the world, we do not understand how the NSA puts to use the intelligence they collect. Even with these leaks the
NSA largely remains a black box, and our knowledge of its specific activities are limited. Yet, the ease with which a middle-level functionary like Snowden accessed a wealth of valuable intelligence data necessarily raises questions about how the NSAs massive data collections may be used for self-serving economic interests. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu establish past insider exploitations of intelligence data, and with the growth of insider-cheater capitalism of the type documented in Michael Lewiss Flash Boys, and expensive private
inside-the-beltway newsletters, there are tangible markets for the industrial espionage collected and analyzed by the NSA and CIA under these programs. Snowden, after all, was just one of tens of thousands of people with access to the sort of data with extraordinary value on floor of global capitalisms casinos. T h e o r i z i n g
C a p i t a l i s m s
P e r v a s i v e
S u r v e i l l a n c e
C u l t u r e Notions of privacy and surveillance are always culturally constructed
and are embedded within economic and social formations of the larger society. Some centralized state-socialist systems, such as the USSR or East Germany, developed intrusive surveillance systems, an incessant and effective theme of anti-Soviet propaganda. The democratic-socialist formations, such as those of contemporary northern Europe, have laws that significantly limit the forms of electronic surveillance and the collection of metadata, compared to Anglo-U.S. practice
the significant limitations hindering analysis of the intentionally secret activities of intelligence
agencies operating outside of public accountability and systems of legal accountability, the
documents made available by whistleblowers like Snowden and WikiLeaks, and knowledge of
past intelligence agencies activities, provide information that can help us develop a useful
framework for considering the uses to which these new invasive electronic surveillance
technologies can be put. We need a theory of surveillance that incorporates the political economy
of the U.S. national security state and the corporate interests which it serves and protects. Such
analysis needs an economic foundation and a view that looks beyond cultural categories
separating commerce and state security systems designed to protect capital. The metadata,
valuable private corporate data, and fruits of industrial espionage gathered under PRISM and
other NSA programs all produce information of such a high value that it seems likely some of it
will be used in a context of global capital. It matters little what legal restrictions are in place; in a
global, high-tech, capitalist economy such information is invariably commodified. It is likely to
be used to: facilitate industrial or corporate sabotage operations of the sort inflicted by the
Stuxnet worm; steal either corporate secrets for NSA use, or foreign corporate secrets for U.S.
corporate use; make investments by intelligence agencies financing their own operations; or
secure personal financial gain by individuals working in the intelligence sector . The rise of new invasive technologies
coincides with the decline of ideological resistance to surveillance and the compilation of metadata. The speed of Americans adoption of ideologies embracing previously unthinkable levels of corporate and state
surveillance suggests a continued public acceptance of a new surveillance normal will continue to develop with little resistance. In a world where the CIA can hack the computers of Senator Feinsteina leader of the
one of the three branches of governmentwith impunity or lack of public outcry, it is difficult to anticipate a deceleration in the pace at which NSA and CIA expand their surveillance reach. To live a well-adjusted
life in contemporary U.S. society requires the development of rapid memory adjustments and shifting acceptance of corporate and state intrusions into what were once protective spheres of private life. Like all things
in our society, we can expect these intrusions will themselves be increasingly stratified, as electronic privacy, or illegibility, will increasingly become a commodity available only to elites. Today, expensive
technologies like GeeksPhones Blackphone with enhanced PGP encryption, or Boeings self-destructing Black Phone, afford special levels of privacy for those who can pay. While the United States current state of
surveillance acceptance offers little immediate hope of a social movement limiting corporate or government spying, there are enough historical instances of post-crises limits being imposed on government
surveillance to offer some hope. Following the Second World War, many European nations reconfigured long-distance billing systems to not record specific numbers called, instead only recording billing zones
because the Nazis used phone billing records as metadata useful for identifying members of resistance movements. Following the Arab Spring, Tunisia now reconfigures its Internet with a new info-packet system
known as mesh networks that hinder governmental monitoringthough USAID support for this project naturally undermines trust in this system.
Following the Church and Pike committees congressional
investigations of CIA and FBI wrongdoing in the 1970s, the Hughes-Ryan Act brought significant oversight and limits on these groups, limits which decayed over time and whose remaining restraints were undone
with the USA PATRIOT Act. Some future crisis may well provide similar opportunities to regain now lost contours of privacies. Yet hope for immediate change remains limited. It will be difficult for social reform
movements striving to protect individual privacy to limit state and corporate surveillance. Todays surveillance complex aligned with an economic base enthralled with the prospects of metadata appears too strong for
meaningful reforms without significant shifts in larger economic formations. Whatever inherent contradictions exist within the present surveillance system, and regardless of the objections of privacy advocates of the
liberal left and libertarian right, meaningful restrictions appear presently unlikely with surveillance formations so closely tied to the current iteration of global capitalism.
2AC Try or Die
Its Try or die for the aff
Foster 5
John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, "Naked Imperialism,"
Monthly Review, Vol. 57 No. 4, 2005
From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism
following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism
by its very logic is a globally
expansive system. The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations
and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation states is
insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to
overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In
present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the
means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum
dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the world
economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher Istvn Mszros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)
written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: [W]hat is at stake today is not the
control of a particular part of the planetno matter how largeputting at a disadvantage but still tolerating
the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic
and military superpower, with all meanseven the most extreme authoritarian and,
if needed, violent military onesat its disposal. The unprecedented dangers of this
new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is
heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the
outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush
administrations refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the
Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled Apocalypse Soon in the MayJune 2005 issue of Foreign Policy:
The United States has never endorsed the policy of no first use, not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and
remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weaponsby the decision of one person, the presidentagainst either a nuclear or
nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the
willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it
whenever it sees fitsetting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global
warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the worlds total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing
global warming and the worlds growing environmental problemsraising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if
present trends continue.
2AC Solves Terrorism
Capitalist inequalities are the root cause of terrorism.
Slater 6 (Philip, 10/25/6 Former professor and chair, Brandeis Sociology Department, Google,
DOA 6/22/15) The
Root Causes of Terrorism and Why No One Wants to End
Them http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/the-root-causes-ofterror_b_32466.html //Kbuck
Everyone talks about 'fighting terrorism' at the roots, but no one does anything about it. It's
much easier--and relieves more anxiety and frustration--to go bomb somebody. Making "war" on terrorism is a lot like taking a
couple of drinks to cure a hangover--an enjoyable short-term solution and a disastrous
long-term one. But long-term solutions have never played well in Washington, the land of the quick fix. Nor with the American public for that matter--our
instant-gratification consumer society has a bevy of corporations competing to make that
instant even shorter. The people who do most to foment terrorism are not the fundamentalist imams and ayatollahs, who only exploit the hopelessness around
them. The people who do the most are those who create that hopelessness in the first place-the oil monarchies, for example. For of all capitalist enterprises, the extractive industries
are probably the most deserving of the abuse heaped on them over the years. The possessors of the
earth's treasures believe, apparently, that the luck, wealth, or political corruption that allowed them to own land containing such riches is a sign of divine favor, while the poverty of
those around them indicates celestial disgust. Terrorists are people who have lost hope--hope for the possibility of peacefully creating a better world. They may be middle-class and
educated, as many terrorist leaders are, but their despair is one of empathy for the plight of their people as a whole.
The root causes of terrorism
are pathological inequalities in wealth--not just in Saudi Arabia but all over the Third World. Even in our own country Republican
policies have in recent decades created inequalities so extreme that while a few have literally more money than they can possibly use, the vast majority are struggling to get by.
society that impoverishes most of its population in order to enrich a few neurotically
greedy individuals is a sick society. As Jared Diamond has shown, societies in which a few plunder the
environment at the expense of the many are headed for collapse. Fundamentalist religions and radical ideologies
are the common refuge of people without hope. Christianity has played this role for centuries. The rich encourage the poor to accept the misery of this world as a passport to
heaven, despite the fact that according to Jesus they don't have a prayer of getting in themselves. This isn't really surprising. The rich wouldn't be caught dead in a place where they
let poor people in. Islamic fundamentalism is the latest drug being offered the poor and desperate. It has the added appeal that you can not only get into heaven but also take
Terrorism will never end until caps are placed on inequality. At this point
Republicans usually start screaming about communism and destroying 'freedom'. But no
one's talking about ending capitalism. Capitalism is here to stay, but like any system it will self-destruct without limits. Pure greed is not a
vengeance at the same time.
sufficient basis for a viable social system, and a pure free market system will self-destruct as surely as pure communism. As Lewis Mumford pointed out years ago, no system can
survive without contradictions, because humans are much more complex than their ideologies. A completely pure, unrestrained free market, for example, would end by poisoning
its consumers, starving its workers to death, exhausting all the earth's resources, and turning into a single giant monopoly that no longer had anything to sell, no one to make its
product, and no one who could afford to buy it--perhaps no one even alive on an uninhabitable planet. Government regulation exists not only to protect the consumer, the worker,
and the environment, it exists also to protect capitalism from destroying itself. For there is absolutely nothing in free market ideology that provides for long-range thinking.
Capitalism is the most dynamic and powerful force in the world today. The only political
question is what to do with its tendency to get into positive feedback loops and selfdestruct. Republicans tend to act in ways to heighten this tendency, to feed those loops and help it along the path to self-destruction. Democrats tend to act to curb its selfdestructiveness. Placing caps on wealth through taxation or other means--an idea that provokes screams of horror from Republicans--is absolutely necessary for our survival. Not
because it's obscene for some people to have incomes of a million dollars a day while millions of equally able--but less neurotic--people are a single hospital stay away from
homelessness. Not because excess wealth can't buy anything except power--the ability to corrupt the political process and destroy democracy, as it already largely has in the United
States. But because it tends to stifle creativity, suck money from the future (the education of children) to the present (short-term profits for the already wealthy), and decimate the
middle class. In other words, to kill hope.
AT FA Solves Cap
If requested, telecommunication companies are required
to provide data information to the federal government
Pease 6/17
By Dr. Harold Pease, expert on the United States Constitution, who has taught
history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft
College; June 17. 2015; Harlandaily.com;
http://www.harlandaily.com/news/opinion_columns/154125060/Spy-law-looksthe-same
Critics find the new spy law more hype than substance with only slightly less intrusive spying laws than the
previous citizen spy law The Patriot Act .
Private communications are still
confiscated and stored against the will of its owner and
without probable cause or warrant. Once a conspiracy theory, until Edward
Snowden, two years ago, provided the indisputable evidence that the government actively spies on its own
people in the freest land in the world. Deep Orwellian governmental intrusion into the lives of innocent
Americans is the new normal and is to continue as before with one difference. The notorious Section 215,
changed requiring private
telecommunication companies to collect the bulk data (it is
now illegal for them not to) and store the information
themselves at their own expense, rather than to immediately
give it to the government as before. Amazingly this is just after a US Department
authorizing bulk data collection, was
of Justice report revealed the FBI did not identify any major case developments that resulted from use of
the records obtained in response to Section 215 orders. If it has not helped the government catch a single
bad guy in all these years, why then do we do it? This is never explained. It must be about power. Section
215 was also used to track financial data and transactions and to obtain companies Internet business
records. It was Edward Snowden who enlightened us on the extent of its invasiveness to personal
information. He wrote: The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.
With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without
targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wifes phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get
now must provide the information when requested by the
federal government. They have lost their freedom not to
collect and not to give your private information. They are now,
in essence, agents of the federal government and bulk data
collection continue under them. As such the USA Freedom Act
provides these corporations liability protection should you wish to sue for
your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
their disclosure of your sensitive information. Some call it a shell game; the federal government still gets
your information just as before. Probably columnist Daniel Mcadams said it best in an article The
turns private
telecommunications companies into depositories of pre-crime
data for future use of state security agencies. In other words, an
Freedom Act is WORSE than the Patriot Act, because it
individual under no suspicion of any crime and thus deserving full Fourth and Fifth Amendment protection
will nevertheless find himself providing evidence against his future self should that person ever fall under
suspicion. That is not jurisprudence in a free society. Ironically the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals just
ruled bulk collection of citizens records an illegal act. Congress ignored this ruling and essentially declared
the same practice legal in the USA Freedom Act. Mcadams asks, How does making an unconstitutional
and illegal act into a legal one a benefit to civil liberties?
Cyber Security Adv
U Vulnerable to Attack Now
Infrastructure is vulnerable to attack now targeted attacks are occurring
and we do not have adequate defense
Assante 14
Michael Assante. 11/11/2014. America's Critical Infrastructure Is Vulnerable To Cyber Attacks.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/11/11/americas-critical-infrastructure-is-vulnerable-to-cyber-attacks/ (Mr. Assante is
director of Industrial Control Systems as well as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Networks for the SANS Institute.)
Americas critical infrastructurethe utilities, refineries, military defense systems,
water treatment plants and other facilities on which we depend every dayhas
become its soft underbelly, the place where we are now most vulnerable to attack.
Over the past 25 years, hundreds of thousands of analog controls in these facilities have been
replaced with digital systems. Digital controls provide facility operators and managers with remote visibility and
control over every aspect of their operations, including the flows and pressures in refineries, the generation and transmission of power
in the electrical grid, and the temperatures in nuclear cooling towers. In doing so, they have made industrial facilities more efficient
and more productive. But the same connectivity that managers use to collect data and control devices allows
attackers to get into control system networks to steal sensitive information, disrupt
processes, and cause damage to equipment. Hackers, including those in China,
Russia and the Middle East, have taken notice. While early control system breaches were random,
accidental infections, industrial control systems today have become the object of targeted
attacks by skilled and persistent adversaries. Industrial control systems are being targeted The
recently discovered Industrial Control System modules of the HAVEX trojan are
one example. The malware infiltrated an indeterminate number of critical facilities
by attaching itself to software updates distributed by control system manufacturers .
When facilities downloaded the updates to their network, HAVEX used open communication standards to collect information from
control devices and send that information to the attackers for analysis. This
type of attack represents a
significant threat to confidential production data and corporate intellectual
property and may also be an early indicator of an advanced targeted attack on an
organizations production control systems. Other hacks represent a direct threat to
the safety of U.S. citizens. Earlier this year, the FBI released information on Ugly Gorilla, a Chinese attacker
who invaded the control systems of utilities in the United States. While the FBI suspects this was a
scouting mission, Ugly Gorilla gained the cyber keys necessary for access to systems that
regulate the flow of natural gas. Considering that cyber attackers are numerous and
persistentfor every one you see there are a hundred you dontthose developments should
sound alarms among executives at companies using industrial controls and with the people responsible for protecting American
citizens from attacks. To their credit,
both businesses and the U.S. government have begun to take
action; however, neither is adequately addressing the core of the issue.
The US is cyber fragile now terrorists are targeting infrastructure now, we
are in a cyber-arms race
NBC 2/2
Tony Kovaleski, Liz Wagner and Mark Villarreal. Feb 2, 2015. Critical Infrastructure Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks, Experts
Warn.NBC. http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Critical-Infrastructure-Vulnerable-to-Cyber-Attacks-Experts-Warn290370921.html
security breaches at Sony Pictures, Target and Home Depot have put a spotlight on
the vulnerabilities of the nations cyber systems. But an NBC Bay Area investigation
reveals concerns from some of the countrys leading cyber security experts that
threats have moved beyond movies, credit cards and bank accounts, to the ability to hack into computer systems that
control vital infrastructure. For nearly two decades, the United States government has known and
warned about potential threats to critical infrastructure, including nuclear plants,
electric substations, gas pipelines, transit systems, chemical facilities and drinking
water supplies. Its those systems, that if we lose them, its going to have a serious
impact on our way of life, said Perry Pederson, a Washington, D.C.-based expert on cyber
security. In 2007, when Pederson worked for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), he helped design a government test now known as
Project Aurora. The experiment involved hacking into a replica of an Idaho power plants
control system and causing it to smoke, shake and self-destruct. It ultimately proved and
demonstrated on video that you can destroy physical equipment with a cyber-attack , Pederson said.
Its a type of vulnerability we should be concerned about. But Pederson said the United States isnt employing the lessons learned from the
Aurora should have been a wakeup call, and we just hit the snooze button
experiment.
go back to sleep, Pederson said. What has served as a wakeup call to some Americans is the governments recent decision to divulge previously
classified information about the Aurora experiment. It was an incredibly, incredibly bad thing to have done, said Joe Weiss, a Bay Area-based control
system security specialist. What it did is put all of that information in the hands of the bad guys who never had it. DHS released 840 documents
detailing the vulnerabilities Project Aurora revealed. It is information that implicates potential targets in the Bay Area and across California. NBC Bay
Areas investigation intentionally withholds specific details from the records. In an email, DHS defended the decision to release the information. "The
documents were thoroughly reviewed for sensitive or classified information prior to their release to ensure that critical infrastructure security would not
be compromised," it wrote. This is a roadmap for a bad guy, and this is what DHS put out, Weiss said. One of [the documents] even had a picture to
show where you would go to the substation to destroy the equipment.
Weiss characterized the countrys
infrastructure as very cyber fragile, and has testified in front of Congress about his tracking of cyber events targeting
critical infrastructure overseas and on U.S. soil. He says he has documented almost 400 attacks on systems
that control infrastructure. Weiss and others believe that terrorist networks like al Qaeda have
been examining the fragility of Americas vital infrastructure. Around the time that Sonys computer
systems were breached by hackers last December, two major security incidents involving critical infrastructure were unfolding abroad. Hackers
Some people worry
about were on the brink of a cyber-arms race, Pederson said. I would say, no, were not
on the brink of it; were in the thick of it. Were in it. Weiss believes the government has
not moved fast enough to address real threats. Pederson said the governments inaction is a symptom of waiting for something to
successfully accessed computer systems at a nuclear power plant in South Korea and a steel mill in Germany.
happen and getting serious after. While the need to address cyber security breaches has resonated with federal lawmakers, significant change to the
countrys cyber security landscape hit a government roadblock as Congress struggled to understand how much change private industry and the public is
willing to accept. A bill by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein recently stalled on Capitol Hill. The legislation called for information sharing between
Cyberattacks cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollar a year and this will only get
worse, said Feinstein in a statement in January. Congress must take steps to minimize the damage.
private companies and the U.S. government, and aimed to improve the detection of cyber-attacks and slow the progress of hackers.
Link Weakened Encryption
NSA bulk data collection has weakened cyber security it gives a roadmap to
hackers and has weakened encryption programs
Donahue 14 (Eileen,- visiting scholar at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,
former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council Why the NSA undermines national security)
What is most disconcerting is that the NSAs mass surveillance techniques have
compromised the security of telecommunication networks, social media platforms,
private-sector data storage and public infrastructure security systems.
Authoritarian governments and hackers now have a roadmap to surreptitiously tap
into private networks for their own nefarious purposes. By weakening encryption
programs and planting backdoor entries to encryption software, the NSA has
demonstrated how it is possible to infiltrate and violate information-security
systems. In effect, the spy agency has modeled anarchic behavior that makes everyone less safe.
NSA surveillance techniques are deliberately weakening cyber security now
only ending bulk data collection reduces vulnerability
Danielle Kehl. JULY 31 2014. How the NSA Hurts Our Economy, Cybersecurity, and Foreign Policy.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/31/usa_freedom_act_update_how_the_nsa_hurts_our_economy_cybersecurity_and_foreign.html (Danielle Kehl is a policy
analyst at New America's Open Technology Institute, where she researches and writes about broadband policy, Internet freedom, and other technology policy issues.)
theres growing evidence that certain NSA surveillance techniques are actually bad
for cybersecurity. As the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recently explained: The United States might have
compromised both security and privacy in a failed attempt to improve security . Weve
learned in the past year that the NSA has been deliberately weakening the security of the Internet,
including commercial products that we rely on every day, in order to improve its
own spying capabilities. The agency has apparently tried everything from secretly
undermining essential encryption tools and standards to inserting backdoors into
widely used computer hardware and software products, stockpiling vulnerabilities
in commercial software, and building a vast network of spyware inserted onto
computers and routers around the world. A former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Eileen Donahoe, wrote a
Lastly,
forceful article back in March about how the NSAs actions threaten our national security.
To collect data, the NSA must build backdoors, sabotage companies, and
compromise systems
Cohn and Timm 13
CINDY COHN AND TREVOR TIMM. OCTOBER 2, 2013. The NSA is Making Us All Less Safe. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/nsa-making-us-less-safe (Cindy Cohn is
the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFFs Legal Director as well as its General Counsel. Trevor Timm is a co-founder and
the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.)
By weakening encryption, the NSA allows others to more easily break it. By
installing backdoors and other vulnerabilities in systems, the NSA exposes them to other
malicious hackerswhether they are foreign governments or criminals. As security expert
Bruce Schneier explained, Its sheer folly to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities they create. The New York
Times presented internal
NSA documents with some specifics. They are written in bureaucratese, but we have
some basic translations: Insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT
systems, networks and endpoint communications devices used by targets
Sabotage our systems by inserting backdoors and otherwise weakening them if theres a chance that a
target might also use them. "actively engages US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence
and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs" Secretly infiltrate
companies to conduct this sabotage, or work with companies to build in weaknesses to
their systems, or coerce them into going along with it in secret. Shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace
to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS Ensure that the global
market only has compromised systems, so that people dont have access to the safest
technology. "These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection with foreknowledge
of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact." Make sure no
one knows that the systems have been compromised. influence policies, standards and specifications
for commercial public key technologies Make sure that the standards that everyone relies on
have vulnerabilities that are hidden from users. Each of these alone would be
terrible for security; collectively they are a nightmare. They are also a betrayal of the very public
political process we went through in the 1990s to ensure that technology users had access to real security tools to keep them safe.
Link Chinese Attack
China has the resources and access to attack now
Maloof 12
F. Michael Maloof 07/01/2012 CHINA: 'PERVASIVE ACCESS' TO 80% OF TELECOMS
http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/chinese-have-pervasive-access-to-80-of-worlds-telecoms/ (F.
Michael Maloof, is a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense.)
WASHINGTON The
Chinese government has pervasive access to some 80 percent of
the worlds communications, giving it the ability to undertake remote industrial
espionage and even sabotage electronically of critical infrastructures in the United
States and in other industrialized countries. The Chinese government and its
Peoples Liberation Army are acquiring the access through two Chinese companies,
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd and ZTE Corporation, telecommunications experts have told WND. With
this access, the sources say, the Chinese are working on the other 20 percent. The two companies give the
Chinese remote electronic backdoor access through the equipment they have
installed in telecommunications networks in 140 countries. The Chinese companies service 45 of the
worlds 50 largest telecom operators. Authors Brett M. Decker and Bill Triplett cut through the fog of soothing, pro-China propaganda
to reveal the truth, in Bowing to Beijing. In 2000, Huawei was virtually unknown outside China, but by 2009 it had grown to be one
of the largest, second only to Ericsson. As a consequence, sources say that any information traversing any Huawei equipped network
isnt safe unless it has military encryption. One source warned, even then, there is no doubt that the Chinese are working very hard to
decipher anything encrypted that they intercept.
China can attack our systems now an attack would weaken our military and
sabotage weapons systems
A report put out in March by the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission also had warned that Huawei and ZTE were examples of high
technology companies the Chinese government could use to enter remotely into
telecommunications systems and computers linked to them to gain undetected access
to sensitive data. It warned that the Chinese military, through its large Chinese telecommunications firms, has
created an avenue for state-sponsored and state-directed penetrations of supply
chains for electronics supporting U.S. military, government and civilian industry.
Successful penetration of a supply chain such as that for the telecommunications
industry has the potential to cause the catastrophic failure of systems and networks
supporting critical infrastructure for national security or public safety, the report said.
Potential effects include providing an adversary with capabilities to gain covert
access and monitoring of sensitive systems, to degrade a systems mission
effectiveness, or to insert false information or instructions that could cause
premature failure or complete remote control or destruction of the targeted system.
The report pointed out Chinese capabilities in computer network operations have advanced
sufficiently to pose a genuine risk to U.S. military operations in the event of a conflict.
PLA analysts, the report said, consistently identify logistics and C4ISR infrastructure as U.S. strategic centers of gravity suggesting
that PLA
commanders will almost certainly attempt to target these systems with both
electronic countermeasure weapons and network attack and exploitation tools, likely in
advance of actual combat to delay U.S. entry or degrade capabilities in a conflict. The report, titled
Occupying the Information High Ground: Chinese Capabilities for Computer Network Operations and Cyber Espionage, said that
many of the findings actually came from Chinese source materials, including
authoritative PLA publications. While Huawei has denied to WND that it has capabilities that are of concern to the
House Intelligence Committee, sources point to a particular technology that Huawei has
developed called Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI, which gives it and ZTE capabilities that
pose potential threats to U.S. security. DPI is the key technology in high-capacity
data interception and mining, according to a WND source who viewed Huaweis PowerPoint presentation. The entire
matter became an issue when Huawei last February spoke of its DPI capability in a PowerPoint presentation at the annual
Intelligence Supportive Systems World Middle East and African Law Enforcement, Intelligence and Homeland Security conference in
Dubai. While Huaweis presentation of its DPI capability was meant to show how it protected Huawei-equipped networks by detecting
malicious code, WND sources say that the very same technology can
be very effectively used to conduct
widespread industrial espionage and breach national telecommunications security.
The magnitude of Huaweis operations worldwide has alarmed national security
specialists who say its covert capability to remotely access communications
technology sold to the U.S. and other Western countries could disable a countrys
telecommunications infrastructure before a military engagement. Sources add that the
Chinese government, through the companys electronic backdoor of
telecommunications networks, has the ability to exploit networks to steal technology
and trade secrets, or even to sabotage electronic devices. With this capability, China
would be in a position to sabotage critical U.S. weapons systems and sensitive cyber
sites, all of which could include intelligence or systems used by defense contractors
doing work on behalf of the Department of Defense or the U.S. intelligence
Internal Link Cyber Attack Conventional Attack
Cyber war increases likelihood of conventional war
Clarke and Knake 10
Richard Clarke and Robert K. Knake 2010 Cyber War: The Next Threat To National Security And What To Do About It
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126097038 (Richard A. Clarke is an internationally-recognized expert on
security, including homeland security, national security, cyber security, and counterterrorism. Clarke served three Presidents as a
senior White House Advisor. Prior to his White House years, Clarke served for 19 years in the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community,
and State Department. Robert K. Knake is an international affairs fellow in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations studying
cyber war. He is currently working on a Council Special Report on internet governance and security.)
While it may appear to give America some sort of advantage, in fact cyber
war places this country at greater
jeopardy than it does any other nation. Nor is this new kind of war a game or a figment of our imaginations.
Far from being an alternative to conventional war, cyber war may actually increase
the likelihood of the more traditional combat with explosives, bullets, and missiles. If
we could put this genie back in the bottle, we should, but we can't. Therefore, we need to embark on a complex series of tasks: to
understand what cyber war is, to learn how and why it works, to analyze its risks, to prepare for it, and to think about how to control it.
The US will retaliate conventionally in response to cyber war from the DoD
Lynn 11
As Delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn, III, National Defense University, Washington, D.C., Thursday, July 14,
2011 Remarks on the Department of Defense Cyber Strategy http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1593
The steps we have taken to respond to the cyber threat has prompted discussion in recent weeks about cyber-war and its
implications. As
we release the DoD Cyber Strategy, it is important to address this topic head
on. Commentators have asked whether and how the U.S. would respond militarily to attacks on
our networks. And this speculation has prompted concerns that cyberspace is at risk of being militarizedthat a domain
overwhelmingly used by civilians and for peaceful purposes could be fundamentally altered by the militarys efforts to defend it. The
concern here, as in other areas of our security, is that the measures put in place to prevent hostile actions will negate the very benefits
of cyberspace we seek to protect. We have designed our DoD Cyber Strategy to address this concern. It
should come as no
surprise that the United States is prepared to defend itself. It would be irresponsible, and a failure
of the Defense Departments mission, to leave the nation vulnerable to a known threat. Just as our military organizes
to defend against hostile acts from land, air, and sea, we must also be prepared to
respond to hostile acts in cyberspace. Accordingly, the United States reserves the right,
under the laws of armed conflict, to respond to serious cyber attacks with a
proportional and justified military response at the time and place of our choosing.
Cyber Attacks now give a justification for military conflict according to a new
DoD report
Rashid 11
[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Pentagon-Confirms-Military-Action-is-an-Acceptable-Response-to-CyberAttacks-493894/,
November 22, 2011, Fahmida Y. Rashid, Staff Writer on Cyber Security matters at E-Week, Pentagon Confirms Military Action is An
Acceptable Response to Cyber Attacks]
It is official. The
United States military has explicitly stated that it has the right to
retaliate with military force against a cyber-attack. In a 12-page report sent to Congress and made
public Nov. 21, the Department Of Defense said the military can launch a physical attack
in the case of a cyber-attack against its systems. The threat of military action would act as deterrence on
people who think they can carry out "significant cyber-attacks directed against the U.S. economy, government or military," the
Pentagon wrote in the report, which appears to be an update to the cyber-strategy plan released over the summer. The president would
be in charge of authorizing these attacks, which are approved only to defend computer networks in "areas of hostilities" or actual
battle zones, such as Afghanistan. While the report talked about the necessity of securing critical infrastructure, the report said the
Pentagon would work with the Department of Homeland Security, which has oversight of this sector. It does not appear from the
report that attacks on critical infrastructure by themselves could automatically lead to military action. "When warranted, we
respond to hostile attacks in cyber-space as we would do to any other threat to our
country," according to the report, which the Pentagon is mandated to complete under the 2011 Defense Authorization Act. The
Defense Department operates a massive network environment, with more than 15,000 computer networks consisting of seven million
computers scattered around the world, Army Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and commander of
U.S. Cyber Command, told eWEEK recently. Defense
officials have stated in the past that the
networks are probed millions of times a day trying to find and extract data. One defense
company lost more than 24,000 files as part of a network breach in March. The report "reserves the right to
defend, not just the nation, but various other related interests as well," said Cameron Camp,
a security researcher at ESET, noting that the policy would cover the use of proxy force so long as it
can be considered as being in "our interests." The United States will conduct a military strike only when
all other options have been exhausted and only when the risks of not doing anything outweigh the risks of acting, the report said. The
cyber-operations will still follow the same rules of armed conflict the defense department follows for "kinetic" warfare on the ground,
according to the Pentagon.
Cyber Attacks will lead to a war cyber damages will be weighed as physical
WSJ 11
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html, May 30, 2011, Cyber Combat: Act of War,
SIOBHAN GORMAN And JULIAN E. BARNES]
"Act of war" is a political phrase, not a legal term, said Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force Major General and professor at Duke
University law school. Gen. Dunlap argues cyber
attacks that have a violent effect are the legal
equivalent of armed attacks, or what the military calls a "use of force." "A cyber
attack is governed by basically the same rules as any other kind of attack if the effects
of it are essentially the same," Gen. Dunlap said Monday. The U.S. would need to show that the cyber
weapon used had an effect that was the equivalent of a conventional attack. James Lewis, a computer-security specialist at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies who has advised the Obama administration, said Pentagon officials are
currently figuring out what kind of cyber attack would constitute a use of force. Many military planners believe the
trigger for retaliation should be the amount of damageactual or attempted
caused by the attack. For instance, if computer sabotage shut down as much
commerce as would a naval blockade, it could be considered an act of war that
justifies retaliation, Mr. Lewis said. Gauges would include "death, damage, destruction or a high level of disruption" he
Impact China War
U.S.-China war leads to extinction
Straits Times 00
June 25, 2000 lexis Straits Times
THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and
If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes
unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would
embroil other countries far and near and -- horror of horrors -raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any
country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the
region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east
will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may
try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political
landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India
and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a
nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the
Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book
The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign
policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -- truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the
use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability,
there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US
estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major
American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. A Chinese
military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first
use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded
Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although
the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military
leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked
dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we
would see the destruction of civilization.
Impact Cyber Warfare (General)
Cyberattack causes war
Tucker, 14
Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. Hes also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That
Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has
written about emerging technology in Slate,The Sun, MIT Technology Review, Wilson Quarterly, The American Legion
Magazine,BBC News Magazine, Utne Reader, and elsewhere. (10/29/14)
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/10/cyber-attack-will-cause-significant-loss-life-2025-experts-predict/97688/ //ZA
A major cyber attack will happen between now and 2025 and it will be large enough to cause
significant loss of life or property losses/damage/theft at the levels of tens of billions
of dollars, according to more than 60 percent of technology experts interviewed by the Pew
Internet and American Life Project. But other experts interviewed for the project Digital Life in 2015, released Wednesday, said the
current preoccupation with cyber conflict is product of software merchants looking to hype public anxiety against an eternally
unconquerable threat. Its the old phantom of the cyber Pearl Harbor, a concept commonly credited to former Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta but that is actually as old as the world wide web. It dates back to security expert Winn Schwartaus testimony to
Congress in 1991, when he warned of an electronic Pearl Harbor and said it was waiting to occur. More than two decades later,
were still waiting. The Pew report offers, if nothing else, an opportunity to look at how the cyber landscape has changed and how it
will continue to evolve between now and 2025. Potential Infrastructure Vulnerabilities A key
concern for many of
the experts Pew interviewed is infrastructure, where very real cyber vulnerabilities
do exist and are growing. Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and a partner at
Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson told Pew, Cyberwar just plain makes sense.
Attacking the power grid or other industrial control systems is asymmetrical and
deniable and devilishly effective. Plus, it gets easier every year. We used to worry
about Russia and China taking down our infrastructure. Now we have to worry
about Iran and Syria and North Korea. Next up: Hezbollah and Anonymous. Jeremy Epstein, a senior
computer scientist working with the National Science Foundation as program director for Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, said,
in the billions will occur to manufacturing and/or utilities but because it
ramps up slowly, it will be accepted as just another cost (probably passed on to taxpayers through government rebuilding
subsidies and/or environmental damage), and there will be little motivation for the private sector to defend itself. Today, cities around
the world use supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to manage water, sewage, electricity, and even traffic lights.
Last October, researchers Chris Sistrunk and Adam Crain found that these systems suffer from 25 different security vulnerabilities.
Cyberwarfare causes global, nuclear war
Fritz 09
Fritz 09, Jason, Researcher for International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, Former Army Officer and
Consultant, Master of Internation Relations at Bond University, Hacking Nuclear Command and Control, 2009.
(http://icnnd.org/Documents/Jason_Fritz_Hacking_NC2.pdf.)
This paper will analyse the threat of cyber terrorism in regard to nuclear weapons. Specifically, this research will use open source
knowledge to identify the structure of nuclear command and control centres, how those structures might be compromised through
computer network operations, and how doing so would fit within established cyber terrorists capabilities, strategies, and tactics. If
access to command and control centres is obtained, terrorists could fake or actually cause
one nuclear-armed state to attack another, thus provoking a nuclear response from
another nuclear power. This may be an easier alternative for terrorist groups than building
or acquiring a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb themselves. This would also act as a force
equaliser, and provide terrorists with the asymmetric benefits of high speed,
removal of geographical distance, and a relatively low cost. Continuing difficulties in
developing computer tracking technologies which could trace the identity of
intruders, and difficulties in establishing an internationally agreed upon legal
framework to guide responses to computer network operations, point towards an
inherent weakness in using computer networks to manage nuclear weaponry. This is
particularly relevant to reducing the hair trigger posture of existing nuclear
arsenals. All computers which are connected to the internet are susceptible to infiltration and remote control. Computers which
operate on a closed network may also be compromised by various hacker methods, such as privilege escalation, roaming notebooks,
wireless access points, embedded exploits in software and hardware, and maintenance entry points. For example, e-mail spoofing
targeted at individuals who have access to a closed network, could lead to the installation of a virus on an open network. This virus
could then be carelessly transported on removable data storage between the open and closed network. Information found on
internet may also reveal how to access these closed networks directly. Efforts by
militaries to place increasing reliance on computer networks, including experimental technology
such as autonomous systems, and their desire to have multiple launch options, such as nuclear triad capability, enables
multiple entry points for terrorists. For example, if a terrestrial command centre is impenetrable, perhaps
isolating one nuclear armed submarine would prove an easier task. There is evidence to suggest multiple
attempts have been made by hackers to compromise the extremely low radio
frequency once used by the US Navy to send nuclear launch approval to submerged
submarines. Additionally, the alleged Soviet system known as Perimetr was designed to automatically launch nuclear weapons
if it was unable to establish communications with Soviet leadership. This was intended as a retaliatory response in the event that
nuclear weapons had decapitated Soviet leadership; however it did not account for the possibility of cyber terrorists blocking
communications through computer network operations in an attempt to engage the system. Should a warhead be launched, damage
could be further enhanced through additional computer network operations. By
using proxies, multi-layered
attacks could be engineered. Terrorists could remotely commandeer computers in
China and use them to launch a US nuclear attack against Russia.Thus Russia
would believe it was under attack from the US and the US would believe China was
responsible. Further, emergency response communications could be disrupted,
transportation could be shut down, and disinformation, such as misdirection, could
be planted, thereby hindering the disaster relief effort and maximizing destruction.
Disruptions in communication and the use of disinformation could also be used to provoke uninformed responses. For example, a
nuclear strike between India and Pakistan could be coordinated with Distributed Denial of Service attacks against key networks, so
they would have further difficulty in identifying what happened and be forced to respond quickly. Terrorists
could also
knock out communications between these states so they cannot discuss the situation.
Alternatively, amidst the confusion of a traditional large-scale terrorist attack,
claims of responsibility and declarations of war could be falsified in an attempt to
instigate a hasty military response. These false claims could be posted directly on Presidential, military, and
government websites. E-mails could also be sent to the media and foreign governments using the IP addresses and e-mail accounts of
government officials.
A sophisticated and all encompassing combination of traditional
terrorism and cyber terrorism could be enough to launch nuclear weapons on its
own, without the need for compromising command and control centres directly.
Impact Calculus
Cyber attacks are on par with nuclear winter
Information Week June 02, 2007 The Impact Of Cyberwarfare http://www.informationweek.com/the-impact-ofcyberwarfare/199800131
Cyberwarfare: What will it look like, how will we defend against it? Those questions have taken on new urgency, as the possibility
becomes more real. Recently, the Baltic nation of Estonia
suffered several weeks of distributed denialof-service attacks against both government and private-sector Web sites. And late last
month, a report from the Department of Defense said the People's Liberation Army of China is building up its cyberwarfare
capabilities, even creating malware that could be used against enemy computer systems in first-strike attacks. To date, there have been
no proven, documented cases of one nation attacking another via cyberspace. Yet cyberwarfare
is a chilling
prospect that's treated among most nations with much the same reverence as Cold War
players treated the idea of nuclear winter, mainly because of the potential large-scale
economic disruption that would follow, says Howard Schmidt, a former White House
cybersecurity adviser and former chief security officer at eBay and Microsoft. This
would include shortages of supplies that could affect both citizens and the military, he
says. The cyberattacks against Estonia primarily targeted the government, banking,
media, and police sites, and they "affected the functioning of the rest of the network
infrastructure in Estonia," the European Network and Information Security Agency, or ENISA, reported on its Web site. As a
result, targeted sites were inaccessible outside of Estonia for extended periods in order to ride out the attacks and to try and maintain
services within the country.
Cyber attacks have the highest probability and magnitude billions of
attacks equitable to a bomb
Fox News 10
Fox News March 08, 2010 FBI Warns Brewing Cyberwar May Have Same Impact as 'Well-Placed Bomb'
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/03/08/cyberwar-brewing-china-hunts-wests-intel-secrets/#ixzz22z8hTX68
NATO and America's European allies are sounding the alarm over what they say are increased
cyber attacks originating from China that are targeting key government and
intelligence computers. The warning comes on the heels of an FBI report last week
detailing the "real ... and expanding threat" of cyber terrorism, especially from Al Qaeda. FBI
Director Robert Mueller warned Thursday that cyber-terrorists "will either train their own
recruits or hire outsiders... as a means to damage both our economy and our psyche
-- and countless extremists have taken this to heart," he said. Mueller said that a cyber-attack
could have the same impact as a "well-placed bomb." He also accused "nation-state hackers" of seeking
out U.S. technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies. NATO's warning focuses on China,
for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China. The cyber-penetration of
key offices in NATO and the EU has led to restrictions because there are concerns that secret intelligence reports might be vulnerable,
the London Times reports. There are reportedly two forms of attack: those focusing on disrupting computer systems and others
involving "fishing trips" for sensitive information. Security
officials have indicated that China now
poses the biggest threat -- but Beijing denies making such attacks. An official report released Friday said
the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen
significantly in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.
A/T Cyber Attacks in the Past
There is a distinction we have engaged in limited war, our evidence is
talking about unrestricted war
Shimaell et. Al. 02
Timothy Shimaell, Phil Williams Casey Dunlevy 2002 Countering cyber war (Timothy Shimeall is a senior analyst with the CERT
Analysis Center of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with specific interests in cyber war and cyber terrorism.
Phil Williams, a former NATO fellow, is a profes- sor at the University of Pittsburgh and a visiting scientist at the CERT Analysis
Center. Casey Dunlevy is a former intelligence analyst, and leads the CERT Analysis Center.)
In this connection, it is worth emphasising that cyber war is not the defacement of web sites owned by a rival nation, organisation or
political movement. Even when they accompany other tensions or hostilities as they did during NATOs Kosovo air campaign in
1999 such attacks on web sites are best understood as a form of harassment or graffiti and not as cyber war per se. There
are,
nevertheless, several
levels of cyber war, of which three stand out: cyber war as an adjunct to
military operations; limited cyber war; and unrestricted cyber war. When modern
military establishments are involved in military hostilities, a key objective is to
achieve information superiority or information dominance in the battle space. This
requires suppressing enemy air defences, blocking and/or destroying radar, and the like.
The aim, in Clausewitzian terms, is to increase the fog of war for the enemy and to reduce it for ones own forces. This can be
achieved through direct military strikes designed to degrade the enemys information-processing and communications systems or by
attacking the systems internally to achieve, not denial of service, but a denial of capability. In effect, this form of cyber warfare
focuses almost exclusively on military cyber targets. In
a limited cyber war, the information
infrastructure is the medium, target and weapon of attack, with little or no realworld action accompanying the attack. As the medium of attack, the information
infrastructure forms the vector by which the attack is delivered to the target often
through interconnections between the enemy and its allies, using links for sharing resources or data, or through wide-area network
connections. Alternatively, an inside agent might place malicious software directly on the enemys networks. As the target of attack,
the infrastructure forms a means by which the effectiveness of the enemy is reduced. Networks facilitate organisational missions.
Degrading network capacity inhibits or prevents operations that depend on the
network. Degrading the level of service on the network could force the enemy to resort to backup means for some operations,
which might expose additional vulnerabilities. Degrading the quality of the data on a net- work might even force the enemy to
question the quality of the information available to make decisions. As the weapon of attack, the infrastructure could be perverted to
attack itself either via the implantation of multiple pieces of malicious software, or via deliberate actions that exploit weaknesses.
Limited cyber war of this kind could be designed to slow an adversarys
preparations for military intervention, as part of an economic warfare campaign, or as
part of the manoeuvring that typically accompanies a crisis or confrontation between states. More serious, and perhaps more
likely, than limited cyber war is what can be termed unrestricted cyber war, a form of
warfare that has three major characteristics. First, it is comprehensive in scope and
target coverage with no distinctions between military and civilian targets or between
the home front and the fighting front. Second, unrestricted cyber war has physical
consequences and casualties, some of which would result from attacks deliberately
intended to create mayhem and destruction, and some of which would result from
the erosion of what might be termed civilian command and control capabilities in
areas such as air-traffic control, emergency-service management, water- resource
management and power generation. Third, the economic and social impact in
addition to the loss of life could be profound. An unrestricted cyber campaign
would almost certainly be directed primarily against the target countrys critical national
infrastructure: energy, transportation, finance, water, communications, emergency services and the infor- mation
infrastructure itself. It would likely cross bound- aries between government and private sectors, and, if sophisticated and coordinated,
would have both immediate impact and delayed consequences. Ultimately, an
unrestricted cyber attack would
likely result in significant loss of life, as well as economic and social degradation.
A/T No China War
China and the US are preparing for war now any accidental escalation will
trigger conflict, asymmetrical attacks like cyber war are a likely trigger
Pillsbury 14
MICHAEL PILLSBURY. NOVEMBER 13, 2014. China and the United States Are Preparing for
War. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/11/13/china-and-the-united-states-are-preparing-for-war/
(Michael Pillsbury is the director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute)
At a Nov. 12 news conference in Beijing, General Secretary of the Communist Party Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama
agreed to notify the other side before major military activities, and to develop a set of rules of behavior for sea and air encounters, in
order to avoid military confrontations in Asia. "Its
incredibly important that we avoid inadvertent
escalation," Ben Rhodes, a U.S. deputy national security advisor, was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying. An
"accidental circumstance," he said, could "lead into something that could precipitate conflict."
Should we really be worried about war between the United States and China? Yes. Over the last
four decades of studying China, I have spoken with hundreds of members of Chinas military, the
Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), and read countless Chinese military journals and strategy articles.
Chinese military and political leaders believe that their country is at the center of
American war planning. In other words, Beijing believes that the United States is readying
itself for the possibility of a conflict with China and that it must prepare for that
eventuality. Tensions are high not just because of Beijings rapidly expanding military
budget, or because the United States continues to commit an increasingly high percentage of
its military assets to the Pacific as part of its "rebalance" strategy. Rather, the biggest problem is Chinese
opacity. While its heartening to hear Xi agree to instruct the PLA to be more open with regard to the United States, it is doubtful
this will lead to any real changes. Washington is willing to share a substantial amount of military information with China, in order to
"reduce the chances of miscommunication, misunderstanding or miscalculation," as then U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said
during a January 2011 trip to Beijing. But the Chinese
leadership, which benefits from obfuscation and
asymmetric tactics, refuses to communicate its militarys intentions. Chinese leadership,
which benefits from obfuscation and asymmetric tactics, refuses to communicate its militarys intentions. Despite repeated entreaties
from American officials,
Beijing is unwilling to talk about many key military issues like the scope and
intentions of its rapid force buildup, development of technologies that could cripple American naval forces in the region, and its
militarys involvement in cyberattacks against the United States that would lower friction between
the two sides. And sometimes, as in 2010 after U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Beijing breaks off military-to-military contacts altogether
leading to an especially troubling silence. As a result, there is a growing mistrust of China among many
thoughtful people in the U.S. government. Chinese military officers have complained to me that journals of the American war colleges
now feature articles on war with China, and how the United States can win. A February 2014 article, for example, in the U.S. Naval
Institutes Proceedings magazine, entitled "Deterring the Dragon," proposes laying offensive underwater mines along Chinas coast to
close Chinas main ports and destroy its sea lines of communications. The article also suggests sending special operations forces to
arm Chinas restive minorities in the countrys vast western regions. But China is doing the same thing. In
2013, Gen.
Peng Guangqian and Gen. Yao Youzhi updated their now-classic text, The Science of Military Strategy, and
called for Beijing to add to the quality and quantity of its nuclear weapons, in order
to close the gap between China and both Russia and the United States. Even Xis "new
model" of great-power relations seems to preclude arms control negotiations, requiring the United States to yield to the inevitability of
Chinas rise. Many people outside the Pentagon may be surprised by just how many senior
American officials are
worried about a war with China. These include no less than the last U.S. two secretaries of
defense, and a former secretary of state. In the concluding chapter of Henry Kissingers 2011 book, On China,
he warns of a World War I-style massive Chinese-American war. "Does history repeat itself?" he asks.
Democracy Adv
2AC Bulk Data Solves Backsliding
Bulk collection violates the Constitution, causes backsliding other nations
will backlash
Sorcher 15
SARA SORCHER. May 2015. Christian Science Monitor. Influencers: Congress should end NSA
bulk data collection. http://passcode.csmonitor.com/influencers-surveillance (This article
gathered more than 90 high-profile security and privacy experts for the Influencers Poll.)
However, they differed on the reasons why. "Two
years ago, people learned that intelligence agencies
have been indiscriminately collecting the private records of innocent people around the world. This
is a violation of basic human rights and it must end," said Amie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel at Access, a
human rights organization. Heather West, from Internet performance and security company CloudFlare, said ending bulk
collection of both phone and online records "is an important step in ensuring that
the US government and by proxy, US companies are trusted globally." The current
bulk collection program is of dubious national security value, said Chris Finan, chief executive officer of security company Manifold
Security. "It is no different in principle to the British writs of assistance that inspired the Fourth Amendment," Mr. Finan said. " If
lawmakers think such warrantless collection is necessary for the nation's security they should
put forward a Constitutional amendment. Metadata can be used to create a rich
mosaic of a person's life, allowing a spy agency to do so without a warrant is simply
not consistent with what the Framers intended." From an intelligence perspective, collecting data from
call records is "invaluable" to find a "needle in a haystack" during investigations and missions, acknowledged Rick Howard, chief
security officer for Palo Alto Networks, who also served in the Army for 23 years. "By drawing phone and e-mail nodal analysis
diagrams of suspects (link analysis), intelligence analysts can very quickly find key leaders of terrorist groups," Mr. Howard said. But
Howard also agreed lawmakers
should vote to end the program because it runs up against
the Fourth Amendment, meant to ensure people's rights to be secure against
unreasonable searches and seizures unless there's probable cause for a specific
warrant. "This debate fundamentally comes down to our to country's decision on this one issue: do we care more
about liberty or security? The Snowden revelations clearly demonstrate what the country is willing to do to preserve our
security. I worry about what we give up as a nation when we do that and how far do we go down that rabbit
hole if we commit to it," Howard said. "In the entire world history of governments using spy
agencies to collect information on enemies and frenemies, without fail, when the state turns
its intelligence apparatus on its own citizens, things get ugly quickly ... We tell ourselves, 'It is just
metadata, what's the harm?' But over time, as we keep chipping parts of the Fourth Amendment
away, pretty soon we might find ourselves in an Orwellian novel and wondering how we got
here. What's on the table is a chance to reform Section 215 into something we can all be more comfortable with."
Collection of bulk data destroys democracy
Before I left the State Department, I filed a complaint with the departments inspector general, arguing that the
system of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons under Executive
Order 12333 violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. I have
also brought my complaint to the House and Senate intelligence committees and to the inspector general of the NSA. I am not the
first person with knowledge of classified activities to publicly voice concerns about the collection and retention of communications by
U.S. persons under 12333. The
presidents own Review Group on Intelligence and
Communication Technologies, in Recommendation 12 of its public report, addressed the matter. But the review
group coded its references in a way that masked the true nature of the problem. At first glance, Recommendation 12 appears to
concern Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes collection inside the United States against foreign targets outside
the United States. Although the recommendation does not explicitly mention Executive Order 12333, it does refer to any other
authority. A member of the review group confirmed to me that this reference was written deliberately to include Executive Order
12333. Recommendation 12 urges
that all data of U.S. persons incidentally collected under
such authorities be immediately purged unless it has foreign intelligence value or is necessary to prevent
serious harm. The review group further recommended that a U.S. persons incidentally collected data never be used in criminal
proceedings against that person, and
that the government refrain from searching
communications by U.S. persons unless it obtains a warrant or unless such searching is necessary
to prevent serious harm. The White House understood that Recommendation 12 was intended to apply to 12333. That understanding
was conveyed to me verbally by several White House staffers, and was confirmed in an unclassified White House document that I saw
during my federal employment and that is now in the possession of several congressional committees. In that document, the White
House stated that adoption of Recommendation 12 would require significant changes to current practice under Executive Order
12333 and indicated that it had no plans to make such changes. All of this calls into question some recent administration statements.
Gen. Keith Alexander, a former NSA director, has said publicly that for years the NSA maintained a U.S. person e-mail metadata
program similar to the Section 215 telephone metadata program. And he has maintained that the e-mail program was terminated in
2011 because we thought we could better protect civil liberties and privacy by doing away with it. Note, however, that Alexander
never said that the NSA stopped collecting such data merely that the agency was no longer using the Patriot Act to do so. I suggest
that Americans dig deeper. Consider the possibility that Section 215 collection does not represent the outer limits of collection on
U.S. persons but rather is a mechanism to backfill that portion of U.S. person data that cannot be collected overseas under 12333.
Proposals for replacing Section 215 collection are currently being debated in Congress. We need a similar debate about Executive
The order as used today threatens our democracy . There is no good reason
that U.S. citizens should receive weaker privacy and oversight protections simply because
Order 12333.
their communications are collected outside, not inside, our borders. I have never made any unauthorized disclosures of classified
information, nor would I ever do so. I fully support keeping secret the targets, sources and methods of U.S. intelligence as crucial
elements of national security. I was never a disgruntled federal employee; I loved my job at the State Department. I left voluntarily and
on good terms to take a job outside of government. A draft of this article was reviewed and cleared by the State Department and the
NSA to ensure that it contained no classified material. When I started at the State Department, I took an oath to protect the
Constitution of the United States. I
dont believe that there is any valid interpretation of the
Fourth Amendment that could permit the government to collect and store a large
portion of U.S. citizens online communications, without any court or congressional
oversight, and without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Such a legal regime risks abuse
in the long run, regardless of whether one trusts the individuals in office at a particular moment.
Bulk data collection has a chilling effect on free speech and collapses
PCLOB 14
PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES OVERSIGHT BOARD. JANUARY 23, 2014. Report on the Telephone Records Program
Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Pg
167-8. https://www.pclob.gov/library/215-Report_on_the_Telephone_Records_Program.pdf (The PCLOB is an independent agency
within the executive branch established by the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. The bipartisan,
five-member Board is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. By statute, the Chairman serves full time, but the four
other Board members serve in their positions part-time. The PCLOBs mission is to ensure that the federal governments efforts to
prevent terrorism are balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties.)
If the programs implications for privacy and civil liberties were minor, then the showing made by the government might perhaps
warrant retention of the program on the chance that it may offer critical counterterrorism insights in the future, even if it has not yet
done so. As we have explained above, however, in
our view the daily governmental collection of the
telephone calling records of nearly every American has deep privacy ramifications,
fundamentally alters the relationship between citizens and the state, and threatens
to substantially chill the speech and associational freedoms that are essential to our
democracy . Any governmental program that entails such costs requires a strong
showing of efficacy. We do not believe the NSAs telephone records program
conducted under Section 215 meets that standard. VII. Recommendations for Section 215 Program
Recommendation 1. The government should end its Section 215 bulk telephone records
program. The Section 215 bulk telephone records program is not sustainable from a
legal or policy perspective. As outlined in this Report, the program lacks a viable legal foundation under
Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth
Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter,
and has shown only limited value. For these reasons, the government should end the program.
Bulk data collection gives the government authoritarian controls over its
people and produces a chilling effect on free speech and association
The Board also has analyzed the Section 215 programs implications for privacy and
civil liberties and has concluded that they are serious. Because telephone calling records
can reveal intimate details about a persons life, particularly when aggregated with other information and
subjected to sophisticated computer analysis, the governments collection of a persons entire telephone calling
history has a significant and detrimental effect on individual privacy. The circumstances of a
particular call can be highly suggestive of its content, such that the mere record of a call potentially offers a window into the callers
private affairs. Moreover, when
the government collects all of a persons telephone records,
storing them for five years in a government database that is subject to high-speed
digital searching and analysis, the privacy implications go far beyond what can be
revealed by the metadata of a single telephone call. Beyond such individual privacy intrusions,
permitting the government to routinely collect the calling records of the entire
nation fundamentally shifts the balance of power between the state and its citizens .
With its powers of compulsion and criminal prosecution, the government poses unique threats to privacy when it collects data on its
own citizens. Government collection of personal information on such a massive scale also courts the ever-present danger of mission
creep. An
even more compelling danger is that personal information collected by the
government will be misused to harass, blackmail, or intimidate, or to single out for
scrutiny particular individuals or groups. To be clear, the Board has seen no evidence suggesting that
anything of the sort is occurring at the NSA and the agencys incidents of non-compliance with the rules approved by the FISC have
generally involved unintentional misuse. Yet, while the danger of abuse may seem remote, given
historical abuse of
personal information by the government during the twentieth century, the risk is more than
merely theoretical. Moreover, the bulk collection of telephone records can be expected to have a
chilling effect on the free exercise of speech and association, because individuals and
groups engaged in sensitive or controversial work have less reason to trust in the
confidentiality of their relationships as revealed by their calling patterns. Inability
to expect privacy vis--vis the government in ones telephone communications means that people
engaged in wholly lawful activities but who for various reasons justifiably do not wish the government to
know about their communications must either forgo such activities, reduce their frequency, or
take costly measures to hide them from government surveillance. The telephone
records program thus hinders the ability of advocacy organizations to communicate
confidentially with members, donors, legislators, whistleblowers, members of the public, and others. For similar reasons,
awareness that a record of all telephone calls is stored in a government database may have debilitating consequences for
communication between journalists and sources.
Collection of bulk data violates the first amendment and produces a
substantial chilling effect
Any First Amendment inquiry must next ask whether the chilling effect of the program is
significant or only minimal, since this will determine the applicable legal standard for review. If the chilling effect is found to
be minimal, then the program is not subject to stringent review. If, however, the burden is found to be
significant, then the exacting scrutiny test applies, and the question becomes whether the
government possesses a sufficiently important interest and employs means closely drawn to
avoid unnecessary abridgment of associational freedoms.529 As we explain in the next section of this
Report, the NSAs bulk collection of telephone records can be expected to exert a
substantial chilling effect on the activities of journalists, protestors, whistleblowers,
political activists, and ordinary individuals. This effect stems from the governments
collection of telephony metadata and the knowledge that the government has access
to millions of individuals records regardless of whether the individuals have any suspected connection to
terrorist activity. More particularized methods of government access to data do not create
the same broad impact, because individuals can expect that their records will not be
collected unless they are connected to a specific criminal or terrorism investigation.
We think the likely deterrence of these associational activities by the 215 bulk collection
program rises to the level of a significant interference with the protected rights
of political association, and thus the exacting scrutiny test should apply.
Bulk data monitoring compromises democracy chilling effect
PRGICT 13
Report and Recommendations of The Presidents Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. 12 December
2013. LIBERTY AND SECURITY IN A CHANGING WORLD. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-1212_rg_final_report.pdf (Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum instructing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, to
form a "Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies". " The group included former counter-terrorism czar
Richard A. Clarke, former Acting Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Morell, University of Chicago Law professor Geoffrey
Stone, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein and former Chief
Counselor for Privacy in the Office of Management and Budget Peter Swire.)
Risks to freedom and civil liberties on the Internet and elsewhere. Liberty
includes a range of values, such as
freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association, that go well
beyond privacy. If people are fearful that their conversations are being monitored,
expressions of doubt about or opposition to current policies and leaders may be
chilled, and the democratic process itself may be compromised. Along with many other nations,
the United States has been committed to the preservation and expansion of the Internet
as an open, global space for freedom of expression. The pursuit of Internet freedom
represents the effort to protect human rights online. These rights include the right
to speak out, to dissent, and to offer or receive information across national borders.
Citizens ought to be able to enjoy these rights, free from fear that their words will result in punishment or threat. A particular concern
involves preservation of the rights, and the security, of journalists and the press; their rights and their security are indispensable to
selfgovernment.
2AC Modeling
Reduction of surveillance in the US bolsters democracy globally
The right to privacy is essential to a free and self-governing
society. The rise of modern technologies makes it all the more important that democratic
nations respect peoples fundamental right to privacy, which is a defining part of individual security and
personal liberty. Protecting Democracy, Civil Liberties, and the Rule of Law. Free debate within the United States is
essential to the long-term vitality of American democracy and helps bolster
democracy globally. Excessive surveillance and unjustified secrecy can threaten
civil liberties, public trust, and the core processes of democratic self-government.
All parts of the government, including those that protect our national security, must
be subject to the rule of law.
Protecting the Right to Privacy.
2AC Internet K/T Democracy
The Internet is the new public square, key to democracy
OBoyle 14
Todd OBoyle. May 27, 2014. A Healthy Democracy Demands An Open Internet. http://www.commoncause.org/democracy-wire/ahealthy-democracy-demands-an-open-internet.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/ (Todd O'Boyle is program director for
Common Cause's Media and Democracy Reform Initiative. He has experience in grassroots political organizing and designing
persuasive communications at the local, state, and federal levels. He has a Ph.D. degree in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the
University of Delaware.)
The health
of our media is key to the health of our democracy. Traditionally, a vibrant local press
the Internet is
emerging as our 21st century public square, the place where voters inform
themselves, advocates organize their constituents, and citizens debate the issues.
Against that backdrop, it's absolutely vital that we implement and enforce public
interest communications policies.
was key to an informed electorate. But with newspaper reading and local TV news viewing in decline ,
Economy Adv
Link Free Trade
Bulk data collection will disrupt free trade and collapse the economy
Risks to trade and commerce, including international commerce. Free
trade, including free communications,
is important to commerce and economic growth. Surveillance and the acquisition of
information might have harmful effects on commerce, especially if it discourages
people either citizens of the United States or othersfrom using certain communications
providers. If the government is working closely or secretly with specific providers,
and if such providers cannot assure their users that their communications are safe and
secure, people might well look elsewhere. In principle, the economic damage could be
severe.
Link Tech Trade
Reforming bulk data collection key to the economy customers are leaving
US tech companies now, that collapses competitiveness and costs billions
Hirji 6/13
Ashie Hirji. Jun 13, 2015. Tech sector likely to lose $35B in sales due to NSA surveillance.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-sector-likely-lose-35b-sales-due-nsa-ashie-hirji (Director @
Asita Informatica Inc)
Now according to a report I was reading, US
technology companies are getting hit harder than
anticipated by revelations about mass surveillance programs led by the National Security
Agency. US governments failure to reform the NSA spying programs and its opposition to encryption could
cost tech companies over $35 billion. They are losing money as non-Americans are shunning
US businesses and erecting trade barriers. The study done by the Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, said the impact would be
greater than its estimate nearly two years ago of losses for the cloud computing sector. The study published argues that
unless the American government can vigorously reform how NSA surveillance is
regulated and overseen, U.S. companies will lose contracts and, ultimately, their competitive
edge in a global market as consumers around the world choose cloud computing and
technology options that do not have potential ties to American surveillance
programs. In 2013, the think tank estimated that US cloud computing firms could lose between $22 billion and $35 billion in
overseas business over three years. It now appears impossible to quantify the economic damage because the entire sector
has been tarnished by the scandal from revelations in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden. "These revelations have fundamentally shaken international trust in US tech
companies and hurt US business prospects all over the world," the report said. The
study report was co-author by Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn said the impact is now open-ended, with the NSA scandal having
tarnished a wide range of US tech firms. The authors warned When
historians write about this period in
US history it could very well be that one of the themes will be how the United States
lost its global technology leadership to other nations. To protect not only American soft power, but our
wallets as well, ITIF is urging the NSA to make a change. Since 2013, he said, "we haven't turned this around: it's not just cloud
companies. It's all tech firms implicated by this," he stated to AFP. "It doesn't show any signs of stopping." According to the report,
economic impact of U.S. surveillance practices will likely far exceed ITIFs
initial $35 billion estimate. Foreign companies have seized on these controversial
policies to convince their customers that keeping data at home is safer than sending it abroad,
and foreign governments have pointed to U.S. surveillance as justification for
protectionist policies that require data to be kept within their borders. One survey
cited by the researchers found 25 percent of businesses in Britain and Canada planned to pull
company data out of the United States as a result of the NSA revelations. Some companies
in Europe do not want their data hosted in North America due to these concerns, the researchers said. Meanwhile foreign companies
have used the revelations as a marketing opportunity. "There
is also an increasingly distressing trend of
countries, such as Australia, China, Russia, and India, passing laws that prevent
their citizens' personal information from leaving the country's borders -- effectively
mandating that cloud computing firms build data centers in those countries or risk
losing access to their markets." The report said several US tech firms including Apple and
Salesforce have already started to build data centers abroad "to appease foreign
watchdogs and privacy advocates." While this "data nationalism" may create some jobs in the short term, Castro
said that countries enacting these policies "are hurting themselves in the long term by cutting themselves off from the best
technology." Castro said the passage of a reform measure last week called the USA Freedom Act is not sufficient to repair the
reputation of US tech firms. The report recommends further reforms including boosting transparency of surveillance practices,
opposing government efforts to weaken encryption and strengthening its mutual legal assistance treaties with other nations. "Over the
last few years, the
US government's failure to meaningfully reform its surveillance
practices has taken a serious economic toll on the US tech sector and the total cost
continues to grow each day," Castro said. Castro said the USA Freedom Act, which curbs
bulk data collection among its reforms, is "good legislation and a step in the right
direction. We have ignored the economic impact of US surveillance." Glenn Greenwald states on his twitter feed: "Claim that
many NSA activities are unchanged ignore 1) hugely increased encryption use; 2) tech company changes; 3) other countries' actions"
decisions by the US intelligence community have reverberated throughout
the global economy, the authors argue, putting intelligence gathering first and foremost while doing little to address the
backlash against US tech companies.Foreign governments have responded by adopting protectionist policies locking out US vendors,
and citing fears of digital surveillance to demand source codes from service providers. As a result, many US companies have
embraced strong encryption for their mobile devices and cloud services, and have begun to oppose government initiatives to subvert or
ban encryption.
Racism Adv
Well isolate two internals to racism
Domestic surveillance is a form of islamic racism.
Lennard, 14
Natasha Lennard 7/9/14 (author for Vice News also a freelancer for The New York Timess City Blog)
https://news.vice.com/article/the-nsas-racist-targeting-of-individuals-is-as-troubling-as-indiscriminate-surveillance Be a
homie and follow her on twitter - @natashalennard // kbuck
Revelations of the National Security Agencys massive
surveillance programs have highlighted
how millions of ordinary internet and phone users that is, non-criminal targets
have had their communications data swept up by a vast, indiscriminate
dragnet. This has occasioned justifiable outrage, but the reaction has
overshadowed discussion of how the NSA targets actual individuals a process
that, it turns out, can be quite discriminatory. As I noted last week, if our national security states
dangerously loose determination of what constitutes an imminent threat is any indication, we should be as troubled by
the NSAs targeting of particular people as we are by its non-targeted spying. The latest disclosure from The Intercept
clearly illustrates why. With the NSA reform bill, privacy is not on the menu. Read more here. According to documents
leaked by Edward Snowden,
the NSA has been spying on five distinguished MuslimAmericans under a law the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that
is meant to target international terrorists or foreign agents. The inclusion of the
email accounts of these five people in a spreadsheet listing the targeted accounts
of more than 7,000 others belies the NSAs claim that its in the business of
marking only terrorist suspects. Here are the agencys suspected terrorists: Faisal Gill, who was
appointed to (and thoroughly vetted by) the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush; Asim
Ghafoor, an attorney who has defended clients suspected of terrorism; Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American
professor of public policy and international development at Rutgers University; Agha Saeed, founder and chairman of the
American Muslim Alliance and a former political science professor at California State University; and Nihad Awad, the
executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This
is anti-Muslim
discrimination pure and simple. While the NSAs broad data collection is
disturbingly total and unspecific, its targeted spying is evidently racist. Another
leaked document punctuates this point with a dull, disgusting thud: a 2005
training document explaining how to properly format internal memos to justify
FISA surveillance offers a sample memo that uses Mohammed Raghead as the
name of a fictitious terrorism suspect. Your NSA at work, ladies and gentlemen! Report finds NSA
programs legal, but legal doesn't equal right. Read more here. As the existence of this document
makes clear, legality is a tortured issue at the heart national security misdeeds.
NSA agents are trained to ensure that their surveillance practices fall within the letter of the law and the law here is at
fault, shaped not by a spirit of justice but by surveillance-state paranoia. The
Intercept report does not
skirt around this point: Indeed, the governments ability to monitor such highprofile Muslim-Americans with or without warrants suggests that the most
alarming and invasive aspects of the NSAs surveillance occur not because the
agency breaks the law, but because it is able to exploit the laws permissive
contours. The scandal is what Congress has made legal, says Jameel Jaffer, an
ACLU deputy legal director. The claim that the intelligence agencies are
complying with the laws is just a distraction from more urgent questions relating to
the breadth of the laws themselves. This latest Snowden leak adds a new dimension to the troubling
stream of NSA revelations, illuminating an even more insidious aspect of the governments surveillance practices. We
know that through dragnet data hoarding programs like PRISM we are all always-already potential suspects. We are all
watched. But who falls under the NSA microscope? Who gets to be the needles in the haystack, the targeting of which
provides the official justification of total surveillance? Who gets to be Mohammed Raghead? Well, thats top-secret
government business.
Dont worry, though its legal.
NSA surveillance is racist towards African Americans warrants arent
required for unreasonable search and seizure.
Cyril, 3/30
Malika Amala Cyril 3/30/15 (founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and co-founder of the Media
Action Grassroots Network, a national network of 175 organizations working to ensure media access, rights, and representation for
marginalized communities.) Black Americas State of Surveillance
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance // KBuck
Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle
cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial
proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my
mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didnt get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. My
mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and
actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files
obtained during a
break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger
Hoovers largest target group, didnt have to be perceived as dissident to warrant
surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is
driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law
enforcement agencies across the United States . Today, media reporting on
government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden
that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mothers visit
from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized
white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color
have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial
hierarchy. Its time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they
are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused
to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an
impoverished underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the
speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies
are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to
this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal.
Targeted surveillance is an obvious answerit may be discriminatory, but it helps
protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent.
The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate
collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any
crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate
surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us.
Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin order to navigate a world in which
spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built
environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton
made it clear: 2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of
technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology that wouldve been unheard of
even a few years ago. Predictive policing, also known as Total Information Awareness, is described as using advanced
technological tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in
data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it
presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In
a racially discriminatory criminal justice
system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice.
Scenario One is Extinction
Racism causes extinction
Feagin, 6
(Fmr President-American Sociological Association, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression, P. 9)
-racism refuses to take into account logical solutions to crisis if their
authors arent white.
Indeed, this
planet will not survive much longer if we continue to rely so heavily on the
white men now at the helm for key ideas, policies, and actions in regard to the worlds
ecology, economy, and politics. Systemic racism has killed not only people, but many
important human values, scores of excellent ideas, and countless innovations and
inventions. One need not be melodramatic to suggest that the survival of the planet
likely depends on the speedy elimination of racial oppression and other major social oppressions.
Scenario Two is Dehumanization
Racism is dehumanizing
Keenahan, 90
Debra Keenahan, PhD University of Wollongong, Dehumanization: understanding the paradox of human interaction
http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2656&context=theses //ZA
Racism functions on a plane different to that of prejudice. Where prejudice is the expression of
individuals needs, wants and desires to establish and reinforce their identities as human beings, it can be said that racism is the
collective expression of those same needs, wants and desires. Intrinsic to the meaning of being human is identification with and
attachment to a group racism reflects this aspect of being human. If it can be said that the expression of
prejudice is something of a defense of the identity of individuals when they experience their identity as being threatened in some way,
then it may justifiable be said that the expression of racist ideologies is the defense of the identity of the collective. What is more,
the institutionalization of racism functions not only to reinforce that defense but also
to justify the original ideologies by establishing a social system which can be
described as a self-fulfillment of the ideologies. For example, to deride the hygienic practices of a group
whilst denying their access to soap and water is ensuring the Others unhygienic state. For individuals to be human beings they need to
experience themselves as capable agents unique from others. Yet
at the same time for individuals to be
human beings they need to also identify themselves as individuals but as individuals
within a group. To be afforded the opportunity to strengthen the cohesion of the group is to reinforce ones identity two-fold
along with any associated benefits a most attractive option. Given the frequency with which human relations are presented with the
conditions conducive to the development and expression of prejudice and the inherent benefit of a strengthened identity, it is scarcely
surprising that people would seek to continue and reinforce that state given their being in the advantageous position. Hence
attraction of institutionalized racism, and the dynamic relatedness between racism
and dehumanization. Institutionalized racism is a manifestation of dehumanization
in its heirarchization of individuals and groups. In establishing a hierarchy of social relations, those upper
in the hierarchy may subjugate, dominate and control those in lower positions. Moreover, in maintaining such a hierarchy, the
subsequent social relations become so fixed in their modes of functioning that the subjugation, domination and control of Others takes
on a seemingly invisible quality. That
is, to subjugate, dominate and control people virtually
becomes an accepted and unquestioned form of social relationship. Yet like
prejudice, racism has its limitations as an explanation of peoples inhumane actions
toward others. The most obvious of these limitations is that racism can only refer to the relations between different
racial/ethnic groups. Racism cannot explain the seemingly gratuitous and systematic inhumane actions inflicted upon those who are
members of the victimizers own group and who through their shared group membership, are most like the victimizers themselves
that is the victim and the victimizer would share the same values, meanings and rules of their social interactions and such, prejudice
is also an inadequate explanation. There does remain an alternative explanation and this is stigmatization.
Dehumanization is historically the cause of war and genocides it makes us
morally culpable to any atrocity WWII checks
Livingstone-Smith 11
(3/29/11, David, Livingstone Smith is a co-founder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at
the University of New England. Less Than Human: The Psychology of Cruelty DOA 6/21/15, Google)
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human //kbuck
*Killer quote for rebuttals Its wrong to kill someone but its okay to kill a rat to Nazis all Jews were rats.
*Boxes denote examples of torture committed by the scientists/doctors from the Nuremberg Trail.
*We dont endorse the glang or the ableist references
During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide
called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman
animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe
dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide. "We all know,
despite what we see in the movies," Smith tells NPR's Neal Conan, "that it's very difficult,
psychologically, to kill another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on
them." So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human
beings "to overcome the very deep and natural inhibitions they have against treating other people
like game animals or vermin or dangerous predators." Rolling Stone recently published photos
online of American troops posing with dead Afghans, connected to ongoing court-martial cases of
soldiers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. In addition to posing with the corpses,
"these soldiers called the 'kill team' also took body parts as trophies," Smith alleges,
"which is very often a phenomenon that accompanies the form of dehumanization in which
the enemy is seen as game." But this is just the latest iteration in a pattern that has unfolded time and again over the course
of history. In ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature, Smith found repeated references to enemies as subhuman
creatures. But it's not as simple as a comparison. "When
people dehumanize others, they actually conceive of
them as subhuman creatures," says Smith. Only then can the process "liberate aggression and exclude
the target of aggression from the moral community." When the Nazis described Jews as
Untermenschen, or subhumans, they didn't mean it metaphorically, says Smith. "They didn't mean
they were like subhumans. They meant they were literally subhuman." Human beings have long conceived
of the universe as a hierarchy of value, says Smith, with God at the top and inert matter at the bottom, and everything else in between.
That model of the universe "doesn't make scientific sense," says Smith, but "nonetheless, for some reason, we continue to conceive of
the universe in that fashion, and we relegate nonhuman creatures to a lower position" on the scale. Then, within the human category,
there has historically been a hierarchy. In the 18th century, white Europeans the architects of the theory "modestly placed
themselves at the very pinnacle." The lower edges of the category merged with the apes, according to their thinking. So "sub-Saharan
Africans and Native Americans were denizens of the bottom of the human category," when they were even granted human status.
Mostly, they were seen as "soulless animals." And that dramatic dehumanization
made it possible for great
atrocities to take place. Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for
its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I'll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the
single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War. More than seventy million people died in the war, most of
them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in
the end, nuclear weapons.
Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage
possible. Let's begin at the end. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the first of twelve military
tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Twenty doctors and three administrators
twenty-two men and a single woman stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had participated in
Hitler's euthanasia program, in which around 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped
people deemed unfit to live were gassed to death, and they performed fiendish medical experiments on thousands of
Jewish, Russian, Roma and Polish prisoners. Principal prosecutor Telford Taylor began his opening statement with these somber
words: The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science.
The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful
only are still alive; a few of the
survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered
outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected ... To their murderers,
these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated
worse than animals. He went on to describe the experiments in detail. Some of these human
guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high altitude parachute jumps. Others were
frozen, infested with malaria, or exposed to mustard gas. Doctors made incisions in their flesh to
simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken glass or wood shavings into them, and then, tying off
the blood vessels, introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women
were made to drink seawater, were infected with typhus and other deadly diseases, were poisoned
and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their agonized
screams and violent convulsions. The descriptions in Taylor's narrative are so horrifying that it's easy to overlook what
might seem like an insignificant rhetorical flourish: his comment that "these wretched people were ... treated worse
than animals". But this comment raises a question of deep and fundamental importance. What is it that enables one
group of human beings to treat another group as though they were subhuman creatures ? A rough
answer isn't hard to come by. Thinking sets the agenda for action, and thinking of humans as less
than human paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims .
They were Untermenschen subhumans and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind
humankind together. It's
wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat . To the Nazis,
all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats. Jews were the main
victims of this genocidal project. From the beginning, Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a deadly
threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization were represented as
parasitic organisms as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion. "Today," Hitler proclaimed in 1943, "international Jewry is
the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as long as peoples do not find the
strength to get rid of the virus." Both the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the
Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army)
were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence. Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious,
bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war
against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a "severe but
just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements" (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of "international Jewry", and
were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Military
historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, "soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as 'animals' ... that had to perish.
Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis' new
vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter." The Holocaust
is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization . Its hideousness
strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it can be strangely comforting. It's all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich
was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political
power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it's tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and
bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What's
most disturbing about the Nazi
phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It's that they were ordinary
human beings. When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the
Holocaust, but it wasn't only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects
of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the RussianJewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin's
Red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the smell of
Germany's animal breath," and described Germans as "two-legged animals who have mastered
the technique of war" "ersatz men" who ought to be annihilated. "The Germans are not human beings," Ehrenburg
wrote, "... If you kill one German, kill another there is nothing more amusing for us than a
heap of German corpses." This wasn't idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly
half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into
Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder . "They
were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists..." writes journalist Giles McDonough: East Prussia was the first
German region visited by the Red Army ... In the course of a single night the red army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most
of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made it to
the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One
man was shot and fed to the pigs. Excerpted from Less Than Human by David Livingstone Smith. Copyright 2011 by the author and
reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.
2AC State Good
Institutional approaches are the only way to avoid the collapse of all
movements and effectively challenge the flawed state policies.
Grossberg, 92
(Lawrence, Morris Davis Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, We Gotta Get Out
of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, page 388-389)
The demand for moral and ideological purity often results in the rejection of any hierarchy or
organization. The question-can the master's tools be used to tear down the master's house?ignores both the contingency of the relation between such tools and the master's power and, even
more importantly, the fact that there may be no other tools available. Institutionalization is seen as
a repressive impurity within the body politic rather than as a strategic and tactical, even
empowering, necessity . It sometimes seems as if every progressive organization is condemned to
recapitulate the same arguments and crisis, often leading to their collapse. 54 For example, Minkowitz has
described a crisis in Act Up over the need for efficiency and organization, professionalization and even hierarchy,55 as if these
inherently contradicted its commitment to democracy. This is particularly unfortunate since Act Up, whatever its limitations, has
proven itself an effective and imaginative political strategist. The problems are obviously magnified with success, as membership,
This refusal of efficient operation and the moment of organization is
intimately connected with the Left's appropriation and privileging of the local (as the site of democracy
finances and activities grow.
and resistance). This is yet another reason why structures of alliance are inadequate, since they often assume that an effective
movement can be organized and sustained without such structuring. The
Left needs to recognize the necessity of
institutionalization and of systems of hierarchy, without falling back into its own
authoritarianism. It needs to find reasonably democratic structures of institutionalization, even if
they are impure and compromised.
The state is a mode of thoughtwe use the plan text as a way to read the state
against itself, to challenge bureaucratic philosophies from within
Massumi, 87
(Brian, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Translators Foreword, Pleasures of
Philosophy, pages IX to X)//Csmith
The annals of official philosophy are populated by "bureaucrats of pure reason"
who speak in "the shadow of the despot" and are in historical complicity with the
State.3 They invent "a properly spiritual... absolute State that ... effectively functions in the
mind." Theirs is the discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by "good" sense, of
rocklike identity, "universal" truth, and (white male) justice. "Thus the exercise of their
thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant
significations, and with the requirements of the established order."4 Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles
of his earliest books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants. "What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history
of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an
author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous."5 Hegel is absent, being too
despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.6 To Kant he dedicated an affectionate study of "an enemy." Yet much of positive value
came of Deleuze's flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of thinkers who were tied by no direct descendance but were
united in their opposition
to the State philosophy that would nevertheless accord them
minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a "secret
link constituted by the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the
exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power."7 Deleuze's first major statements written in his own
voice, Difference et repetition (1968) and Logique du sens (1969), cross-fertilized that line of "nomad" thought with
contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker revolt of May 1968 and the reassessment it prompted of the role
of the intellectual in society8 led him to disclaim the "ponderous academic apparatus"9 still in evidence in those works. However,
many elements of the "philosophy of difference" they elaborated were
collaboration, of which A Thousand Plateaus is the most recent product.
transfused into a continuing
2AC Framing
Ethics come first ethical evaluation is key to positively influence culture
Brimmer, 07
Steve Brimmer is employed as director of corporate communications for NikSoft Systems Corp. in Reston, Va. He is also a retired
senior pastor who is engaged in leadership coaching while pursuing a doctorate in strategic leadership at Regent University. The Role
of Ethics in 21st Century Organizations
http://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/lao/issue_11/brimmer.htm //ZA
More than simply a legal or moral responsibility, ethics need to become an organizational priority.
Organizational leaders have a lot on their minds in todays highly competitive world. They must keep abreast of rapid technological
advancements, competitors products and services, the effects of globalization, and opportunities and threats within their own industry,
to name the most obvious. Leaders must also keep a constant eye on the mission, vision, values, culture, strategy and goals of their
own organizations. In the midst of all of this complexity, its not easy to find room on the organizational plate for another major
priority. However, to
succeed in the 21st century, organizations will have to figure out how
to make ethics a priority. Priorities are those few things that are deemed most
important. Many things are important, some more and some less important, but only a few things are most important.
Ethical values need to achieve recognition as among the elite, most important
success factors in modern organizations. As an organizational priority, ethics will not only affect
decision-making but also, and ultimately, institutional culture. To achieve this ideal, there must be
an alignment process that integrates business ethics with mission, vision, values, strategies and goals. Ethical values are essentially
social in nature, therefore, this alignment process will be concerned with relationships and defining relational expectations.
goal of an ethical organizational culture is the greater good of all. Internal relationships between
leaders and followers, as well as external relationships with clients, customers, vendors and the community are all prized. As a
result, people are treated well consistently and an ethical culture emerges. Todays
organizations need to advance beyond a view of ethics as necessary for safeguarding their reputation and thereby avoiding bad media
coverage; or as mere compliance with forced regulations. A great
opportunity awaits organizations alert
to the potential of ethical values in shaping the future. One illustration of this kind of possibility
thinking is found in a challenge put to the International Olympic Committee. The challenge originates from a
growing disillusionment with the Olympic Games, which has become characterized
by the worst features of the competitive culture: winning at any cost, corruption and
the unfair advantage of advanced nations (Milton-Smith, 2002). Almost simultaneously on another front,
disenchantment with the social and ethical consequences of globalization is
occurring. Milton-Smith identifies the Olympic Games as being in a unique position to influence society, It is difficult to
conceive of another institution with the same capacity as the Olympic Games to positively shape popular culture on a global scale
(Milton-Smith, 2002, p. 131). Societys
desperate need for an ethical culture is every
organizations opportunity to influence social culture, through the
institutionalization of ethical values. When this occurs, communities benefit from
the positive influences employees take from their workplace back to families, friends
and associates.
One in three billion chance of nuclear terrorism--- Means no magnitude
Mueller 10
John, professor of political science at Ohio State University, Calming Our Nuclear Jitters, Issues in Science & Technology,
Winter2010, Vol. 26, Issue 2
In contrast to these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and
even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible
routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered that the tremendous effort required
is scarcely likely to be successful. The most plausible route for terrorists, according to most
experts, would be to manufacture an atomic device themselves from purloined fissile material
(plutonium or, more likely, highly enriched uranium). This task, however, remains a daunting one,
requiring that a considerable series of difficult hurdles be conquered and in sequence. Outright
armed theft of fissile material is exceedingly unlikely not only because of the resistance of
guards, but because chase would be immediate. A more promising approach would be to corrupt insiders to smuggle
out the required substances. However, this requires the terrorists to pay off a host of greedy confederates, including brokers and
money-transmitters, any one of whom could turn on them or, either out of guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff that is
useless. Insiders might also consider the possibility that once the heist was accomplished, the terrorists would, as analyst Brian Jenkins
If terrorists
were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material, they would then
probably have to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar terrain and probably while being
pursued by security forces. Crossing international borders would be facilitated by following
established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they appear and are often under the
watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators. If border personnel became suspicious of the commodity
none too delicately puts it, "have every incentive to cover their trail, beginning with eliminating their confederates."
being smuggled, some of them might find it in their interest to disrupt passage, perhaps to collect the bounteous reward money that
would probably be offered by alarmed governments once the uranium theft had been discovered. Once
outside the country
with their precious booty, terrorists would need to set up a large and well-equipped machine shop
to manufacture a bomb and then to populate it with a very select team of highly skilled scientists,
technicians, machinists, and administrators. The group would have to be assembled and retained for the monumental task while no
consequential suspicions were generated among friends, family, and police about their curious and sudden absence from normal pursuits back home. Members of the bombbuilding team would also have to be utterly devoted to the cause, of course, and they would have to be willing to put their lives and certainly their careers at high risk, because after
their bomb was discovered or exploded they would probably become the targets of an intense worldwide dragnet operation. Some observers have insisted that it would be easy for
terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile material. But Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at
Switzerland's Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude that the task "could hardly be accomplished by a subnational group." They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just
sketches and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint the terrorist group would most certainly be forced to redesign. They also stress that the work is difficult, dangerous,
and extremely exacting, and that the technical requirements in several fields verge on the unfeasible. Stephen Younger, former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos
Laboratories, has made a similar argument, pointing out that uranium is "exceptionally difficult to machine" whereas "plutonium is one of the most complex metals ever
discovered, a material whose basic properties are sensitive to exactly how it is processed." Stressing the "daunting problems associated with material purity, machining, and a host
of other issues," Younger concludes, "to think that a terrorist group, working in isolation with an unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools and supplies" could
Under the best circumstances, the process of making a bomb could take
months or even a year or more, which would, of course, have to be carried out in utter secrecy. In addition, people in the
fabricate a bomb "is farfetched at best."
area, including criminals, may observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of technicians
unlikely to be locals. If the effort to build a bomb was successful, the finished product, weighing a ton or more, would then have to
be transported to and smuggled into the relevant target country where it would have to be received by collaborators who are at once
totally dedicated and technically proficient at handling, maintaining, detonating, and perhaps assembling the weapon after it arrives.
The financial costs of this extensive and extended operation could easily become monumental.
There would be expensive equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up and people to pay or pay off. Some operatives might work for free
out of utter dedication to the cause, but the vast conspiracy also requires the subversion of a considerable array of criminals and
opportunists, each of whom has every incentive to push the price for cooperation as high as possible. Any criminals competent and
capable enough to be effective allies are also likely to be both smart enough to see boundless opportunities for extortion and
psychologically equipped by their profession to be willing to exploit them. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb
contend that a terrorist group could, if with great difficulty, overcome each obstacle and that doing so in each case is "not impossible."
But although
it may not be impossible to surmount each individual step, the likelihood that a group
could surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small. Table 1 attempts to catalogue the
barriers that must be overcome under the scenario considered most likely to be successful. In contemplating the task before them,
would-be atomic terrorists would effectively be required to go though an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do, they
will undoubtedly conclude that their prospects are daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. It is possible
to calculate the chances for success.
Adopting probability estimates that purposely and heavily bias the
case in the terrorists' favor for example, assuming the terrorists have a 50% chance of overcoming
each of the 20 obstacles the chances that a concerted effort would be successful comes out to
be less than one in a million . If one assumes, somewhat more realistically, that their chances at
each barrier are one in three, the cumulative odds that they will be able to pull off the deed drop
to one in well over three billion. Other routes would-be terrorists might take to acquire a bomb
are even more problematic. They are unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a generous likeminded nuclear state for delivery abroad because the risk would be high, even for a country led
by extremists, that the bomb (and its source) would be discovered even before delivery or that it would be
exploded in a manner and on a target the donor would not approve, including on the donor itself. Another
that the terrorist group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence.
concern would be
Soft Power Adv
NSA Destroys SP
Restricting NSA surveillance is key to soft power current surveillance is
destroying US credibility
But this zero-sum
framework ignores the significant damage that the NSAs practices have
done to U.S. national security. In a global digital world, national security depends
on many factors beyond surveillance capacities, and over-reliance on global data collection can
create unintended security vulnerabilities. Theres a better framework than security-versus-privacy for
evaluating the national security implications of mass-surveillance practices. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called
it smart power. Her idea acknowledges that as global political power has become more
diffuse, U.S. interests and security increasingly depend on our ability to persuade
partners to join us on important global security actions. But how do we motivate
disparate groups of people and nations to join us? We exercise smart power by inspiring trust
and building credibility in the global community. Developing these abilities is as important to
U.S. national security as superior military power or intelligence capabilities. I adopted the smart-power approach when
serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Our task at the council was to work with allies, emerging
democracies and human rights-friendly governments to build coalitions to protect international human rights. We also built alliances
with civil society actors, who serve as powerful countervailing forces in authoritarian systems. These partnerships can reinforce stable
relationships, which enhances U.S. security. The NSAs
arbitrary global surveillance methods fly in
the face of smart power. In the pursuit of information, the spy agency has invaded the privacy
of foreign citizens and political leaders, undermining their sense of freedom and security. NSA methods
also undercut U.S. credibility as a champion of universal human rights. The U.S.
model of mass surveillance will be followed by others and could unintentionally invert the
democratic relationship between citizens and their governments. Under the cover of preventing terrorism, authoritarian governments
may now increase surveillance of political opponents. Governments that collect and monitor digital information to intimidate or
defenders and democracy activists worldwide, the potential consequences of the
widespread use by governments of mass surveillance techniques are dark and clear.
Superior information is powerful, but sometimes it comes at greater cost than previously recognized. When trust and
credibility are eroded, the opportunity for collaboration and partnership with other
nations on difficult global issues collapses. The ramifications of this loss of trust have not been adequately
squelch political opposition and dissent can more justifiably claim they are acting with legitimacy.
factored into our national security calculus. What is most disconcerting is that the NSAs mass surveillance techniques have
compromised the security of telecommunication networks, social media platforms, private-sector data storage and public infrastructure
security systems. Authoritarian governments and hackers now have a roadmap to surreptitiously tap into private networks for their
own nefarious purposes. By weakening encryption programs and planting backdoor entries to encryption software, the NSA has
demonstrated how it is possible to infiltrate and violate information-security systems. In effect, the spy agency has modeled anarchic
behavior that makes everyone less safe. Some have argued, though, that there is a big difference between the U.S. government
engaging in mass-surveillance activities and authoritarian governments doing so. That big difference is supposed to be democratic
checks and balances, transparency and adherence to the rule of law. Current NSA programs, however, do not operate within these
With global standards for digital surveillance now being set, our political
leaders must remember that U.S. security depends upon much more than unimpeded
surveillance capabilities. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of President Barack Obamas most trusted
international partners, has wisely reminded us, just because we can do something does not mean that we should do it. National
security policies that fail to calculate the real costs of arbitrary mass surveillance
threaten to make us less secure. Without trusted and trusting partners, U.S. priority
initiatives in complex global negotiations will be non-starters.
constraints.
2AC AT CCP DA
2AC Impact Defense
CCP Collapse is inevitable
Mattis 15 (3/02/15, Peter, He is a Fellow with the Jamestown Foundation and a visiting
scholar at National Cheng-chi Universitys Institute of International Relations in Taipei.
Doomsday: Preparing for China's Collapse http://nationalinterest.org/feature/doomsdaypreparing-chinas-collapse-12343?page=3 , DOA 6/24/15, Google) //Kbuck
a senior China scholar declared the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) had reached the final stage before collapse
A couple of weeks ago, AEI scholar Michael Auslin published a column for theWall Street Journal about a quiet dinner in Washington where
. The political collapse of the worlds second-largest economy and a nuclear power
is no small thing. What should Washington do? Go outside the Fourth Ring Road (a Chinese reference akin to saying go outside the Beltway), forge links to marginalized Chinese and speak out about Chinese human rights to show the Chinese people that the United
States has a moral stake in Chinas development. Even if the CCPs collapse does not occur for years, these measures will help U.S. policy makers be on the right side of history. Such measures appear trivial in the face of a problem the size of Chinas potential
political instability and the collapse of its governing structure. By Auslins telling, this anonymous China scholar and those nodding in approval think that these first steps constitute a genuine signal to the Chinese people that Washington stands and will stand by them.
Rhetorical support, however, will not grace the United States in the eyes of the Chinese people if
their discontent demolishes the CCP
Being prepared for a political crisis with the potential to bring down the CCP requires a much
more serious effort that involves both research and planning.
despite Chinas rise to international
prominence, the country still has political fault lines capable of causing an earthquake .
. Actions, rather than words, in the heat of another crisis at least on the scale of nationwide protests in 1989 will be the measure of Washingtons moral interest in Chinas
Before that day of crisis comes, the mindset for dealing with China must include the ability to
imagine a China without the CCP and how that outcome might develop. The tens of thousands of demonstrations serve as a reminder that,
With this kind
of warning, the moral failing would be to ignore the potential for regime-changing unrest or any other political crisis that might threaten the regime, and what Beijing might do to prevent that from happening. (Recommended: China: The Real Reason for the Great OilPrice Crash?) The purpose of these tasks is to reduce the uncertainty faced by policy makers as a Chinese crisis emerges and cascades across the country, as well as to identify ways and decision points where Washington can influence the CCPs choices. If an effort is
not made to reduce the uncertainty, then fear of the unknown is likely to drive U.S. policy makers to a decision about whether to support the Chinese government out of ignorance, rather than informed calculation. One of the first research-related steps is to identify the
cohesive and centrifugal forces inside China. The CCP used its sixty-six years in power to dismember Chinese civil society and insert itself into any group with the potential to become a political force. Groups that could not be coopted, like Falungong, became pariah
and hunted by the regime. Nascent civil-society and activist groups survive in the blind spots of Chinas underlapping bureaucratic maze. Chinese political culture beyond the party needs to be understood if Washington wants to claim a moral stake. (Recommended:
Japan's Master Plan to Defeat China in a War) Ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the National Intelligence Council produced an assessment of Iraqs political prospects after Saddam Hussein fell. The paper updated a periodically updated analysis begun in the
early 1980s, and it accurately analyzed the sectarian rivalries and domestic cleavages that blew up under the post-Saddam U.S. administration. It is not clear, however, whether such a paper could even be done on China today, let alone in any accurate manner. Such a
paper cannot be about Uyghurs and Tibetans, but the 1.24 billion Han Chinese who inevitably will dominate Chinas autocratic or democratic future. The second is to develop, maintain and update a database of leadership dossiers (as well as their families) that includes
points of leverage, such as overseas assets that could be frozen, as well as electronic and telephonic contact information. The U.S. government is certainly as capable as Bloomberg and the New York Times of ferreting out this kind of information. If the CCP is
imploding, the tense situation will ensure that many cadres start thinking in terms of their personal and family welfare, rather than the party. When survival is at stake, the CCPs institutional cohesion is likely to falter as each looks after his own and looks to ensure there
is an escape hatch. In this kind of situation, the ability to influence Beijings decisions will be highly personalized, and the ability to both contact and shape the incentives of individual decision makers in Zhongnanhai as well as provincial leaders and security officials
could prove critical if Washington wants to shape outcomes. Like corporate and nongovernmental organization databases, this project should be accompanied by records of meetings with U.S. officials and other prominent Americans. This way, Washington has
awareness of who might have an existing relationship and can be called upon to reach out to a Chinese official if the situation demands (and it might even help in routine negotiations to which Chinese interlocutors always seem to come better prepared with knowledge
of their U.S. counterparts). It also requires the White House to be honest, at least with the U.S. bureaucracy, about its dealing with Beijingsomething that has not always been the case in U.S.-Chinese relations. Third, determining the capability of Chinas internal
Most studies of Chinas future often
assume the countrys security services will function, without understanding their ability to
protect the regime depends on a fluctuating dynamic that also involves citizen-activists and
security forces, including domestic intelligence and paramilitary capabilities, is vital to understanding whether unrest is approaching a critical mass.
. If political change comes to China through mass public demonstrations, then it is because the assumptions held about a loyal and capable security apparatus did not hold. Relatedly, any decision for military intervention will involve at the
very least the PLA headquarters, if not the Central Military Commission (CMC)the senior-most political-military policy-making body chaired by Xi Jinping. If the order from the center comes, the military leadership must make a decision whether to support the
current government, take power for themselves or stand aside. Although most PLA officers are party members, the relationship between the two organizations has changed substantially since the days of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping when the Chinese leadership was
dominated by dual political-military elites. The PLA may be developing a professional identity separate from its party identity. Exacerbated by the militarys relative isolation from society on closed compounds and the absence of shared experiences, Chinas robust
military modernization has required PLA officers to become better educated and more professional. If the PLAs professionalization gives strength to the idea that the PLA should be a national army, then U.S. policy makers need to knowand they need to know who is
harboring such sentiments. Fourth, U.S. policy makers and analysts need to map out the decisions Beijing will face as individual incidents of unrest begin to cascade into a larger crisis. First, Chinese leaders will have to make an assessment of whether the
demonstrations can be stymied by buying off or capturing protest ringleaders. Or whether the unrest can be isolated and localized before it spreads across too many counties. The next big set of decisions faced in Beijing would involve whether to allow local and
provincial authorities to resolve the crisis without involving the central leadership. Based on the complicated arrangements that make horizontal cooperation across jurisdictions almost impossible, widespread protests that cross provincial boundaries will require central
intervention to coordinate action. Knowing how this works and who will decide at different levels could be crucial to influencing events. Parts of this process and the decision points can be imagined until new information can be acquired, but the important thing is to
spell it out while never thinking that the answer is final. Concrete plans may be useless, to paraphrase President Dwight Eisenhower, but planning will be indispensable. Fifth, the U.S. government needs to find a way to maintain communication with the Chinese people,
even if Beijing starts cutting international linkages. The Great Firewall may not be impervious and it will be difficult to shut down the Chinese internet, but China, as proved by its recent interference in virtual private networks (VPNs), can make it extremely difficult to
move communications and information via the Internet. Moving the American propaganda effort solely online without a failsafe would be foolhardy at best. If such a failsafe cannot be found with the capacity to elude censorship, then the next best thing would be
retaining the capacity to broadcast radio into China in an emergency. Finally, the kind of focused intelligence effort that this kind of contingency preparation will require may not be occurring. If the current U.S. intelligence collection and analysis apparatusincluding
the U.S. Foreign Serviceis unsuited for these tasks, then some rethinking about how to build expertise, collect and process information and manage a political crisis inside China needs to occur. The question here is not necessarily the amount effortas some claim
U.S. intelligence needsbut focus and ensuring the continuous effort to sustain the aforementioned measures. And it will require the direct involvement of policy makers, because of their role in collecting some of the crucial personal information as well as the truism
that policy making determines the limits of intelligence. If Washington is concerned that
the CCP is approaching its twilight
, then asserting a moral stake in Chinas development requires nothing less
than a substantial effort to understand Chinas political landscape beyond day-to-day policy-making concerns and to influence Chinese leaders before they pull the trigger on their citizens again. Without advance preparation, U.S. and other international leaders will find
the prospects of an unstable China distressing, possibly with the view that it is too big to fail. They may even watch from the sidelines as in 1989, not knowing the best course of action or how to influence the decisions of Chinese leaders. This may not be wrong, but
such a momentous decision should not be left to ignorance, preexisting mental images or scattered information collected as a crisis breaks.
No risk of Chinese political or economic disintegration - Many reasons.
Pendley 01, China scholar, review of Is China Unstable, The Journal
of Asian Studies, Vol. 60, No. 1. Feb., 2001
One of the major strengths of this book is its balance. It does not neglect
the factors that work to maintain stability. First is
strengthen the economic infrastructure and encourage growth of foreign direct
and the private economic sector while softening the transition of the SOEs. While most expert analysis, including that of Nicholas Lardy and Pieter Bottelier in this text, considers
measures taken thus far to be inadequate,
also discusses factors that
China has weathered the Asian financial crisis and kept inflation
and well below recent levels reached by South Korea and Russia. Bruce Dickons chapter, while citing the erosion in
the position of the CCP
support its continuing monopoly of political power and the ability to
maintain stability. Almost unnoticed in the West has been the growing party
membership and its evolution from a party of
, economic elites and college students. Most important,
workers and
peasants to the party of
the government message that stability is essential
to economic growth and development is widely accepted in a society that has a fear
of chaos resulting from
and urban laborers are documented,
over a century of
revolutionary stability
. While an increasing number of
by ethnic minorities, peasants
these have focused on local grievances and not on the national party
. The authors point out that
there has been no success in achieving either the connectivity
across segments of the population or the mass mobilization essential to cause major
instability. Even if such protests expand
untested,
in the future,
current Chinese
has available both incentives and repressive measures.
, though
1AR Impact Defense
CCP wont lashout Rationality.
Wang, 2007, Staff Writer for Harvard International Review Lake, Why China
Cooperates; Economics of National Security, Vol. 29 (3) - Fall 2007
However, Chinas recent military modernization, as exemplified by the anti-satellite missile testing in January 2007, has led many observers to claim that China will become more assertive and aggressive in its
foreign policy in the near future, especially with regard to Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. With a restless population that is often riled up by nationalistic propaganda,
it is possible
that the CCP will turn toward aggressive means in order to ensure survival . But even
as it seems that China will begin to assert itself further in international arenas, it is
easy to forget that the legitimacy and ultimate survival of the CCP rests on economic
growth that is highly dependent on trade, foreign investments, and access to natural
resources and foreign technology. As a result of these
policy will
pragmatic and
diplomatic.
economic incentives,
Flexibility of Chinese political system accommodates change and prevents
Naughton and Yang 04, Barry J., economist and Professor of Chinese and
International Affairs at UC-San Diego and Dali L., professor and director of the
Committee on IR at U-Chicago, 2004 Holding China Together p. 6-7
The contributors to this book approach diverse subjects by using a variety of analytic methods; their chapters also reflect their own individual viewpoints. Nevertheless, a common view emerges from this volume.
Without doubt, increasing diversity and a larger society create centrifugal forces in China that undermine the traditional monolithic state structure. However,
political, economic, and cultural forces that
"centripetal forces" imply that diversity and integration in China develop in a kind of dynamic tension.
misleading -and ultimately
unity and integration
. These
The fragmentation literature on China
simply wrong - because it examines only one side of this tension and
fails to see the forces working against fragmentation
fragmentation literature are simply that - examples of increasing diversity.
. In fact, many of the examples of increasing diversity pointed out by the
There is no evidence that
accommodated within the framework of a growing
and developing
diversity cannot be
. At the same time, the "China threat" literature seems to
willfully ignore the evidence of increasing diversity in China and the enormous domestic challenges China still faces. These challenges significantly constrain the Chinese leadership, making it extremely difficult for
them to simply impose solutions on a complex domestic society, and limit their ability to project influence internationally. A dynamic tension between increasing diversity and national unity may not be a bad thing:
at a minimum, it is preferable to either of the twin extremes of an all-powerful central government or a society in disintegration. Indeed, it is even possible that
kind of creative
pressure that helps keep China's
social and
this tension may
transformation moving forward.
No Chinese regime collapse too many low probability events have to occur in
tandem with one another
Chang, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna, 2004
(Gordon Chang, Collapse Perhaps? The Stability of the Modern Chinese State,
4/8/04, http://www.gordonchang.com/articles/paper.pdf)
Regime collapse is a low probability event, says Minxin Pei. Actually, he says its worse than
that: governments completely fail only when a series of low probability events occur at
the same time.11 Maybe its more precise to say that they crumble only when unlikely events happen in the right sequence ,
but Pei begins to explain why there are so few instances of government failure in the past.
Its not easy to get
historical forces to converge on cue. No wonder bad systems last so long. You need a lot to bring down a
government, even a decrepit one. Political scientists, who like to bring order to the inexplicable, tell us that a host of factors are required for
There must exist, for example, general discontent or even anger, solidarity among the
aggrieved, the ability to resist official. action, strong leadership, demands with mass
appeal, a broad coalition, a divided government 12 Most of the listed
regime collapse.
requirements cannot be found in the Peoples Republic today or at least they
cant be found
in sufficient quantities. China, it would seem, must be a long way from its
next revolution. Whatever school of thought one belongs
2AC AT Politics DA
No Link PC
Obama has never really used political capital to advance his agenda
Mitchell, 14, Jim, Editorial Writer, Obamas lame duck season may start tomorrow, Dallas Morning News,
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/01/obamas-lame-duck-season-may-open-tomorrow.html/
There was a time when a State of the Union address melded promises with reality. For many reasons, President Barack Obamas last
two addresses have failed to do so. Part of the problem is a GOP-led House; The other part is the president himself. The
presidents style isnt consistent with policy-making in a tough environment. Hes
prone to saying things like bring me a bill I can sign. Thats another way of staying too far
above the fray. It tosses the entire leadership responsibility back onto Congress a
punt that makes him appear weak, not only to GOP House members, but also to Democrats in the Senate and those on the Far Left,
who insist that he hasnt done enough. It
would be ok for him to seek a Third Way if he were
willing to arm-twist his party as much as he criticizes the other party, in essence
burning his political capital for a higher goal. But for the most, hes allowed House
Republicans and Senate Democrats to appeal to their bases, and on the Senate side,
utilized Harry Reid as his pocket veto. I anticipate that hell use [the State of the Union] to talk
about income inequality and threaten to use executive orders to circumvent Congressional gridlock. A best, those are signals to people
listening at home, who either will love him or hate him for it. However, it wont
carry much weight with
lawmakers and will open the executive orders to Constitutional challenges, real or contrived. In an email to supporters over the
weekend, senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer indicated that the president will lay out a set of real, concrete, practical proposals
to grow the economy, strengthen the middle class, and empower all who hope to join it. President Obama has a pen and he has a
phone, and he will use them to take executive action and enlist every American business owners and workers, mayors and state
legislators, young people, veterans, and folks in communities from across the country in the project to restore opportunity for all. It
will be an optimistic speech. Thanks to the grit and determination of citizens like you, America has a hard-earned right to that
optimism. This deep into his second term and were still talking about broad principles of governing? Also this sounds a lot like the
message of the past two State of the Union speeches. Presidencies
have an expiration date, a point
beyond which anything a president says becomes background noise. It is usually
about this time. As much as I do not like to admit it, gun safety, climate change, immigration policy and tax reform have
become examples of sounds and fury. If we hear more of the same on Tuesday, it will officially mark the start of lame
duck status.
Link Turn
Privacy Legislation is overwhelmingly bipartisan
Volz 6/25 (Dustin, 6/25/15, staff correspondent for National Journal covering tech policy Why cant the most
popular bill in the House get a vote? http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/why-can-t-the-most-popular-bill-in-thehouse-get-a-vote-20150625 DOA 6/26/15, Google) //Kbuck
That was the question Rep. Kevin Yoder asked the House Judiciary
Committee on Thursday, as he pleaded with his fellow lawmakers to consider bipartisan digital
privacy legislation
the most supported bill in Congress to not earn a
House vote
How many lawmakers does it take for a bill to become a law?
that has now accrued 281 of a possible 435 cosponsorsmaking it
. Yoder's measure, the Email Privacy Act, would update a decades-old federal law by requiring law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before prying into the content of private emails. Currently, investigators can grab emails or other
communications stored onlinesuch as documents saved in a cloud servicewith only a subpoena if those records are at least 180 days old. "We want to treat digital correspondence the same as paper correspondence," Yoder told the Judiciary panel during a "listening
session" convened to allow members to present ideas related to criminal-justice reform. Emails, he argued, deserve the same Fourth Amendment privacy protections as physical letters kept in a filing cabinet. The Kansas Republican said an update to the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, was long overdue, given the radical changes to the Internet since the law's passage in 1986 when "Mark Zuckerberg was only two years old." ADVERTISEMENT Digital privacy advocates say they are buoyed by the banner year
they have had so far, with Congress passing a law earlier this year that will effectively end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of U.S. call data. That lawmakers, privacy groups, and the White House could rally around a bill amounting to the most significant
curtailment yet of the government's post-9/11 expansion of surveillance powers would seemingly bode well for a relatively non-controversial update to a 29-year-old law. But Yoder said that ECPA reform has suffered from not having the same level of interest attached
to NSA spying. "I think because it doesn't have the Edward Snowden sex appeal the NSA issues had, that it doesn't really register quite as significantly," Yoder said during the interview. "But I believe that the issue that we're trying to resolve is a greater violation of
Americans' civil liberties than the issues that Edward Snowden raised." Like NSA reform, the Email Privacy Act has widespread backing from tech companies and the privacy community, and its endorsements span the length of the political spectrum, from the American
Civil Liberties Union to the Heritage Foundation. The bill, which Yoder authored with Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, landed with more than 220 cosponsors in February, but has yet to earn a hearing or a vote in the House Judiciary Committee, where it boasts support
from 23 of the panel's 39 members. That includes Rep. John Conyers, the committee's top Democrat, but notably not Chairman Bob Goodlatte. Goodlatte "has told me repeatedly that it is on his to-do list and they have some potential modifications to the end product,"
Yoder told National Journal after his testimony. A House Judiciary spokeswoman also said in a statement that "ECPA reform continues to be a top priority for Chairman Goodlatte" on which he "expects to move forward soon." Some of the modifications being
considered relate to grievances raised by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Yoder said, an unsuspecting federal agency that has been accused of single-handedly obstructing efforts to update ECPA. Mary Jo White, the SEC's chairwoman, has expressed concerns
that requiring warrants to obtain emails could impede financial-fraud investigations. The SEC lacks warrant power, so it relies on using subpoenaswhich require a lower standard of judicial approvalissued to internet service providers to collect digital
communications. DON'T MISS TODAY'S TOP STORIES Love it - first thing I read in the morning." Amy, VP of Communications Top of Form Sign up form for the newsletter Bottom of Form White acknowledged during testimony before Congress in April,
however, that the SEC has not subpoenaed ISPs because it is waiting for Congress to decide if and how it wants to change ECPA. The admission surprised privacy advocates, who assumed the SEC was actively relying on subpoena power, given its defense of the
practice. "The administration and the SEC are on an island that is rapidly going underwater," Yoder said. "Their approach is to say [for] digital content they ought to receive special access to it because it's stored somewhere else that remains a bit of a sticking point."
Administration officials would not comment on the record Thursday regarding ECPA legislation. The White House has stayed largely mute on the issue, though a 2014 report on big data said that "some of the lines drawn by the statute have become outdated and no
longer reflect ways in which we use technology today." It tempered that language by noting that any changes should consider the law's use "to protect public safety and enforce criminal and civil law." In the Senate, a companion bill from Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike
Lee has the backing of 21 senators. The combination of Leahy, a veteran liberal Democrat, and Lee, a tea-party conservative, proved an effective pairing when the Senate passed NSA reform this month. But the dynamics in the upper chamber mirror those in the House.
Whether Leahy and Lee can replicate the same success with an ECPA update will depend in part on whether Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley can be convinced to move the bill forward. Though Leahy and Lee both sit on the Judiciary panel, Grassley was
Yoder said that
his bill would earn "way more" than 300 votes if it came to the House floor, and that such a
lopsided victory would exert enough pressure on the Senate to vote on the legislation as well
unmoved by months of aggressive lobbying to get on board with NSA reform. And the Senate's action was spurred by a hard deadline in Congress over the Patriot Act's spy provisionsa motivating factor that elides Yoder's bill.
. "I can't find
Americans who agree with that provision of the law," Yoder said. "I can't even find five members of Congress who agree with that provision of the law."
NSA Reform is bipartisan.
DW 6/23 (6/23/15, Deutsche Welle, is Germanys international broadcaster, http://www.dw.com/en/us-congressdivided-on-nsa-reform-proposals/a-17361869 US divided on NSA reform proposals DOA 6/26/15, Google //Kbuck
The National Security Agency (NSA) must be reformed: The review panel is unanimous on this point, even if Congress is not. Senator Patrick
Leahy, chairman of the judiciary committee that interviewed the intelligence experts, gave the hand-picked panel his backing. "I believe strongly that we must impose stronger
limits on government surveillance powers," the Democrat said on Tuesday (14.01.2014) at the start of the hearing. But those called to testify before the committee
apparently did not want to put it as starkly as that. The five authors of the 308-page report entitled, "Liberty and Security in a Changing World," were adamant about not jeopardizing the work of the NSA. "Much of
our focus has been on maintaining the ability of the intelligence-community to do what it needs to do," said one of the panel, law professor Cass Sunstein. "And we emphasize - if there is one thing to emphasize, it is
this - that not one of the 46 recommendations of our report would in our view compromise or jeopardize this ability in any way." The report, he added, was not meant to destroy the NSA - though it clearly does not
come out of the assessment well - but to improve it, "by increasing safeguards against insider threats and by eliminatiing certain gaps in the law that make it hard to track people under circumstances in which we have
reasons to believe they don't wish to do us well, " said Sunstein. The panel, consisting of two constitutional lawyers, a data protection expert, ex-CIA deputy director Michael Morell, and anti-terrorism expert Richard
Clarke, presented their report to the White House in December. There was "a misperception on the part of the media and much of the American public that the review group had indeed recommended an end to the
program and we did not do that," said Morell. "We recommended a change in approach." That means change not only within the US - but abroad too. The panel's recommendations include a proposal that the NSA
limit its foreign surveillance activities - and not only among world leaders. The experts said future NSA directors should be civilians and at least partly chosen by the Senate. On top of this, his areas of responsibility
should be split between cyber security and the NSA's offensive capabilities. But the most important and substantial reform, the panel suggested, was the metadata program. This program, which allows the NSA to
randomly collect citizens' phone and internet data, was brought to light last June through the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Morell admitted that critics were right to say that this program had not
prevented any terrorist attacks. " The program only has to be successful once to be invaluable," he added. Sunstein emphasized that the important thing was to manage various risks. "First and foremost the risk of
national security, but including also the risk to public trust, the risk to privacy, risk to economic values and risk to democratic self-governance," he said. For these reasons, the panel recommended that the government
pull out of the business of collecting information for its own sake. Instead, a third party, such as a telecommunications company, should store the data for a limited period and make it available to the government on
request. This proposal has been dismissed as window dressing by digital rights activists, whereas others believe it goes too far. Regardless of what reforms Obama announces on Friday (17.01.2014), the president is
limited when it comes to implementing the panel's proposals. On most points, he needs Congressional approval. But just like the US public itself, the House of Representatives and the Senate are divided on the
reforms, says long-term CIA employee Fred Fleitz, a former member of the Congressional intelligence committee. "There is a great deal of acrimony within the US Congress on what to do," he said. "There is an odd
alliance between the right and left of politicians who want to roll back the metadata program and put strict limits on certain NSA surveillance programs because they believe they infringe on the proxy rights of
there is also a
very strong bipartisan Senate intelligence committee bill which would improve the NSA program
and address concerns about it without shutting it down," said Fleitz. Fleitz, who works for the think tank Center for Security Policy, thinks any reform bill would have good
chances of being approved, though it could take some time to pass through both houses of Congress and be implemented. Many analysts even doubt whether Obama will even be able
Americans." Many would even block reforms, if they don't go far enough, while others are against them because they are worried about undermining US security standards. "However
to complete the job in his tenure. DW RECOMMENDS
2AC AT Prez Powers DA
Congressional oversight expands prez powers AUMF proves
Kenny 13
Jack Kenny, Constitutional Law analyst, Congress Looks to Revise, Expand President's War Powers, 04 June 2013,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/15616-congress-looks-to-revise-expand-president-s-war-powers
In recent congressional hearings, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) pointed
out that "associated forces"
appears nowhere in the AUMF, while Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services
Committee, has argued the authorization applies to organizations that have since allied
with al-Qaeda and have "joined the fight against us." Sen. John McCain, seldom bashful about
the use of military force, has called the inclusion of associated forces "certainly a liberal interpretation of AUMF." McCain,
the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said he was considering offering amendments to
the defense spending bill for Fiscal Year 2014 to make changes in the counterterrorism law. "It's something whose time has
come," he said. But
change in what direction? Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is usually allied with
McCain on defense and foreign policy issues, made clear the direction he thinks he thinks the Congress should move. "I just
think we
need to broaden the definition," said Graham, "and look at who is the enemy and where is the war in
2013." Broadening the definition of the enemy would necessarily mean broadening
the war, which is what the president has been doing anyway, despite his statements about
wanting a narrower focus and an end to the "global war on terror." A recent Washington Post editorial warned of "a danger that
dropping the AUMF as opposed to tailoring it to the new conditions Obama described will result in
less restraint on presidential power, not more." That, the Post explained, is because "top legal advisers
at the State and Defense departments" have publicly said that absent the AUMF, "military attacks on terrorists can still be carried
out under Article II of the Constitution, which grants the president power to defend the country against imminent attack. Most
legal experts agree with that view," the Post informed its readers. Far
from acting to check and restrain
executive overreach, the tendency of Congress for several decades has been to
continually vote the president more power. The "question of war," as Madison described it, has not been
answered by Congress since World War II. The AUMF did not answer it, nor did a similar resolution for the 1991 Gulf War.
Neither did the Vietnam (commonly called the Gulf of Tonkin) Resolution that the Johnson administration later claimed was "the
functional equivalent" of a declaration of war. The equivalence is not there. The Constitution
Congress to decide whether and when we will go to war. The Congress chooses
instead to "authorize" the president to decide. Then many of the same members who voted for the
authorization turn against the war when it is going badly and becomes unpopular. Some will even complain of the "imperial
presidency" they helped to create.
Impact Turn Terrorism
Strong Presidential powers cause terrorism -- blowback
Bacevich 5
Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, NY Times, War Powers in the Age of Terror,
October 31, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/opinion/31bacevich.html
After 9/11, the Bush administration wasted little time in expanding executive
prerogatives even further. Acting in his capacity as commander in chief, President Bush committed the nation to
open-ended war on a global scale. Concluding that eradicating terrorism meant going permanently on the offensive, he
promulgated a doctrine of preventive war. Finding that Saddam Hussein posed a clear and present danger, he moved to put this
Bush Doctrine into effect in Iraq. On Capitol Hill, the response to this sweeping assertion of presidential authority fell somewhere
between somnolent and supine. With the administration gearing up to invade Iraq, the Congress roused itself just long enough to
instruct the president in October 2002 to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by
Iraq." As Lyndon Johnson did with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, Mr. Bush interpreted this as a mandate to wage war
however he saw fit, an interpretation that Secretary Rice has now reaffirmed. Yet the
brief history of America's
global war on terrorism demonstrates the folly of allowing the executive branch a
free hand in determining the scope and conduct of that conflict. Deference to Mr.
Bush's fixation with Saddam Hussein has cost the United States dearly.
To expand
that misadventure will only drive those costs higher. Furthermore, an attack on either Syria or Iran, launched merely on the
president's say-so, would produce a profound reaction, in all likelihood surpassing that induced by Richard Nixon's 1970
incursion into Cambodia. In the interests of national security, earlier generations endowed whoever happened to occupy the Oval
Office with the authority to unleash Armageddon. The perceived urgency of the Soviet threat took precedence over constitutional
scruples. Deterring yesterday's enemy meant being able to wage war in an instant, with one man issuing the orders. But
defeating today's jihadists, who are unlikely to be impressed by the prospect of
incineration, requires a different strategy. Victory will come when we have deprived violent radical
Islam of its claim to legitimacy. Incorporating military power into that effort will require
prudence - we have seen the consequences that rashness can produce. Hardly less
important, sustaining military commitments once undertaken will demand a national
consensus, which existed after 9/11 but which the present administration has since squandered. In the interests
of national security today, we should curb presidential war-making powers. A
hitherto compliant Congress must reclaim the institutional authority conferred upon it
by the Constitution. When it comes to wars, the first responsibility of the legislative branch is not to support the
commander in chief. It is to exercise independent judgment, an obligation that transcends party. Members of Congress who lack
the wit or the moral courage to fulfill this obligation ought to be held accountable by voters.
Impact Turn War
Prez powers cause war
Girhaldi 12
(Philip, Former CIA officer, BA from UChicago, MA and Ph.D in history from the University of London.
September 13 th 2012, Defending the Indefensible,
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/defending-the-indefensible/)
Executive primacy is by its very nature a dangerous zero sum game, with political
power accruing to the president taken away from the American people, the
judiciary, from congress, and from the states. The Posner
by the White House
to become the unchallengeable
enables bad
norm while Posner himself
personally provides intellectual legitimacy to a set of bad ideas not to mention criminal behavior.
Consider the government fabrications that led to the rush to war with Iraq as an
of how fraud by government can work. Posners granting of de facto carte blanche to
someone who, quite possibly by a set of curious chances, winds up in the Oval Office and is
restrained only by the limits of his own popularity should be seen as a threat to every American,
not as a necessary or inevitable advance in governance.
Impact Turn Warming
Executive decisions fail cooperation with Congress key to solve environment
Claussen et al 01
[Climate Change: Science, Strategies, & Solutions, Volume 13, Issue 45, 2001, edited by Eileen Claussen, Vicki Arroyo Cochran,
Debra P. Davis]
Effective policy in the United States requires cooperation across branches of
(legislative, executive, and judicial), across levels of government (federal, state, and local),
No meaningful GHG reduction strategy will be
possible without close cooperation between the Congress and the Executive
and across agencies within each level.
Branch.
Within the Executive Branch, such a strategy would require the involvement of at least seven
major agencies the departments of State, Energy, Commerce, Agriculture, Treasury, and Justice, and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Within Congress, it would require the involvement of multiple
committees and subcommittees. Further, many of the programs and policies crafted at the federal level will
It is not easy to get such a
pluralistic structure of governance to embrace new concepts of ideas. Instead, the
U.S. government was deliberately organized to avoid the tyranny of big
have to be implemented in concert with the 50 state governments.
even if it came at the expense of effi cient government. In 1989, Harvard University
professors Ray Vernon and Roger Porter wrote a monograph on U.S. foreign economic policy-making. In it they
made two major points. First, they argued that foreign
in forms that
economic problems almost always
affect more than one agency or
more than one congressional
committee, and
second that the United States has historically had great diffi culty coordinating these agencies and
committees. These diffi culties arise because most international economic policies substantially affect
domestic economic issues issues around which strong and powerful interest groups are arrayed. As a result,
initiatives that are developed unilaterally and independently by the Executive
Branch or by a small group within the Executive Branch are rarely sustainable.
2AC AT Terror DA
U Terrorism High Now
Non-UQ - Risk of homeland terrorist attacks are high
CFR 4/22/15 Council on Foreign Relations (The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an
independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher. CFR members, including
Brian Williams, Fareed Zakaria, Angelina Jolie, Chuck Hagel, and Erin Burnett, explain why the Council on
Foreign Relations is an indispensable resource in a complex world.)
http://www.cfr.org/global/global-conflict-tracker/p32137#!/?marker=1 //kbuck
Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations continue to pose a stark threat to the U.S.
homeland more than a decade after 9/11. Although the United States has been
successful in eliminating most of the senior al-Qaeda leadership, affiliates and other
extremist groupsthe self-described Islamic State, al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP), and Lashkar-e-Taibahave emerged and grown in strength. In
December 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry described the Islamic State as a
danger and a threat to the interests and the values of all of us, and emphasized the
acute threat of foreign fighters returning to their homes in Western countries. Just
the year before, the White House stated in August 2013 that AQAP poses the
greatest potential threat anddemonstrates an interest in and a willingness to
attempt serious attacks on the United States, our allies, and our people. That same
month, AQAP threats resulted in the closing of more than two dozen U.S. diplomatic facilities. Domestically, concerns of
homegrown terrorism were reinforced by the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. In an effort to prevent mass casualty
attacks, the United States has taken stepsas stated by then-deputy national adviser John O. Brennan in 2009to hold
state sponsors of terrorism accountable for their crimes. Although the 9/11 attacks were a rare catastrophic event,
another attack of the same scale is plausible. A mass casualty attack would demand an immediate response from the
United States, threatening to implicate the country in protracted conflict, as was the case with the war in Afghanistan
following 9/11.
Terrorism is high now al Qaeda affiliates are in several nations, political
upheavals in the ME are creating new safe havens, and domestic terrorism is
The threat of terrorism faced today by the United States is real. While the core group of Al
Qaeda that planned the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan largely has been decimated by military action,
recent years have seen the rise of new al Qaeda affiliates in other nations plotting
operations against the United States and Europe. President Obama described the emergence of these groups in a speech last
May on the dangers currently posed by international terrorism: From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to
North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse, with Al Qaedas affiliates in the
Arabian Peninsula AQAP the most active in plotting against our homeland.534 Most of these affiliates
presently are focused on executing attacks in their own regions, but such attacks can claim U.S. lives in addition to wreaking
devastation on residents of the nations where they occur. Moreover, failed
attacks against the United States, such as
the attempted 2009 Christmas Day airplane bombing and the attempted 2010 Times Square bombing, serve as a reminder
that foreign terrorist organizations continue to pose a danger to residents of this nation.
Political upheavals in the Middle East, meanwhile, threaten to create opportunities for
safe havens where new terrorist affiliates can plan attacks. At the same time, the United States
has seen evidence that radicalized individuals inside this country with connections
to foreign extremists can carry out horrifying acts of violence, as appears to have been the case
with the shooting at Fort Hood in Texas and the bombing of the Boston Marathon.535 Thus, while al Qaedas core group has not
carried out a successful attack on U.S. soil since 2001 and is less capable of doing so, and while the violence now being attempted
by emergent terrorist affiliates has not yet approached the scope of the 9/11 attacks, the
danger posed to the United
States by international terrorism is by no means over.536
Terrorism is on the Rise
Reuters 6/19 [Warren Strobel, reporter. Terror attacks, deaths up sharply in 2014: State Department .
reuters.com/article/2015/06/19/us-usa-terrorism-idUSKBN0OZ1S820150619 -FL]
Terrorist attacks worldwide surged by more than a third and fatalities soared by 81 percent
in 2014, a year that also saw Islamic State eclipse al Qaeda as the leading jihadist militant group, the U.S. State Department said on
Friday. In its annual report on terrorism, the department also charts
an unprecedented flow of foreign fighters
to Syria, often lured by Islamic State's use of social media and drawn from diverse social backgrounds. Taken together, the
trends point to a sobering challenge from militant groups worldwide to the United States and its allies despite severe blows inflicted
on al Qaeda, author of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in Washington and New York. Al Qaeda's leaders "appeared to lose momentum as the
self-styled leader of a global movement in the face of ISIL's rapid expansion and proclamation of a Caliphate," the report said, using
an alternate acronym for Islamic State. Last June, Islamic State attacked from its base in Syria and seized vast swaths of Iraq, much of
which it still controls. " The
ongoing civil war in Syria has been a spur to the worldwide
terrorism events, " the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, Tina Kaidanow, told a news conference. She
said that while the United States still worried about al Qaeda, the growing concern was the number of groups aligning themselves with
Islamic State across the globe. " There is an appeal of ISIS globally ," Kaidanow added, using another acronym for
the group. U.S. President Barack Obama responded with air strikes in Iraq and Syria, and a program to train Iraqi security forces. He
has also continued air strikes against militant suspects worldwide, included one this week that killed al Qaeda's deputy chief. The State
there were 13,463 terrorist attacks, a 35
percent jump from 2013, resulting in more than 32,700 deaths, an 81 percent rise .
Department report, which covers calendar year 2014, said
More than 9,400 people were kidnapped or taken hostage by militants, triple the rate of the previous year, it said. There was some
good news: Militant activity decreased in some countries, including Pakistan, the Philippines, Nepal and Russia. The report said the
global increase in terrorist attacks was mostly due to events in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Kaidanow said weak or failed
governments allowed terrorist groups to thrive in places such as Yemen, Syria,
Libya, Nigeria and Iraq . Islamic State was particularly lethal . A June 2014 attack on a prison in
Mosul, Iraq, in which the group killed 670 Shi'ite Muslim prisoners "was the
deadliest attack worldwide since September 11, 2001 ," it said. As of late December, more than 16,000
foreign terrorist fighters had traveled to Syria, exceeding the rate of those who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or
Somalia "at any point in the last 20 years," the report said. Last month, a senior State Department official said the army of foreign
fighters who traveled to Syria had grown further, to 22,000.
Terrorism has risen by 35 percent
Williams 6/19 [Abigail Williams, reporter for NBC News article published 6/19/15 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/usnews/state-dept-35-percent-increase-terrorist-attacks-worldwide-n378416 accessed 6/23/15- FL]
The U.S. State Department released the Country Reports on Terrorism on Friday
finding that nearly 33,000 people were killed and 34,700 injured in almost 13,500
terrorist attacks around the world in 2014 . That is a 35 percent increase in terrorist
attacks and an 81 percent increase in total fatalities since 2013. The terrorist attacks
took place in 95 countries, but were concentrated in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
India, Nigeria and Syria. Twenty attacks in 2014 were particularly lethal, killing
more than 100 people. In 2013 there were only two such attacks. The impact of the Islamic State in the Middle East
region and Boko Haram in Africa figured prominently in the report which noted that al-Qaeda leadership "appeared to lose momentum
as the self-styled leader of a global movement in the face of ISIL's rapid expansion." But despite the prominence of the threat once
posed by core al-Qaeda diminishing, the report found that AQ still has an impact . "Though AQ central leadership
was weakened, the organization continued to serve as a focal point of "inspiration" for a worldwide network of affiliated groups,
including al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula a long-standing threat to Yemen, the region, and the United States; al-Qa'ida in the
Last year's trend of terrorist's
employment of more aggressive attacks continued this year with "ruthless methods
of violence such as beheadings and crucifixions intended to terrify opponents," the
report said. Boko Haram and ISIS shared this use of brutal tactics including, "stonings, indiscriminate mass
casualty attacks, and kidnapping children for enslavement." Weak or failed governments in
Islamic Maghreb; al-Nusrah Front; and al-Shabaab," the report said.
Yemen, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, and Iraq were noted as an enabling environment for the growth of extremist radicalism and violence.
terrorism in 2014 was marked by numerous kidnappings and
hostage-taking events citing more than 9,400 people kidnapped or taken hostage in
terrorist attacks in 2014. That is three times as many as in 2013. This particular trend, according
The report points out that
to the report, is more concentrated in Iraq, Nigeria, and Syria. More trends from the report included a rise in lone wolf violent
extremists in the West, ISIS seizure of an unprecedented amount of territory in Iraq and Syria and a continued flow of foreign terrorist
foreign terrorist fighters traveled from more than 90 countries to that country as of
late December. That figure exceeded the rate of foreign terrorist fighters traveling
to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia in the last 20 years Cuba was
fighters joining ISIS from around the world. The ongoing civil war in Syria played a significant role and more than
formally removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on May 29th, leaving Sudan, Syria and Iran. The report did not say
whether terrorism sponsored by Iran, which has been on the list for more than 30 years, had increased in the last year but did point to
their use of proxies to expand their influence not just in the middle east but Africa, Asia and to a lesser extent Latin America. "We
continue to be very, very, concerned by IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force) activity as well as proxies that act on
behalf of Iran .. including Hezbollah and other groups," Ambassador Tina Kaidanow said in a briefing about the report. "We watch that
extremely carefully."
ISIS is gaining momentum
Engel 6/17 [Isis is gaining momentum in the worst possible Way, article published on
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/isis-is-gaining-momentum-in-the-worst-possible-way-2015-6 by Pamela Engel, journalist
for business insider on June 17th 2015 FL]
In the year since the Islamic State terror group tore through the Middle East and
claimed Iraq's second-largest city, the US has been scrambling to come up with an
effective strategy to defeat the militants. Meanwhile, Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) is winning by
settling in as Iraq and Syria crumble. "A year after the Islamic State seized Mosul, and 10 months
after the United States and its allies launched a campaign of airstrikes against it, the
jihadist group continues to dig in, stitching itself deeper into the fabric of the
communities it controls ," Ben Hubbard of The New York Times reports. The Times, citing interviews with residents,
notes that ISIS "is offering reliable, if harsh, security; providing jobs in decimated
economies; and projecting a rare sense of order in a region overwhelmed by
conflict. " And by doing so, they are increasingly winning over reluctant civilians. "It is not our life, all the violence and fighting
and death," a laborer from Raqqa told the Times. "But t hey got rid of the tyranny of the Arab rulers."
'They've clearly got the best battle plan' After a US general insisted that the ISIS
was on the defensive in December, the militants seized Ramadi, the provincial
capital of Sunni-dominated Anbar province, successfully crippling Iraqi security
forces that significantly outnumbered ISIS fighters . The group then went on to take Palmyra, a
strategically and historically significant town in Syria, from the regime of dictator Bashar Assad. "People inside DC are hanging onto
what ISIS has done shows an extraordinary
capability to conduct integrated military operations ," Christopher Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the
the myth that ISIS isn't that good, but they're missing that
Institute for the Study of War, told Business Insider. Harmer noted that ISIS has proven that it can coordinate military activity across
multiple fronts, moving fighters within and between Syria and Iraq, transporting vehicles across borders, sharing expertise in how to
build improvised explosive devices, and coordinating even small battles from the top down.
Bulk data has not helped identify a terrorist, stopped a plot, or made a
difference in counterterrorism for the 7 years it has existed
The threat of terrorism faced today by the United States is real. The Section 215 telephone records program was
intended as one tool to combat this threat a tool that would help investigators piece together the networks of terrorist groups and
the patterns of their communications with a speed and comprehensiveness not otherwise available. However, we
conclude that the Section 215 program has shown minimal value in safeguarding
the nation from terrorism. Based on the information provided to the Board, including classified
briefings and documentation, we have not identified a single instance involving a
threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the
outcome of a counterterrorism investigation. Moreover, we are aware of no instance in
which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown
terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack. And we believe that in only one
instance over the past seven years has the program arguably contributed to the
identification of an unknown terrorism suspect. Even in that case, the suspect was not involved in
planning a terrorist attack and there is reason to believe that the FBI may have discovered him without the
contribution of the NSAs program. The Boards review suggests that where the telephone
records collected by the NSA under its Section 215 program have provided value, they have
done so primarily in two ways: by offering additional leads regarding the contacts of terrorism
suspects already known to investigators, and by demonstrating that foreign
terrorist plots do not have a U.S. nexus. The former can help investigators confirm suspicions about the target
of an inquiry or about persons in contact with that target. The latter can help the intelligence community focus its limited
investigatory resources by avoiding false leads and channeling efforts where they are needed most. But with respect to the former,
our review suggests that the Section 215 program offers little unique value but largely
duplicates the FBIs own information gathering efforts. And with respect to the latter, while the value
of proper resource allocation in time-sensitive situations is not to be discounted, we question whether the
American public should accept the governments routine collection of all of its
telephone records because it helps in cases where there is no threat to the United
EVEN IF phone data decreases terrorism, there is no difference between
warranted searches and bulk data
Even in those instances where telephone records collected under Section 215 offered
additional information about the contacts of a known terrorism suspect, in nearly all
cases the benefits provided have been minimal generally limited to corroborating
information that was obtained independently by the FBI. And in those few cases
where some information not already known to the government was generated through
the use of Section 215 records, we have seen little indication that the same result could not
have been obtained through traditional, targeted collection of telephone records.
The classified briefings and materials the Board has received have not demonstrated that the
increased speed, breadth, and historical depth of the Section 215 program have
produced any concrete results that were otherwise unattainable. In other words, we see little evidence
that the unique capabilities provided by the NSAs bulk collection of telephone
records actually have yielded material counterterrorism results that could not have
been achieved without the NSAs Section 215 program.
There is no evidence to support that NSA surveillance has stopped terrorism.
Elliot and Meyer 13. December 17, 2013. Justin Elliott has been a reporter with ProPublica since 2012, covering politics with a focus on
money and influence. He was previously a reporter at Salon.com and TPMmuckraker and news editor at Talking Points Memo. He was also a factchecker at Mother Jones. Theodoric Meyer was ProPublicas reporting fellow. He started at ProPublica as a reporting intern in 2012 and previously
worked as a reporting intern at The New York Times and The Seattle Times. He was a lead reporter for ProPublicas After the Flood series, which won
the Deadline Club Award for Local Reporting in 2014. His reporting on the National Security Agency with Justin Elliott was cited in Judge Richard J.
Leons ruling that N.S.A. surveillance of phone metadata was likely unconstitutional. He is a graduate of McGill University and Columbia University.
Claim on Attacks Thwarted by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence http://www.propublica.org/article/claim-on-attacks-thwarted-by-nsa-spreadsdespite-lack-of-evidence //Csmith
UPDATE Dec. 17, 2013: In a new ruling that calls the NSA's phone metadata surveillance likely
unconstitutional, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon cited this article in his assessment of the agency's claims about
thwarted terrorist attacks. Readthe ruling here. *** Two weeks after Edward Snowdens first revelations about sweeping
President Obama shot back. We know of at least 50 threats
that have been averted because of this information not just in the United
States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany , Obama said during a visit to Berlin in
government surveillance,
June. So lives have been saved. In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from
both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The
figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs. Fifty-four times this and the other
program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe saving real lives, Rep. Mike Rogers, a
Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on the House floor in July, referring to programs
But there's no evidence that the
oft-cited figure is accurate. The NSA itself has been inconsistent on how many
plots it has helped prevent and what role the surveillance programs played.
The agency has often made hedged statements that avoid any sweeping
assertions about attacks thwarted. A chart declassified by the agency in July, for example, says that
authorized by a pair of post-9/11 laws. This isnt a game. This is real.
intelligence from the programs on 54 occasions has contributed to the [U.S. governments] understanding of terrorism
activities and, in many cases, has enabled the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad a much
different claim than asserting that the programs have been responsible for thwarting 54 attacks. NSA officials have mostly
repeated versions of this wording. When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander spoke at a Las Vegas security conference in July,
for instance, he referred to 54 different terrorist-related activities, 42 of which were plots and 12 of which were cases in
which individuals provided material support to terrorism. But the NSA has not always been so careful. During
Alexanders speech in Las Vegas, a slide in an accompanying slideshow read simply 54 ATTACKS THWARTED. And in a recent
letter to NSA employees, Alexander and John Inglis, the NSAs deputy director, wrote that the agency has contributed to
keeping the U.S. and its allies safe from 54 terrorist plots. (The letter was obtained by reporter Kevin Gosztola from a
source with ties to the intelligence community. The NSA did not respond when asked to authenticate it.) Asked for
clarification of the surveillance programs' record, the NSA declined to comment. Earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, DVt., pressed Alexander on the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Would you agree that the 54 cases that
keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.? Leahy said
impossible to assess the role NSA surveillance played in the 54 cases
at the hearing. Would you agree with that, yes or no? Yes, Alexander replied, without elaborating.
because, while the agency has provided a full list to Congress, it remains
classified.
NSA not Key to Counter- Terrorism
Sterman, Shneider, and Bergen 14 [January 13,2014 David Sterman Emily Schneider Peter Bergen
International Security experts https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/do-nsas-bulk-surveillance-programs-stop-terrorists/
accessed 6/23/15 -FL]
The governments claims about the role that NSA bulk surveillance of phone and
email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from
terrorism shows that these claims are overblown and even misleading . An in-depth analysis of
225 individuals recruited by al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaedas ideology, and charged in the United States
with an act of terrorism since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local
communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the
contribution of NSAs bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal. Indeed, the controversial bulk collection of American
telephone metadata, which includes the telephone numbers that originate and receive calls, as well as the time and date of those calls
but not their content, under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, appears to have played an identifiable role in initiating, at most, 1.8
the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the
United States under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the
terrorism cases we examined, and NSA surveillance under an unidentified authority
played a role in 1.3 percent of the cases we examined. Regular FISA warrants not issued in connection with
percent of these cases. NSA programs involving
Section 215 or Section 702, which are the traditional means for investigating foreign persons, were used in at least 48 (21 percent) of
the cases we looked at, although its unclear whether these warrants played an initiating role or were used at a later point in the
investigation. (Click on the link to go to a database of all 225 individuals, complete with additional details about them and the
governments investigations of these cases: http://natsec.newamerica.net/nsa/analysis). Surveillance of American phone metadata has
had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related
examination of the role of the database of
U.S. citizens telephone metadata in the single plot the government uses to justify
the importance of the program that of Basaaly Moalin, a San Diego cabdriver who in 2007 and 2008 provided
$8,500 to al-Shabaab, al-Qaedas affiliate in Somalia calls into question the necessity of the Section 215
bulk collection program. According to the government, the database of American phone metadata allows intelligence
activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group. Furthermore, our
authorities to quickly circumvent the traditional burden of proof associated with criminal warrants, thus allowing them to connect the
dots faster and prevent future 9/11-scale attacks. Yet in the Moalin case, after using the NSAs phone database to link a number in
Somalia to Moalin, the FBI waited two months to begin an investigation and wiretap his phone. Although its unclear why there was a
delay between the NSA tip and the FBI wiretapping, court documents show there was a two-month period in which the FBI was not
monitoring Moalins calls, despite official statements that the bureau had Moalins phone number and had identified him. , This
undercuts the governments theory that the database of Americans telephone metadata is necessary to expedite the investigative
process, since it clearly didnt expedite the process in the single case the government uses to extol its virtues. Additionally ,
careful review of three of the key terrorism cases the government has cited to
defend NSA bulk surveillance programs reveals that government officials have
exaggerated the role of the NSA in the cases against David Coleman Headley and Najibullah Zazi, and the
significance of the threat posed by a notional plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange. In 28 percent of the cases we reviewed,
court records and public reporting do not identify which specific methods initiated the investigation. These cases, involving 62
individuals, may have been initiated by an undercover informant, an undercover officer, a family member tip, other traditional law
enforcement methods, CIA- or FBI-generated intelligence, NSA surveillance of some kind, or any number of other methods. In 23 of
these 62 cases (37 percent), an informant was used. However, we were unable to determine whether the informant initiated the
investigation or was used after the investigation was initiated as a result of the use of some other investigative means. Some of these
cases may also be too recent to have developed a public record large enough to identify which investigative tools were used. We have
also identified three additional plots that the government has not publicly claimed as NSA successes, but in which court records and
public reporting suggest the NSA had a role. However, it is not clear whether any of those three cases involved bulk surveillance
programs. Finally, the
overall problem for U.S. counterterrorism officials is not that they
need vaster amounts of information from the bulk surveillance programs, but that
they dont sufficiently understand or widely share the information they already
possess that was derived from conventional law enforcement and intelligence
techniques.
The NSA is non-essential to stop terrorism
Nakashima 14 (writer for the Washington post) http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-phone-recordcollection-does-little-to-prevent-terrorist-attacks-group-says/2014/01/12/8aa860aa-77dd-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html
Accessed 6/23/15 -FL
analysis of 225 terrorism cases inside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks has concluded that the bulk collection of phone records by the National
Security Agency has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.
the majority of cases,
traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided
the tip or evidence to initiate the case, according to the study by the New America
Foundation , a Washington-based nonprofit group. The study, to be released Monday, corroborates the
findings of
a White House-appointed review group, which said
last month that
the NSA
counterterrorism program was not essential to preventing attacks and that much
of the evidence it did turn up could readily have been obtained in a timely manner
using conventional [court] orders.
The United States does not need the NSA to counter terrorism, UN Proves
UN 15 http://www.un.org/en/terrorism/ Acessed 6/23/2015 -FL
Eighteen universal instruments (fourteen instruments and four amendments) against international
terrorism have
been elaborated within the framework of the United Nations system
relating to specific terrorist activities . Member States, through the General Assembly, have
been increasingly coordinating their counter-terrorism efforts and continuing their legal norm-setting work.
Security Council has also been active in countering terrorism through resolutions
and by establishing several subsidiary bodies. At the same time a number of
programmes, offices and agencies of the United Nations system have been engaged
in specific activities against terrorism, further assisting Member States in their counter-terrorism efforts.
To consolidate and enhance these activities, Member States in September 2006 embarked
upon a new phase in their counter-terrorism efforts by agreeing on a global strategy
to counter terrorism . The Strategy marks the first time that all Member States of the United Nations have
agreed to a common strategic and operational framework to fight terrorism.
The Strategy forms a basis for
a concrete plan of action: to address the conditions conducive to the spread of
terrorism; to prevent and combat terrorism; to take measures to build state
capacity to fight terrorism; to strengthen the role of the United Nations in
combating terrorism; and to ensure the respect of human rights while countering
terrorism. The Strategy builds on the unique consensus achieved by world leaders at their 2005 September Summit
to condemn terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.
The NSA lied about how many terrorist plots theyve
Waterman 13
Award winning journalist, worked for BBC,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/nsa-chief-figures-foiled-terror-plotsmisleading/?page=all Accessed 6/23/15 -FL
chief of the National Security Agency admitted that officials
put out numbers that vastly overstated the counterterrorism
successes of the governments warrantless bulk collection of all Americans
The Obama administrations credibility on intelligence suffered another blow Wednesday as
phone records. Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight
Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of
terrorist plots foiled by the NSAs huge database of every
phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two
far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the
administration . Gen. Alexander and other intelligence chiefs have pleaded with lawmakers not
hearing,
to shut down the bulk collection of U.S. phone records despite growing unease about government
overreach in the program, which was revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward
There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records
collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist
plots, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and committee chairman, told Gen. Alexander of the
Snowden.
54 cases that administration officials including the general himself have cited as the fruit of the NSAs domestic
snooping. These werent all plots and they werent all foiled, he said. Mr. Leahy and Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin
Republican and author of the USA Patriot Act, which the government says allows bulk data collection, are working on a bill to roll
back that authority
Bulk Metadata collection does little to stop terrorism, only one terroristic plot
was uncovered due to metadata in thirteen years of collection
SCHWARTZ 15 [MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ, 1/26/15, The Whole Haystack,
The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/wholehaystack]
Almost every major terrorist attack on Western soil in the past fifteen years has
been committed by people who were already known to law enforcement. One of the
gunmen in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, had been sent to prison for recruiting jihadist fighters. The
other had reportedly studied in Yemen with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, who was arrested and interrogated
by the F.B.I. in 2009. The
leader of the 7/7 London suicide bombings, in 2005, had been observed by
who planned the Mumbai attacks, in 2008, were under electronic surveillance by the United States, the United
Kingdom, and India, and one had been an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. One of the brothers
accused of bombing the Boston Marathon was the subject of an F.B.I. threat assessment and a warning from
Russian intelligence. In each of these cases, the authorities were not wanting for data. What they
British intelligence meeting with a suspected terrorist, though MI5 later said that the bombers were not on our radar. The
failed to do was appreciate the significance of the data they already had. Nevertheless, since
9/11, the National Security
Agency has sought to acquire every possible scrap of digital informationwhat General Keith
Alexander, the agencys former head, has called the whole haystack. The size of the haystack was revealed in June, 2013, by
Edward Snowden. The
N.S.A. vacuums up Internet searches, social-media content, and, most
controversially, the records (known as metadata) of United States phone callswho called whom, for how
long, and from where. The agency stores the metadata for five years, possibly longer. The metadata program remains the point of
greatest apparent friction between the N.S.A. and the Constitution. It is carried out under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows
the government to collect books, records, papers, documents, and other items that are relevant to an authorized investigation.
While debating the Patriot Act in 2001, Senator Russ Feingold worried about the governments powers to collect the personal records
of anyoneperhaps someone who worked with, or lived next door to . . . the target of the investigation. Snowden revealed that the
N.S.A. goes much further. Metadata for every domestic phone call from Verizon and other carriers, hundreds of billions of records in
all, are considered relevant under Section 215. The N.S.A. collects them on an ongoing, daily basis. The
N.S.A. asserts
that it uses the metadata to learn whether anyone inside the U.S. is in contact with
high-priority terrorism suspects, colloquially referred to as known bad guys. Michael Hayden, the former C.I.A.
and N.S.A. director, has said, We kill people based on metadata. He then added, But thats not what we do with this metadata,
referring to Section 215. Soon after Snowdens revelations, Alexander
said that the N.S.A.s surveillance
programs have stopped fifty-four different terrorist-related activities. Most of these were
terrorist plots. Thirteen involved the United States. Credit for foiling these plots, he continued, was partly due to the metadata
program, intended to find the terrorist that walks among us. President Obama also quantified the benefits of the metadata program.
That June, in a press conference with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, Obama said, We know of at least fifty threats that have
been averted because of this information. He continued, Lives have been saved. Section 215 is just one of many legal authorities
that govern U.S. spy programs. These authorities are jumbled together in a way that makes it difficult to separate their individual
efficacy. Early in the metadata debate, the fifty-four cases were sometimes attributed to Section 215, and sometimes to other sections
of other laws. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in October, 2013, Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, called the
fiftyfour-plots statistic plainly wrong . . . these werent all plots, and they werent all
thwarted. He cited a statement by Alexanders deputy that theres only really one example of a case
where, but for the use of Section 215 bulk phone-records collection, terrorist activity was
stopped. Hes right, Alexander said. The case was that of Basaaly Moalin, a Somali-born U.S. citizen living in San Diego. In
July, 2013, Sean Joyce, the F.B.I.s deputy director at the time, said in Senate-committee testimony that Moalins phone number had
been in contact with an Al Qaeda East Africa member in Somalia. The N.S.A., Joyce said, was able to make this connection and
notify the F.B.I. thanks to Section 215. That February, Moalin was found guilty of sending eighty-five hundred dollars to the Shabaab,
an extremist Somali militia with ties to Al Qaeda. Moalin and three other individuals have been convicted, Joyce continued. I go
back to what we need to remember, what happened in 9/11. At the same hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, talked
about how little information we had before 9/11. I support this program, she said, referring to Section 215. They will come after
us, and I think we need to prevent an attack wherever we can. In
the thirteen years that have passed since
9/11, the N.S.A. has used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to take in records from hundreds of billions
of domestic phone calls. Congress was explicit about why it passed the Patriot Actdespite concerns about potential
effects on civil liberties, it believed that the law was necessary to prevent another attack on the scale of 9/11. The
government has not shown any instance besides Moalins in which the laws
metadata provision has directly led to a conviction in a terrorism case. Is it worth it?
It goes on to say
Its possible that Moalin would have been caught without
Section 215.HisphonenumberwasacommonlinkamongpendingF.B.I.investigations,accordingtoareportfromthePrivacyand
CivilLibertiesOversightBoard(PCLOB),anindependentagencycreatedin2004atthesuggestionofthe9/11Commission,whichObamahadtasked
in a congressional budget request, the
Department of Justice said that the Moalin case was part of a
broader investigation into Shabaab funding.SenatorRonWyden,ofOregon,who,like
Leahy,haspressuredtheN.S.A.tojustifybulksurveillance,said,To suggest that the government
needed to spy on millions of law-abiding people in order to
catch this individual is simply not true. He continued, I still
withassessingSection215.Later,
havent seen any evidence that the dragnet surveillance of
Americans personal information has done a single thing to
improve U.S. national security.RepresentativeJamesSensenbrenner,ofWisconsin,whointroducedthe
PatriotActintheHouse,agreed.The intelligence community has never made a
compelling case that bulk collection stops terrorism,hetoldme.Khalidal
MihdharsphonecallstoYemenmonthsbeforehehelpedhijackAmericanAirlinesFlight77,on9/11,ledObama,Alexander,Feinstein,andothersto
suggestthatSection215couldhavepreventedtheattacks.Weknowthatwedidntstop9/11,Alexandertoldmelastspring.Peopleweretrying,but
the PCLOB found that it was not
necessary to collect the entire nations calling recordstofindMihdhar.I
theydidnthavethetools.Thistool,webelieved,wouldhelpthem.But
askedWilliamGore,whowasrunningtheF.B.I.sSanDiegoofficeatthetime,ifthePatriotActwouldhavemadeadifference.Couldwehave
prevented9/11?Idontknow,hesaid.Youcantfindsomebodyifyourenotlookingforthem.
Bulk collection is ineffective at counterterrorism
Cahall, Sterman, Schneider, Bergen 14 [Bailey Cahall David Sterman Emily
Schneider Peter Bergen, 1/13/14, DO NSA'S BULK SURVEILLANCE
PROGRAMS STOP TERRORISTS?, New America,
https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/do-nsas-bulksurveillance-programs-stop-terrorists/]
June5,2013,theGuardianbrokethefirststoryinwhatwouldbecomeafloodofrevelationsregardingtheextentandnatureofthe
NSAssurveillanceprograms.Facinganuproaroverthethreatsuchprogramsposedtoprivacy,theObamaadministrationscrambled
todefendthemaslegalandessentialtoU.S.nationalsecurityandcounterterrorism.TwoweeksafterthefirstleaksbyformerNSA
contractorEdwardSnowdenwerepublished,PresidentObamadefendedtheNSAsurveillanceprogramsduringavisittoBerlin,
saying:Weknowofatleast50threatsthathavebeenavertedbecauseofthisinformationnotjustintheUnitedStates,but,insome
cases,threatshereinGermany.Soliveshavebeensaved.Gen.KeithAlexander,thedirectoroftheNSA,testifiedbeforeCongress
that:theinformationgatheredfromtheseprogramsprovidedtheU.S.governmentwithcriticalleadstohelppreventover50potential
terroristeventsinmorethan20countriesaroundtheworld.Rep.MikeRogers(RMich.),chairmanoftheHousePermanentSelect
CommitteeonIntelligence,saidontheHousefloorinJulythat54times[theNSAprograms]stoppedandthwartedterroristattacks
bothhereandinEuropesavingreallives.However,ourreviewofthe
governments claims
about the role that NSA bulk surveillance of phone and email
communications records has had in keeping the United States
safe from terrorism shows that these claims are overblown and
even misleading. An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals
recruited by al-QaedaoralikemindedgrouporinspiredbyalQaedasideology,and charged
intheUnitedStateswith an act of terrorismsince9/11,demonstrates that
traditional investigative methods,suchastheuseofinformants,tipsfromlocalcommunities,
andtargetedintelligenceoperations,provided the initial impetus for investigations
in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSAs bulk
surveillance programs to these cases was minimal.Indeed,the
controversialbulkcollectionofAmericantelephonemetadata,whichincludesthetelephonenumbersthat
originateandreceivecalls,aswellasthetimeanddateofthosecallsbutnottheircontent,underSection215oftheUSAPATRIOT
Act,appears
to have played an identifiable role ininitiating,at most,
1.8 percent ofthesecases.NSAprogramsinvolvingthesurveillanceofnonU.S.personsoutsideoftheUnited
StatesunderSection702oftheFISAAmendmentsActplayedarolein4.4percentoftheterrorismcasesweexamined,andNSA
surveillanceunderanunidentifiedauthorityplayedarolein1.3percentofthecasesweexamined.RegularFISAwarrantsnotissued
inconnectionwithSection215orSection702,whicharethetraditionalmeansforinvestigatingforeignpersons,wereusedinatleast
48(21percent)ofthecaseswelookedat,althoughitsunclearwhetherthesewarrantsplayedaninitiatingroleorwereusedatalater
pointintheinvestigation.(Clickonthelinktogotoadatabaseofall225individuals,completewithadditionaldetailsaboutthemand
thegovernmentsinvestigationsofthesecases:http://natsec.newamerica.net/nsa/analysis).Surveillance
American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on
preventing acts of terrorismandonlythemostmarginalofimpactsonpreventingterroristrelated
activity,suchasfundraisingforaterroristgroup.Furthermore,ourexaminationoftheroleofthedatabaseofU.S.citizenstelephone
metadatainthesingleplotthegovernmentusestojustifytheimportanceoftheprogramthatofBasaalyMoalin,aSanDiego
cabdriverwhoin2007and2008provided$8,500toalShabaab,alQaedasaffiliateinSomaliacallsintoquestionthenecessityof
theSection215bulkcollectionprogram.According
to the government, the database
of American phone metadata allows intelligence authorities to
quickly circumvent the traditional burden of proof associated
with criminal warrants, thus allowing them to connect the
dots faster and prevent future 9/11-scale attacks.YetintheMoalin
case,after using the NSAs phone databasetolinkanumberinSomaliatoMoalin,the
FBI waited two months to begin an investigationandwiretaphisphone.
AlthoughitsunclearwhytherewasadelaybetweentheNSAtipandtheFBIwiretapping,court documents
show there was a two-month period in which the FBI was not
monitoringMoalinscalls,despite official statements that the bureau
hadMoalinsphone number and had identified him. ,This undercuts
the governments theory that the database of Americans
telephone metadata is necessary to expedite the investigative
process, since it clearly didnt expedite the process in the
single case the government uses to extol its virtues. Additionally,a
carefulreviewofthree of the key terrorism cases the government has
cited to defendNSAbulk surveillance programs reveals that
governmentofficials have exaggerated the roleoftheNSAin the cases
against David Coleman Headley and Najibullah Zazi, and the
significance of the threat posed by a notional plot to bomb the
New York Stock Exchange. In28percentofthecaseswereviewed,courtrecordsandpublicreportingdo
notidentifywhichspecificmethodsinitiatedtheinvestigation.Thesecases,involving62individuals,mayhavebeeninitiatedbyan
undercoverinformant,anundercoverofficer,afamilymembertip,othertraditionallawenforcementmethods,CIAorFBIgenerated
intelligence,NSAsurveillanceofsomekind,oranynumberofothermethods.In23ofthese62cases(37percent),aninformantwas
used.However,wewereunabletodeterminewhethertheinformantinitiatedtheinvestigationorwasusedaftertheinvestigationwas
initiatedasaresultoftheuseofsomeotherinvestigativemeans.Someofthesecasesmayalsobetoorecenttohavedevelopeda
publicrecordlargeenoughtoidentifywhichinvestigativetoolswereused.Wehavealsoidentifiedthreeadditionalplotsthatthe
governmenthasnotpubliclyclaimedasNSAsuccesses,butinwhichcourtrecordsandpublicreportingsuggesttheNSAhadarole.
However,itisnotclearwhetheranyofthosethreecasesinvolvedbulksurveillanceprograms.Finally, the
problem for U.S. counterterrorismofficialsis not that they need
vaster amounts of informationfromthebulksurveillanceprograms,but that they
dont sufficiently understandorwidelysharethe information they
already possessthatwasderivedfrom conventional law enforcement
and intelligence techniques.Thiswastruefortwoofthe9/11hijackerswhowereknowntobeinthe
UnitedStatesbeforetheattacksonNewYorkandWashington,aswellaswiththecaseofChicagoresidentDavidColemanHeadley,
whohelpedplanthe2008terroristattacksinMumbai,anditistheunfortunatepatternwehavealsoseeninseveralothersignificant
terrorismcases.
Dragnet tactics are ineffective, too much data to apprehend suspects in a
timely fashion.
Erwin 14 [Marshall Erwin, worked for five years as a counterterrorism and cybersecurity
analyst in the Intelligence Community. He also served as the lead intelligence specialist at the
Congressional Research Service and as a professional staff member on the Senate Homeland
Security and Government Affairs Committee, 1/13/14, Connecting the Dots: Assessing the
Effectiveness of Bulk Phone Records Collection, Just Security, http://justsecurity.org/5605/guestpost-connecting-dots/]
Judge William Pauley, in his late December court opinion about NSAs bulk phone records
collection, stated that the effectiveness of that collection cannot be seriously disputed. Less
than two weeks earlier, Judge Richard Leon, citing a lack of evidence that bulk records collection
had actually stopped a terrorist attack, seriously disputed the effectiveness of this intelligence
program.TodayspublicationofConnectingtheDots:AnalysisoftheEffectivenessofBulk
PhoneRecordsCollectionisanefforttocutthroughthismorass.InthespiritofRyansrecent
thoughtfulpostcallingforacandidassessmentofthebenefitsofcollectionconductedunder
Section215oftheUSAPATRIOTACT,I pooled the publicly available information about the
effectiveness of this program.The paper provides an in-depth treatment of the two primary
examples that the intelligence community has offered to demonstrate the value or
prospective value of bulk phone records collection: a 2009 al-Qaeda plot to bomb the New
York City subway and the case of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar.
Myconclusionissimple:neither of these cases demonstrates that
bulk phone records collection is effective. Those records did
not make a significant contribution to success against the 2009
plotbecauseat the point at which the NSA searched the bulk
records database, the FBI already had sufficient information to
disrupt the plot. It isalsounlikely that bulk collection would
have helped disrupt the 9/11 attacks,givencriticalbarriersto
informationsharingandasdemonstratedbythewealthofinformationalreadyavailable
totheintelligencecommunityaboutalMihdhar.
Myanalysisshowsthatthese two key cases cannot justify bulk phone
records collection,butajustificationthatisbothmorecompellingandmore
troublinghasalsobeenadvancedthesynthesislineofreasoning.Goodintelligence
work,theargumentgoes,isoftenaresultofasynthesisofdifferenttools,andthe
absenceofaspecificexampleoftheeffectivenessofbulkrecordscollectionshouldnot
thereforebetakenasanindicationoftheprogramslackofvalue.Thisisinsomesense
truegoodintelligenceworkisoftentheresultofasynthesisofdifferenttools,
challengingourabilitytoassessthevalueofanyspecifictool.Buttheargumentalso
providespolicymakersandtheintelligencecommunitywithameanstoavoidaskinghard
questionsaboutprogramsthatmaybeineffective.Theycanandshouldaskthose
Thelessonthatisemergingfromthedebateaboutbulkrecordscollectionisthatinanage
ofausterityandwith9/11recedingintohistory,a failure to justify our
current intelligence tools and structure will itself threaten the
integrity of our counterterrorism efforts,asAmericanslookwith
growingskepticismattheentireintelligenceapparatus.Thisisexactlywhatwesee
occurringwithNSAnowasimportantprogramsfornationalsecurityhavecomeunderas
muchcriticismasthoseofmarginalvalue.Ifwewanttoensurethelongtermviabilityof
counterterrorismeffortsandourcontinuedsuccessagainstalQaeda,wemust
increasinglypruneawaythoseprogramsandactivitiesthathavenothelpedkeepussafe.
Link Turn Allied Intelligence
NSA data collection drives away allies this crushes cooperation which is key
to fight terrorism
Hoskinson 5/12
CHARLES HOSKINSON | MAY 12, 2015. Washington Examiner. NSA spying undermines global efforts
to fight terrorism. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/nsa-spying-undermines-global-efforts-to-fightterrorism/article/2564341 (Charles Hoskinson is a Senior Writer for the Washington Examiner. He
previously worked as an editor for Politico, Congressional Quarterly and Agence France-Presse and
covered congressional affairs, defense and foreign policy. He is a former Army officer and a graduate of
George Washington University and the University of South Florida.)
Surveillance by the National Security Agency is undermining intelligence cooperation
with allies as the U.S. fights the growing threat of Islamic extremists. The June 2013
revelations of NSA spying by contractor Edward Snowden are having repercussions,
particularly in Germany, even as many allies come to appreciate the need to keep closer
tabs on potential terrorists in the wake of deadly attacks in Europe and North
America. Reports in the German media that the NSA asked the German intelligence service
BND to spy on Siemens, a German company suspected of dealing with Russia, as well as other European
companies and politicians, have rattled the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, which is already
dealing with demands from a parliamentary investigation into Snowden's allegations. The BND last week
reportedly stopped sharing Internet surveillance data with the NSA, the latest fallout
from the scandal. Efforts to smooth out the bumps caused by Snowden have contributed to
some of the fallout, as European parliaments become more assertive at overseeing
their own intelligence agencies, which often are full partners in the NSA's activities.
As European lawmakers have interacted with their U.S. counterparts, they have realized how
much more control Congress exercises over the NSA and other intelligence agencies
than they have over their own, said Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., who met last week with
lawmakers from Germany and 23 other European nations in Vienna and Berlin. "We have a lot of
leverage on our intelligence community through the Congress," Pittenger said. "They
didn't realize what we did and what we didn't do. Now they do ." As chairman of the
Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Pittenger has led efforts to repair the
damage caused by Snowden's leaks to the media since they were first published in June 2013. Deadly
attacks in Europe and elsewhere over the past few months by Islamist extremists, such as the January
killing of 17 people in France at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish market, have aided in
the effort. The lower house of France's parliament last week overwhelmingly passed a
sweeping surveillance measure dubbed the "French Patriot Act," after the 2001 law members of
Congress are working to reauthorize, though it does not include bulk data collection
measures such as those ruled illegal by a U.S. federal court.
Turn: Europe Backlash could restrict NSAs data collection, increasing
Ball 14 Reporter for France24, European news source http://www.france24.com/en/20140217-european-internet-plans-nsa-spying
Accessed 6/23/15 - FL
Europe could create its own communications network to prevent data passing
through the United States and falling into the hands of surveillance organisations
such as the NSA, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel . Speaking on her weekly
Germany had been in discussion with France over the idea,
which would allow Europeans to send emails and other data without it passing
through US networks and servers. It follows the revelations over the surveillance activities of the NSA that
podcast on Saturday, Merkel said
came to light in documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden. Information disclosed by the former NSA contractor
revealed that the US agency had gathered vast amounts of personal data from internet users across the world, including Europe. US
spies even reportedly hacked into Merkels mobile phone to monitor her calls. Weve got to do more for data protection in Europe,
theres no doubt about it, Merkel said on Saturday. Well talk with France about how we can maintain a high level of data
protection. Above all, well talk about European providers that offer security for our citizens, so that one shouldnt have to send
emails and other information across the Atlantic. Rather, one could build up a communication network inside Europe. The German
chancellor also bemoaned the fact that internet giants such as Facebook and Google could base their operations in countries where
data protection is lowest while carrying out business activities in states with more rigorous data privacy laws, such as Germany. An
official at French President Franois Hollandes office confirmed to the Reuters news agency that the idea of a European
communications network had been discussed with Germany and that Paris agrees with Merkels proposal . It is important that we
take up the initiative together, said the official. Unlikely to stop the NSA However, it is unclear whether a European
communications network would be effective in stopping the NSA and other surveillance organisations from accessing private data.
In an interview with German broadcaster ARD earlier this year, Snowden said that attempts to create walled-off national internets
would do little to stop the NSA. The NSA goes where the data is. If the NSA can pull text messages out of telecommunication
networks in China, they can probably manage to get Facebook messages out of Germany, he said. Snowden also warned that US
surveillance organisations can access European data through their close ties with other intelligence agencies. The German services
and the US services are in bed together, he told ARD. They not only share information the reporting of results from intelligence
but they actually share the tools and the infrastructure when they work together against joint targets and services. Nick Pickles,
director of the UK-based civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said that plans for a walled-off European internet fail to
address the core issue of government surveillance of private data. A Balkanised web might deliver some short-term benefits to
those countries who feel the activities of GHCQ and the NSA have intruded upon their citizens' privacy, but in the long term it
undermines the digital economy and gives weight to those states arguing for greater control over the internet in their own countries,
he told FRANCE 24. The legitimate concerns about ensuring innocent citizens do not have their data routinely collected by
Allegations of US
spying on its allies have upset ties between Europe and Washington. On Wednesday,
lawmakers in the European Parliament threatened to withhold their consent for a
trade pact currently being negotiated with the US over data privacy concerns.
intelligence agencies is better addressed through reform of surveillance laws and stronger encryption.
NSA Bulk data collection is not KeyPlan solves with International Relations
Lecher 5/7 [Journalist for the Verge, Germany has stopped sharing internet surveillance info with the NSA published
5/7/15 http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568431/germany-nsa-spying accessed 6/23/15 -FL]
Last month, it was revealed that Germany's
electronic surveillance agency, the BND, spent years
spying for the NSA, snagging communications on European politicians and defense
contractors. The revelation has caused a scandal in Germany, and Reutersreports that the BND has now stopped
sharing the sensitive information. According to Reuters, the decision was made after "a row" within the German
government, and the BND is demanding detailed explanations before handing over
information, which the US agency has reportedly declined to provide. (Those rules were
already in place for phone and fax information, and that information will continue to be passed along.) The NSA, as first reported in
German media, obtained information on thousands of "selectors," search terms like mobile phone numbers and IP addresses the NSA
provided before the BND turned over additional information it had stored. Since the revelations produced by documents from Edward
Snowden including the fact that the NSA spied on Angela Merkel's personal phone
Germany's relationship
with the US government has become tense and distrustful. Groups have called on Chancellor
Angela Merkel to publicly release the selector lists, while the country's top prosecutor is investigating whether the BND broke any
Link Turn Info Overload
Mass data overload makes preventing terrorism impossible
Eddington 15 Patrick, a policy analyst in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute. He was formerly a senior policy advisor
to Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) and a military imagery analyst at the CIAs National Photographic Interpretation Center. No, Mass Surveillance Won't Stop
Terrorist Attacks,, Jan 27, http://reason.com/archives/2015/01/27/mass-surveillance-and-terrorism#.tpu3bu:GSfj
The recent terrorist attack on the office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo generated a now-familiar meme
Another terrorist attack means we need more surveillance. Sen. Bob Corker
(R-Tenn.) said that while "Congress having oversight certainly is important ...
what is more important relative to these types of events is ensuring we
don't overly hamstring the NSA's ability to collect this kind of
information in advance and keep these kinds of activities from
occurring." Similarly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) spoke of his "fear" that "our intelligence
capabilities, those designed to prevent such an attack from taking place on our shores, are quickly
eroding," adding that the government surveillance "designed to prevent these types of attacks from
occurring is under siege." A recent poll demonstrates that their sentiments are widely shared in the wake of
the attack. But would more mass surveillance have prevented the assault on the Charlie Hebdo office? Events
from 9/11 to the present help provide the answer: 2009: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabi.e., the "underwear
bomber"nearly succeeded in downing the airline he was on over Detroit because, according to thenNational Counterterrorism Center (NCC) director Michael Leiter, the federal Intelligence Community(IC) failed
"to connect, integrate, and fully understand the intelligence" it had collected 2009: Army Major Nidal Hasan was able to
conduct his deadly, Anwar al-Awlaki-inspired rampage at Ft. Hood, Texas, because the FBI bungled its Hasan
investigation. 2013: The Boston Marathon bombing happened, at least in part, because the CIA,
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI, NCC, and National Security Agency (NSA) failed to properly
coordinate and share information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his family, associations, and travel to and
from Russia in 2012. Those failures were detailed in a 2014 report prepared by the Inspectors General of the
IC, Department of Justice, CIA, and DHS. 2014: The Charlie Hebdo and French grocery store attackers were
not only known to French and U.S. authorities but one had a prior terrorism conviction and another was monitored
for years by French authorities until less than a year before the attack on the magazine. No,
surveillance does not prevent terrorist attacks. Its worth remembering
that the mass surveillance programs initiated by the U.S. government after the 9/11
attacksthe legal ones and the constitutionally-dubious oneswere premised on the
belief that bin Ladens hijacker-terrorists were able to pull off the
attacks because of a failure to collect enough data. Yet in their
subsequent reports on the attacks, the Congressional Joint
Inquiry (2002) and the 9/11 Commission found exactly the
opposite. The data to detect (and thus foil) the plots was in the U.S.
governments hands prior to the attacks; the failures were
ones of sharing, analysis, and dissemination. That malady perfectly
describes every intelligence failure from Pearl Harbor to the present day. The Office of the Director of
National Intelligence (created by Congress in 2004) was supposed to be the answer to the "failure-toconnect-the-dots" problem.
Ten years on, the problem remains, the IC
bureaucracy is bigger than ever, and our government is
continuing to rely on mass surveillance programs that have
failed time and again to stop terrorists while simultaneously
undermining the civil liberties and personal privacy of every
American. The quest to "collect it all," to borrow a phrase from
NSA Director Keith Alexander, only leads to the accumulation of
masses of useless information, making it harder to find real
threats and costing billions to store. A recent Guardian editorial noted that such
mass-surveillance myopia is spreading among European political leaders as
well, despite the fact that "terrorists, from 9/11 to the Woolwich
jihadists and the neo-Nazi Anders Breivik, have almost always
come to the authorities attention before murdering." Mass
surveillance is not only destructive of our liberties, its continued use is a virtual
guarantee of more lethal intelligence failures. And our continued will to
disbelieve those facts is a mental dodge we engage in at our peril.
Too much data is counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. Plan
eliminates the dragnet tactics and solves better than the Status Quo
MAASS 5/28 [PETER MAASS, 5/28/15, INSIDE NSA, OFFICIALS
PRIVATELY CRITICIZE COLLECT IT ALL SURVEILLANCE, The
Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/28/nsa-officials-privatelycriticize-collect-it-all-surveillance/]
AS MEMBERS OF CONGRESS struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before the Patriot Act expires, they
might consider the unusual advice of an
intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency who warned
about the danger of collecting too much data. Imagine, the analyst wrote in a leaked document, that you are
standing in a shopping aisle trying to decide between jam, jelly or fruit spread, which size, sugar-free or not, generic or Smuckers. It
can be paralyzing. We
in the agency are at risk of a similar, collective paralysis in the face of a
dizzying array of choices every single day, the analyst wrote in 2011. Analysis paralysis isnt only a cute
rhyme. Its the term for what happens when you spend so much time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome .
Its what happens in SIGINT [signals intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow,
and exploit the best ones. The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually heard
from the agencys critics: that the
U.S. governments collect it all strategy can undermine the
effort to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear to
contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global communications helps the
government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack. The Patriot Act, portions of which expire on
Sunday, has been used since 2001 to conduct a number of dragnet surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of phone
metadata from American companies. But the
documents suggest that analysts at the NSA have
drowned in data since 9/11, making it more difficult for them to find the real threats.
The titles of the documents capture their overall message: Data Is Not Intelligence, The Fallacies Behind the Scenes, Cognitive
Overflow? Summit Fever and In Praise of Not Knowing. Other titles include Dealing With a Tsunami of Intercept and
Overcome by Overload? The documents are not uniform in their positions. Some acknowledge the overload problem but say the
agency is adjusting well. They do not specifically mention the Patriot Act, just the larger dilemma of cutting through a flood of
incoming data. But
in an apparent sign of the scale of the problem, the documents confirm
that the NSA even has a special category of programs that is called Coping With
Information Overload. The jam vs. jelly document, titled Too Many Choices, started off in a colorful way but ended
with a fairly stark warning: The SIGINT mission is far too vital to unnecessarily expand the haystacks while we search for the
needles. Prioritization is key. These doubts are infrequently heard from officials inside the NSA. These documents are a window into
the private thinking of mid-level officials who are almost never permitted to discuss their concerns in public.2 AN AMUSING
PARABLE circulated at the NSA a few years ago. Two people go to a farm and purchase a truckload of melons for a dollar each. They
then sell the melons along a busy road for the same price, a dollar. As they drive back to the farm for another load, they realize they
arent making a profit, so one of them suggests, Do you think we need a bigger truck? The parable was written by an intelligence
analyst in a document dated Jan. 23, 2012 that was titled, Do We Need a Bigger SIGINT Truck? It expresses, in a lively fashion, a
critique goes to the heart of the agencys drive to gather as much of the worlds
communications as possible: because it may not find what it needs in a partial
haystack of data, the haystack is expanded as much as possible, on the assumption
that more data will eventually yield useful information. THE PROBLEM IS THAT
critique of the agencys effort to collect what former NSA Director Keith Alexander referred to as the whole haystack.
WHEN YOU COLLECT IT ALL, WHEN YOU MONITOR EVERYONE, YOU
UNDERSTAND NOTHING. EDWARD SNOWDEN The Snowden files show that in practice, it doesnt turn out
that way: more is not necessarily better, and in fact, extreme volume creates its own
challenges. Recently I tried to answer what seemed like a relatively straightforward question about which telephony metadata
collection capabilities are the most important in case we need to shut something off when the metadata coffers get full, wrote the
intelligence analyst. By the end of the day, I felt like capitulating with the white flag of, We need COLOSSAL data storage so we
dont have to worry about it, (aka we need a bigger SIGINT truck). The analyst added, Without metrics, how do we know that we
have improved something or made it worse? Theres a running joke that well only know if collection is important by shutting it off
and seeing if someone screams. Another document, while not mentioning the dangers of collecting too much data, expressed
concerns about pursuing entrenched but unproductive programs. How many times have you been watching a terrible movie, only to
convince yourself to stick it out to the end and find out what happens, since youve already invested too much time or money to
simply walk away? the document asked. This gone too far to stop now mentality is our built-in mechanism to help us allocate and
ration resources. However, it can work to our detriment in prioritizing and deciding which projects or efforts are worth further
expenditure of resources, regardless of how much has already been sunk. As has been said before, insanity is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting different results. WE
ARE DROWNING IN INFORMATION. AND
YET WE KNOW NOTHING. FOR SURE. NSA INTELLIGENCE ANALYST
Many of these documents were written by intelligence analysts who had regular columns distributed on NSANet, the agencys
intranet. One of the columns was called Signal v. Noise, another was called The SIGINT Philosopher. Two of the documents cite
the academic work of Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on whats become known as the attention
economy. Simon wrote that consumers
and managers have trouble making smart choices
because their exposure to more information decreases their ability to understand the
information. Both documents mention the same passage from Simons essay, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich
World: In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that
information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence
a wealth
of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it. In addition to consulting Nobel-prize winning work, NSA analysts have
turned to easier literature, such as Malcolm Gladwells best-selling Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The author of a
2011 document referenced Blink and stated, The
key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is
understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the
latter. The author added, Gladwell has captured one of the biggest challenges facing SID today. Our costs associated with this
information overload are not only financial, such as the need to build data warehouses large enough to store the mountain of data that
arrives at our doorstep each day, but also include the more intangible costs of too much data to review, process, translate and report.
Alexander, the NSA director from 2005 to 2014 and chief proponent of the agencys collect it all strategy, vigorously defended the
bulk collection programs. What we have, from my perspective, is a reasonable approach on how we can defend our nation and
protect our civil liberties and privacy, he said at a security conference in Aspen in 2013. He added, You need the haystack to find the
needle. The same point has been made by other officials, including James Cole, the former deputy attorney general who told a
congressional committee in 2013, If youre looking for the needle in the haystack, you have to have the entire haystack to look
through.
The NSA is drowning in data that severely limits their counterterror efforts
ANGWIN 13 [JULIA ANGWIN, 12/25/13, NSA Struggles to Make Sense of
Flood of Surveillance Data, The New York Times,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023042022045792520228236588
50]
LAUSANNE, Switzerland William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to
snoop on Internet traffic around the world, delivered an unusual message here in September to an audience worried that the spy
agency knows
too much. It knows so much, he said, that it can't understand what it has. "What
they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data," Mr. Binney said at a
privacy conference here. The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to
conduct legitimate surveillance, claims Mr. Binney, who rose to the civilian equivalent of a general during more
than 30 years at the NSA before retiring in 2001. Analysts are swamped with so much information that
they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible
temptation for misuse. Mr. Binney's warning has gotten far less attention than legal questions raised by leaks from former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency's mass collection of information around the world. Those revelations unleashed a
re-examination of the spy agency's aggressive tactics. But the NSA needs more room to store all the data it collectsand new phone
records, data on money transfers and other information keep pouring in. A new storage center being built in Utah will eventually be
able to hold more than 100,000 times as much as the contents of printed materials in the Library of Congress, according to outside
experts. Some
of the documents released by Mr. Snowden detail concerns inside the NSA about
drowning in information. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign cellphone-location tracking by the
agency said the efforts were "outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store"
data. In March 2013, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the
"relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection," another document shows. In response
to questions about Mr. Binney's claims, an NSA spokeswoman says the agency is "not collecting everything, but we do need the tools
to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to the nation and its allies." Existing surveillance programs were
approved by "all three branches of government," and each branch "has a role in oversight," she adds. In a statement through his
lawyer, Mr. Snowden says: "When
your working process every morning starts with poking around a
haystack of seven billion innocent lives, you're going to miss things." He adds: "We're
blinding people with data we don't need." A presidential panel recommended earlier this month that the
agency shut down its bulk collection of telephone-call records of all Americans. The federal government could accomplish the same
goal by querying phone companies, the panel concluded. The panel also recommended the creation of "smart software" that could sort
data as the information is collected, rather than the current system where "vast amounts of data are swept up and the sorting is done
after it has been copied" on to data-storage systems. Administration officials are reviewing the report. A separate task force is expected
to issue its own findings next year, and lawmakers have proposed several bills that would change how the NSA collects and uses data.
The 70-year-old Mr. Binney says he is generally underwhelmed by the panel's "bureaucratic" report, though "it would be something
meaningful" if the controversy leads to adoption of the "smart software" strategy and creation of a technology oversight group with
full access to "be in the knickers of the NSA" and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Binney lives off his government pension and
makes occasional appearances to talk about his work at the NSA. The
spy agency has defended its sweeping
surveillance programs as essential in the fight against terrorism. But having too
much data can hurt those efforts, according to Mr. Binney and a handful of colleagues who have raised concerns
since losing an internal battle to build privacy-protecting Internet surveillance tools in the late 1990s.
NSAs bulk data collection is interfering with counterterror
Brown 15 [Ellen Brown, 5/7/15, NSA Admits It Collects Too MUCH Info to
Stop Terror Attacks, Washington Blog,
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/nsa-admits-it-collects-too-muchinfo-to-stop-terror-attacks.html]
The Problem Isnt Too Little Spying Its Too Much Top security experts agree
that mass surveillance is ineffective and actually makes us MORE vulnerable to
terrorism. For example, the former head of the NSAs global intelligence gathering
operations Bill Binney says that the mass surveillance INTERFERES with the
governments ability to catch bad guys, and that the government failed to stop 9/11,
the Boston Bombing, the Texas shootings and other terror attacks is because it was
overwhelmed with data from mass surveillance on Americans. Binney told Washingtons Blog:
A good deal of the failure is, in my opinion, due to bulk data. So, I am calling all these attacks a result of
Data bulk failure. Too much data and too many people for the 10-20 thousand analysts to
follow. Simple as that. Especially when they make word match pulls (like Google) and get dumps of data selected from close to 4
billion people. This is the same problem NSA had before 9/11. They had data that could
have prevented 9/11 but did not know they had it in their data bases. This back then when the
bulk collection was not going on. Now the problem is orders of magnitude greater. Result, its
harder to succeed. Expect more of the same from our deluded government that thinks more
data improves possibilities of success. All this bulk data collection and storage does give law enforcement a great
capability to retroactively analyze anyone they want. But, of course,that
data cannot be used in court since it
was not acquired with a warrant. Binney and other high-level NSA whistleblowers noted last year: On December
26, for example, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy front-page article, quoting NSAs former Senior
Technical Director William Binney (undersigned) and former chief of NSAs SIGINT Automation
Research Center Edward Loomis (undersigned) warning that NSA is drowning in useless data lacking
adequate privacy provisions, to the point where it cannot conduct effective terroristrelated surveillance and analysis. A recently disclosed internal NSA briefing
document corroborates the drowning, with the embarrassing admission, in bureaucratize, that NSA
collection has been outpacing NSAs ability to ingest, process, and store data let
alone analyze the take.
Author Qual PCLOB
This board is the most knowledgeable they have classified materials from
the NSA, briefings from the intelligence community, private companies, etc
In our effort to carry out this balancing task with respect to the NSAs Section 215 program, we
have examined a
wealth of classified materials regarding the operation of the program. As we have reviewed
such materials, the intelligence community has provided us with follow-up information
responding to specific questions or concerns we have posed to them. We have taken public
testimony from government officials and have received a series of classified
briefings with a range of personnel from the NSA and other elements of the
intelligence community. We have spoken with representatives of private companies
who have received and complied with court orders under the NSAs surveillance
program. We have heard from academics, technology experts, civil liberties
advocates, and former government officials through written submissions provided to us and through
commentary at public workshops that we have conducted. In particular, we have closely scrutinized the
specific cases cited by the government as instances in which telephone records
obtained under Section 215 were useful in counterterrorism investigations. In the wake of
the unauthorized disclosures during the summer of 2013, the intelligence community compiled a list of fifty-four counterterrorism
events in which Section 215 or Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 contributed to a success story. Twelve of those
incidents involved the use of Section 215. We have examined those incidents in depth, attempting to discern precisely what was
accomplished in each case through the use of Section 215 records and whether similar results could have been achieved using more
tailored means of gathering telephone records.
WOT is Racist
Justification of the War on Terror underpins modern racism
Valenzuela, 5 Manuel Valenzuela, social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst
and Internet columnist; The Making of the Enemy, 19 December 2005,
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Why_They_Hate_Us/Making_Enemies.html
Once again, an enemy has been conveniently manufactured out of the dark rooms of Madison Avenue focus groups to fit nicely into the agenda of the
corporatists and neocons in power. Serving the interests of the corporatists, fundamentalist Islamicists, of which only a small minority exists willing to
commit violence, make a great enemy from which to hypnotize the population: unknown, alien, of different culture and language, existing in multiple
desired states, dark skinned, invisible, violent and perhaps most importantly, of a religious belief system at odds with the fundamentalist Christian
The systemic marketing of Muslims and Arabs and Persians as external threats
capable of destroying our way of life, our religious norms, and the cherished charades of freedom and democracy is, therefore, the
perfect weapon launched against the masses, for naturally we impute the actions of a minute lunatic fringe with all Muslim people, allowing the
orthodoxy dominant in today's America.
terror of a few miscreants to penetrate our fragile psyches and our even more fragile belief structure. Through the methodical brainwashing used in
Hollywood and the corporate media, the Arab/Persian is made to be a rabid demon wishing death upon our children's future, ready at any moment to blow
himself up, committing heinous acts of barbarity, murdering and bombing and rampaging, for he is a terrorist, the descendant of the Soviet, the next
adaptation of American enemy, the next marketable wonder the corporatists exploit to enrapture our minds and control our lives.
The Arab/Persian
as enemy serves to militarize the mind of the population, to distract us from more ominous, internal threats, to control
and brainwash the weaker minded among us, creating a marching army of "good
Germans." It helps mobilize the country towards a perpetual war footing, acting as
an excuse to wage war, to increase the profits and wealth and power of the
corporatists, and to further lead America down the road to eventual fascism.
Through war the military-energy-industrial complex and the corporate world can
further engorge themselves, using the energy and wages of the masses for the
construction of their weapons of death and suffering. Through war they can lay claim to the resources of the
Using Arabs and/or Persians - who just happen to be native
with underground fields of oil that the military-energy industrial
complex craves - as the new American enemy gives our corporatist government the perfect excuse to
Middle East, the all-important lifeline to continued economic dominance.
peoples of the Middle East, the very same lands saturated
invade, occupy and devastate desired lands with American imposed capitalism. Accorded the face of evildoer
extraordinaire, stereotyped and marginalized through the lens of fiction, the Arab/Persian people, diverse and complex, unknown to the undereducated,
. If the Arab/Persian
can be demonized to be hated and feared by a population brainwashed by the
hypnotizing glare of television, the nation will be much easier to militarize, the people's
act as the key to unlocking the American people's historical reluctance to fight wars both immoral and of choice
children will be much easier to enlist as cannon fodder and the internal policies of the nation will be much easier to control and manipulate.
sustained viability of the nation's militarization - and some would say the ongoing embezzlement of the people's treasure by
corporatists - desired by corporatists in power depends on the Arab and Persian and Muslim people remaining, in the
conscious of the masses, forever an enemy, always a demon, their reputation strong enough to make of them a most potent
adversary, capable of hijacking airplanes, destroying skyscrapers and threatening to strike fear amongst the population, as always hating our way of life.
What better scapegoat than the Arab/Persian population if one wants to conquer the resources of the Middle East and Central Asia? What greater
marketing ploy could be manufactured to make enemies of the same people whose resources you desire? And, with
acting as a vicious circle of recruitment, by becoming a self fulfilling prophesy , having
violence beget violence, with more and more Arabs incensed at the actions of America, ready to join in jihad where only few extremists
existed before, (Al-Qaeda has become a mass movement, franchised and claimed by many insurgents, most of whom have never met a real member of the
group) thereby creating ever
more non-fictitious enemies, the military-energy industrial complex has the
capacity and will to continue the war into perpetuity , using the anger on the Muslim street, along with the fear and
hatred of Americans, to further its own interests, exploiting both Muslim and American, pitting one against the other, creating
fictitious conflict where none exists, concocting enemies out of two peoples whose similarities as humans quashes our differences of
culture. For a citizenry made to fear an alien people of which little is known about, with hatred and xenophobia running through their veins, programmed
by the keepers at the gate to demand blood and death, can, at the push of a few psychological buttons, be mobilized into a war frenzy where the human
brain, thinking, analytical and logical, is set aside and replaced by our primitive, mammalian brain, full of primordial behaviors and emotions.
the population's collective conscious has mutated according to the designs of their puppeteers the march towards
war, invasion and occupation can commence.
Impact Defense Food Prices
Food Prices have risen before-- impact not triggered
Finz 10 [Stacy Finz is a business reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, article published 12/16/10
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Food-prices-rise-sharply-and-there-s-more-to-2453175.php accessed 6/24/15 -FL]
For the first time since 2008, inflation is hitting consumers in the stomach .
Grocery prices grew by more than 1
1/2 times the overall rate of inflation this year, outpaced only by costs of transportation and medical care,
according to numbers released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists predict that this is only the beginning .
Fueled by the higher costs of wheat, sugar, corn, soybeans and energy, shoppers
could see as much as a 4 percent increase at the supermarket checkout next year.
"I
noticed just this month that my grocery bill for the same old stuff - cereal, eggs, milk, orange juice, peanut butter, bread - spiked $25,"
said Sue Perry, deputy editor of ShopSmart magazine, a nonprofit publication from Consumer Reports. "It was a bit of sticker shock."
Since November 2009, meat, poultry, fish and eggs have surged 5.8
percent in price. Dairy and related products have gone up 3.8 percent; fats and oils,
3 percent; and sugar and sweets, 1.2 percent. While overall inflation nationwide was 1.1 percent ,
grocery prices went up 1.7 percent nationally and 1.3 percent in the Bay Area , said Todd
Johnson, an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics office in San Francisco. " The largest effects on grocery
prices here over the last month were tomatoes, followed by eggs, fish and seafood ."
But it makes sense.
Produce steady Across the country, the price of produce has remained fairly steady. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts
that next year the price of fruits and vegetables, like many other food commodities, could go up. The government agency is
forecasting a 2 to 3 percent food inflation rate in 2011 - a pace that is not unusual in a rebounding economy. "We usually err on the
conservative side," said Ephraim Leibtag, a senior economist with the USDA, adding that "2011 holds a bit of uncertainty, so I
wouldn't be surprised if it goes higher. If it goes to 6 percent, then we should be worried." Michael Swanson, an agricultural economist
at Wells Fargo, said that as long as corn, soybean and energy prices continue to climb, food inflation could reach 4 percent in 2011.
the nation is likely to see the biggest increases
since 2008, when the food inflation rate was a record 5.5 percent. The global
demand for corn - used for food and ethanol - has swelled so much that feed costs
for farmers and ranchers are being passed on to the consumer, Swanson said.
"The USDA always plays it safe," he said, adding that
Food Prices have already risen
Gimnenez and Peabody 08 [Eric Holt-Gimnez and Loren Peabody, From Food
Rebellions to Food Sovereignty: Urgent call to fix a broken food system, Institute for Food and
Development Policy, May 16, 2008 accessed 6/24/15 FL]
The World Bank reports that global food prices rose 83% over the last three years
and the FAO cites a 45% increase in their world food price index during just the
past nine months. The Economists comparable index stands at its highest point
since it was originally formulated in 1845. As of March 2008, average world wheat
prices were 130% above their level a year earlier, soy prices were 87% higher, rice
had climbed 74%, and maize was up 31%.
Impact Defense Nuclear Terrorism
Mueller 10 John, professor of political science at Ohio State University, Calming Our Nuclear Jitters,
Issues in Science & Technology, Winter2010, Vol. 26, Issue 2
In contrast to these predictions, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited
desire and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief
exploration of the possible routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered
that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful. The most
plausible route for terrorists, according to most experts, would be to manufacture an
atomic device themselves from purloined fissile material (plutonium or, more likely,
highly enriched uranium). This task, however, remains a daunting one, requiring that a
considerable series of difficult hurdles be conquered and in sequence. Outright armed
theft of fissile material is exceedingly unlikely not only because of the resistance of
guards, but because chase would be immediate. A more promising approach would be to corrupt insiders to
smuggle out the required substances. However, this requires the terrorists to pay off a host of greedy confederates, including brokers
and money-transmitters, any one of whom could turn on them or, either out of guile or incompetence, furnish them with stuff that is
were somehow successful at obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material, they would
then probably have to transport it a long distance over unfamiliar terrain and probably
while being pursued by security forces. Crossing international borders would be
facilitated by following established smuggling routes, but these are not as chaotic as they
appear and are often under the watch of suspicious and careful criminal regulators. If border
personnel became suspicious of the commodity being smuggled, some of them might find it in their interest to disrupt passage,
perhaps to collect the bounteous reward money that would probably be offered by alarmed governments once the uranium theft had
been discovered. Once
outside the country with their precious booty, terrorists would need to
set up a large and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a bomb and then to
populate it with a very select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians, machinists,
and administrators. The group would have to be assembled and retained for the monumental task while no consequential suspicions were generated among
friends, family, and police about their curious and sudden absence from normal pursuits back home. Members of the bomb-building team would also have to be utterly devoted to
the cause, of course, and they would have to be willing to put their lives and certainly their careers at high risk, because after their bomb was discovered or exploded they would
probably become the targets of an intense worldwide dragnet operation. Some observers have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could
get enough fissile material. But Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerland's Spiez Laboratory, bluntly conclude that the
task "could hardly be accomplished by a subnational group." They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches and general ideas, and that even with a good
blueprint the terrorist group would most certainly be forced to redesign. They also stress that the work is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting, and that the technical
requirements in several fields verge on the unfeasible. Stephen Younger, former director of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos Laboratories, has made a similar argument,
pointing out that uranium is "exceptionally difficult to machine" whereas "plutonium is one of the most complex metals ever discovered, a material whose basic properties are
sensitive to exactly how it is processed." Stressing the "daunting problems associated with material purity, machining, and a host of other issues," Younger concludes, "to think that
the best circumstances, the process of making a bomb could take months or even a year
or more, which would, of course, have to be carried out in utter secrecy. In addition, people in the area, including criminals, may
a terrorist group, working in isolation with an unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools and supplies" could fabricate a bomb "is farfetched at best."
observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of technicians unlikely to be locals. If the effort to
build a bomb was successful, the finished product, weighing a ton or more, would then have to be transported to and smuggled into the
relevant target country where it would have to be received by collaborators who are at once totally dedicated and technically proficient
at handling, maintaining, detonating, and perhaps assembling the weapon after it arrives. The
financial costs of this
extensive and extended operation could easily become monumental. There would be expensive
equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up and people to pay or pay off. Some operatives might work for free out of utter dedication to the
cause, but the vast conspiracy also requires the subversion of a considerable array of criminals and opportunists, each of whom has
every incentive to push the price for cooperation as high as possible. Any criminals competent and capable enough to be effective
allies are also likely to be both smart enough to see boundless opportunities for extortion and psychologically equipped by their
profession to be willing to exploit them. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could,
if with great difficulty, overcome each obstacle and that doing so in each case is "not impossible." But although
it may not
be impossible to surmount each individual step, the likelihood that a group could
surmount a series of them quickly becomes vanishingly small. Table 1 attempts to catalogue the
Adopting probability estimates that purposely and heavily bias
the case in the terrorists' favor for example, assuming the terrorists have a 50% chance of
overcoming each of the 20 obstacles the chances that a concerted effort would be
successful comes out to be less than one in a million . If one assumes, somewhat more
realistically, that their chances at each barrier are one in three, the cumulative odds that
they will be able to pull off the deed drop to one in well over three billion. Other routes
would-be terrorists might take to acquire a bomb are even more problematic. They are
unlikely to be given or sold a bomb by a generous like-minded nuclear state for delivery
abroad because the risk would be high, even for a country led by extremists, that the
bomb (and its source) would be discovered even before delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on
a target the donor would not approve, including on the donor itself. Another concern would be that the terrorist
group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence.
Nuclear terrorism wont happen
Chapman 12 (columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune.) http://reason.com/archives/2012/05/17/theimplausibility-of-nuclear-terrorism -FL
The events required to make that happen comprise a multitude of Herculean tasks. First, a
terrorist group has to get a
bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia's inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one
would have already gone missing. Besides, those devices are probably no longer a danger, since weapons that are not
scrupulously maintained (as those have not been) quickly become what one expert calls "radioactive scrap metal ." If terrorists
were able to steal a Pakistani bomb, they would still have to defeat the arming codes and
other safeguards designed to prevent unauthorized use. As for Iran, no nuclear state has ever given a bomb to
an allyfor reasons even the Iranians can grasp. Stealing some 100 pounds of bomb fuel would require
help from rogue individuals inside some government who are prepared to jeopardize their
own lives. The terrorists, notes Mueller, would then have to spirit it "hundreds of miles out of the
country over unfamiliar terrain, and probably while being pursued by security forces." Then
comes the task of building a bomb. It's not something you can gin up with spare parts and power tools
in your garage. It requires millions of dollars, a safe haven and advanced equipment plus
people with specialized skills, lots of time and a willingness to die for the cause . And if alQaida could make a prototype, another obstacle would emerge: There is no guarantee it
would work, and there is no way to test it. Assuming the jihadists vault over those Himalayas, they would
have to deliver the weapon onto American soil. Sure, drug smugglers bring in contraband all the time - but
seeking their help would confront the plotters with possible exposure or extortion. This, like every other step in the entire process,
means expanding
the circle of people who know what's going on, multiplying the chance
someone will blab, back out or screw up. Mueller recalls that after the Irish Republican Army failed in an attempt to
blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it said, "We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." AlQaida, he says, faces a very different challenge: For it to carry out a nuclear attack, everything has to go right. For us to escape, only
one thing has to go wrong. That has heartening implications. If al-Qaida embarks on the project, it has only a minuscule chance of
seeing it bear fruit. Given the formidable odds, it probably won't bother. None of this means we should stop trying to minimize the risk
by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening. But it offers good reason to think
that in this war,
it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen.
Nuclear terrorism not a threat
Jenkins 08 [Brian Jenkins became a paratrooper and a captain in the Green Berets. He is a decorated combat veteran, having
served in the Seventh Special Forces Group in the Dominican Republic and with the Fifth Special Forces Group in Vietnam. He
received the Department of the Army's highest award for his service. In 1996, President Clinton appointed Jenkins to the White House
Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. From 1999 to 2000, he served as adviser to the National Commission on Terrorism and
in 2000 was appointed to the U.S. Comptroller General's Advisory Board. He is a research associate at the Mineta Transportation
Institute, where he directs the continuing research on protecting surface transportation against terrorist attacks. Article published
October 20th 2008 http://www.govexec.com/defense/2008/10/expert-says-nuclear-terrorism-is-not-a-major-threat/27888/ accessed
6/24/15 --FL]
Seven years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, experts and presidential candidates continue to put nuclear terrorism atop
Brian Michael Jenkins, a longtime terrorism
expert with the Rand Corp., says that the threat lies more in the realms of
Hollywood dramas and terrorist dreams than in reality. There has never been an act
of nuclear terrorism , he notes, yet the threat is so potentially catastrophic that it incites fear -- and that fear fulfills a
their lists of the gravest threats to the United States. Yet
terrorist's primary goal. National Journal Staff Correspondent James Kitfield interviewed Jenkins about his research into nuclear
terrorism for his new book, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? Edited excerpts from the interview follow. NJ: Why did you decide to delve
so deeply into the psychological underpinnings of nuclear terror? Jenkins: Well, I couldn't write about the history of nuclear terrorism,
because at least as of yet there hasn't been any. So that would have been a very short book. Nonetheless, the U.S. government has
stated that it is the No. 1 threat to the national security of the United States. In fact, according to public opinion polls, two out of five
Americans consider it likely that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city within the next five years. That struck
me as an astonishing level of apprehension. NJ: To what do you attribute that fear? Jenkins: I concluded that there is a difference
between nuclear terrorism and nuclear terror. Nuclear terrorism is about the possibility that terrorists will acquire and detonate a
nuclear weapon. Nuclear terror, on the other hand, concerns our anticipation of such an attack. It's about our imagination. And while
there is no history of nuclear terrorism, there is a rich history of nuclear terror. It's
deeply embedded in our popular culture and in policy-making circles . NJ: So the fear of
nuclear terrorism is not new? Jenkins: Almost as soon as the people involved in the Manhattan Project tested an actual atomic bomb
they started to wonder about the possibility of someone using it for terrorist purposes. In the 1970s, some talented nuclear weapons
designers studied the issue of whether someone outside of a government program could possibly design and build a workable nuclear
weapon. They concluded it was possible, and then postulated who might do such a thing -- terrorists! So, in a way, the threat preceded
any terrorist actually thinking about the issue. To a certain extent, we educated the terrorists on the subject. NJ: Hasn't Al Qaeda ,
in particular, focused considerable energy on nuclear weapons? Jenkins: Yes, because terror is the use of violence to create an
atmosphere of fear that causes people to exaggerate the strength of the terrorists, and they are very good at that. So in Al Qaeda's
realize that if they put the words
"terrorism" and "nuclear" in proximity to each other it creates added fear. It also
excites their constituency, because nothing excites the powerless more than the idea
of ultimate power .
media jihad there is a recurrent theme of nuclear terrorism. They
Terrorist do not have nuclear weaponsStates dont want to give them up
Walt 13 [Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Rene Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/25/why-we-dont-need-to-worry-about-a-nuclear-handoff/ article published 7/25/13 accessed 6/25/15
FL]
The fear that nuclear-armed states would hand weapons to terrorists has been a staple of U.S. threat-mongering ever since 9/11. It was
a key part of the justification for invading Iraq in 2003, and it forms part of the constant drumbeat for military action against Iran. But
it never made much sense for two reasons. First,
a nuclear-armed state has little incentive to give up
control over weapons it has labored long and hard to acquire, for what could the
state possibly gain from doing so? Second, a state giving nuclear weapons to
terrorists could never be sure that those weapons would not be traced back to it and
thereby invite devastating retaliation . Lieber and Press examine the historical record and show that it is almost
impossible to conduct a major terrorist operation and not be blamed for it. Heres the abstract for their article: Many experts consider
nuclear terrorism the single greatest threat to U.S. security. The fear that a state might transfer nuclear materials to terrorists was a core
justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, more recently, for a strike against Irans nuclear program. The logical basis for this
concern is sound: if a state could orchestrate an anonymous nuclear terror attack, it could destroy an enemy yet avoid retaliation. But
how likely is it that the perpetrators of nuclear terrorism could remain anonymous?
Data culled from a decade of terrorist incidents reveal that attribution is very likely
after high-casualty terror attacks . Attribution rates are even higher for attacks on the U.S. homeland or the
territory of a major U.S. ally 97 percent for incidents in which ten or more people were killed. Moreover, tracing a terrorist group
that used a nuclear weapon to its state sponsor would not be difficult, because few countries sponsor terror; few terror groups have
multiple sponsors; and only one country that sponsors terrorism, Pakistan, has nuclear weapons or enough material to manufacture
If leaders understand these facts, they will be as reluctant to give weapons to
terrorists as they are to use them directly; both actions would invite devastating
retaliation . I might add that this is the kind of important, nonpartisan, policy-relevant work that more social scientists ought to
be doing. It is also important to disseminate these findings widely, so that 1) U.S. policymakers wont keep chasing phantom dangers,
2) the
leaders of nuclear-armed states understand that their arsenals are good for
deterrence and not much else , and 3) said leaders also understand the need to keep whatever weapons they might
have under very reliable control.
Terrorism is not a threat to the US
Zenko 15 [Micah Zenko, fellow with the Center for Preventative Action at the Council on Foreign Relations Terrorism is Booming Almost Everywhere But in the
United States 6/19/2015 http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/19/terrorism-is-booming-almost-everywhere-but-in-the-united-states-state-department-report/ Accessed 6/25/2015]
terrorism continues to pose an extremely small threat to the United States
and its citizens. The number of Americans killed by international terrorism
grew over the past year from 16 to 24. However, this is still fewer than the average
number that has tragically been killed each year since 9/11, which is 28. Moreover,
not one U.S. citizen died from terrorism within the United States last year. Rather,
as has been consistent with previous years, Americans die from terrorism when they travel to war zones, or areas marked by violent instability: Of the 24 deaths last year, 10 were
in Afghanistan, 5 in Israel or the Occupied Territories, 3 in Somali, 3 in Syria, and 1 a piece in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
AT Reform CP
Freedom Act/ Reform mean nothing.
Froomkin 6/17 [Dan Froomkin, 6/17/15, The Intercept, HAYDEN MOCKS EXTENT OF
POST-SNOWDEN REFORM: AND THIS IS IT AFTER TWO YEARS? COOL!,
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/17/hayden-mocks-extent-post-snowden-surveillancereform-2-years-cool/]
Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden on Monday marveled at
the puny nature of the surveillance reforms put in place two years after NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast expansion of intrusive U.S.
government surveillance at home and abroad. Hayden mocked the loss of the one
program that was reined in the NSAs bulk collection of metadata information
about domestic phone calls calling it that little 215 program. And he said if
someone had told him two years ago that the only effect of the Snowden revelations would be
losing it, his reaction would have been: Cool! Here is the video and the full text of his
remarks: If somebody would come up to me and say Look, Hayden, heres the thing:
This Snowden thing is going to be a nightmare for you guys for about two years.
And when we get all done with it, what youre going to be required to do is that little
215 program about American telephony metadata and by the way, you can still
have access to it, but you got to go to the court and get access to it from the
companies, rather than keep it to yourself I go: And this is it after two years?
Cool! Hayden was speaking at the annual meeting of the Wall Street Journal CFO Network, an
event hosted by the Journals senior editors for an invitation-only group of more than 100
chief financial officers of the worlds largest companies. Asked if he thought Snowden was a
foreign agent, Hayden said: Ive got my suspicions, although he acknowledged, Ive got no
evidence. Some opponents of massive government surveillance hailed the passage,
earlier this month, of the USA Freedom Act. And it did, in fact, mark the first time that
Congress has limited the executive branchs surveillance authority over four decades of explosive
growth. But some observers noted that it was a very small step at best. The program
was just one out of the multitude Snowden revealed and was so blatantly out of line that its
end was virtually a foregone conclusion as soon as it was exposed. Seemingly irreconcilable
media coverage reflected the reality that the reform bill was both important and,
from the NSAs perspective, trivial. Haydens remarks were the most blunt yet
emphasizing that latter point.
Surveillance reform not enough.
Patel 6/25 [Faiza Patel is a co-director of the liberty and national security program at the
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. She focuses on U.S. counterterrorism policy,
racial and religious profiling, human rights and humanitarian law, chemical weapons and
international law, 6/25/15, Aljazeera America,
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/6/when-will-surveillance-reform-stop-being-justcool.html]
Last week, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden declared that
he was cool with the recently enacted USA Freedom Act, which reined in
government bulk collection of Americans phone records. His characterization of
that program as little is no doubt accurate. Information from the archive of
documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed many
other programs that pose equal or greater risks to Americans privacy. But Hayden
is too quick to assume that the phone records program will be the only reform. The
passage of the USA Freedom Act is the first curtailment of intelligence authorities
since the 9/11 attacks and should mark the beginning not the end of reform.
Its no surprise that Congress chose to tackle the phone record program first. It is relatively
straightforward for people to understand, and its goal of amassing a vast database of information
about Americans is patently difficult to square with our constitutional values. Two review boards
found it to be of minimal counterterrorism value, and a federal appeals court declared it illegal.
Even the intelligence community and the president were amenable to reform. But Congress is
well aware that this reform is insufficient. Many of the votes against the act in the
House and Senate came from lawmakers who believe it didnt go far enough.
Several NSA programs are carried out under 2008s FISA Amendments Act, which
permits the agency to collect information in the U.S. as long as it is targeting
foreigners who are thought to be overseas. Despite their purported foreign focus, these
programs undoubtedly pull in huge pools of Americans communications.
International communications have grown exponentially in the last years as it has become easier
and cheaper to talk and text with people abroad. In our increasingly interconnected world, the
notion that surveillance targeted at foreigners overseas pulls in only a negligible amount of
Americans private correspondence is simply outdated. Americans privacy is just as affected by
overseas collection as it is by what happens on U.S. soil. Nor is the NSA limited to targeting
terrorism suspects. It is permitted to collect foreign intelligence information, a
capacious category that includes the open-ended class of material relevant to foreign
affairs. This allows the NSA to scan all our international communications and keep
those that it thinks are interesting. E-mails sent by a Human Rights Watch lawyer to a
researcher in Nigeria would be scanned, even if neither is suspected of involvement in
wrongdoing. If they mention something about the political situation there of interest to the NSA,
they could be retained. A text message from an American journalist to a colleague in Turkey
asking a question about the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant could be picked up as well. We
dont know how many NSA databases of Americans information exist or how large
they are. We do know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation dips into these
archives of emails, texts, videos and chat messages with few constraints. In other
words, information collected without any type of warrant or judicial review for
intelligence purposes can be obtained by a U.S. law enforcement agency and used in
a domestic criminal proceeding. The House of Representatives recently passed an
amendment to the defense appropriations bill (the National Defense Authorization Act) that
would end these backdoor searches by defunding them. While this initiative might not pass,
lawmakers will have another chance to stop the program when the extraordinary and
controversial grant of powers in the FISA Amendments Act expires in 2017. Even that would
just be skimming the surface. The vast majority of U.S. surveillance doesnt take
place under any law passed by Congress. When our intelligence agencies collect
information overseas for example, by tapping into fiber optic cables to scoop up all
information that flows through them they operate under an order issued by President
Ronald Reagan in 1981, Executive Order 12333, which gives the NSA even greater
latitude to collect information with even fewer privacy safeguards than any
legislation. Just because information is collected from a cable overseas doesnt mean that it
concerns only foreigners. Purely domestic emails may be routed through another country and
picked up. Copies of documents are stored by cloud providers overseas, sometimes in multiple
locations. Domestic websites often have ads, pop-ups and other such links that are hosted on
foreign servers, effectively sending search queries into the international ether. Americans privacy
is just as affected by overseas collection as it is by what happens on U.S. soil. Of course, the
NSA must retain the capacity to collect information necessary for the national
defense and security. The question that needs urgent attention is whether it needs
quite as much as it is currently hoarding or whether a more targeted approach
would keep us both safe and free from the fear that our every move is being
watched.
Links to PTX
Surveillance reform link to backlash
Eddington 6/15 [Patrick G. Eddington, 6/15/15, The Hill, Surveillance reform wars continue,
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/244891-surveillance-reform-warscontinue]
The annual Intelligence Authorization bill has become the latest battleground in the
ongoing Surveillance Reform War. The bills inclusion of language that would bar
the relatively independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from
investigating the links between the NSAs surveillance programs and covert actions
prompted a barrage of amendments to the bill. While originally scheduled to meet
Wednesday afternoon to decide on whether to approve any of the amendments submitted, the
GOP majority abruptly cancelled the Rules Committee meeting, possibly partly in response to the
controversy over the attempt to limit the PCLOBs oversight activities. Another flashpoint is
the attempt by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) to reprise their
success last year in moving through the House a provision that would prevent the
government from conducting warrantless searches of Americans stored
communications under Sec. 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. That same
amendment would bar the government from mandating that American tech
companies build in encryption back doors. A version was successfully attached to the
Fiscal Year 2016 Defense Department appropriations bill yesterday by a vote of 255 to 174, but
the Intel Auth version would make the provisions permanent. The battle over Massies
Intelligence Authorization bill amendment within the GOP conference has become
heated, with House Intelligence Committee staff circulating talking points claiming that The
Massie amendment would seriously damage national security and provide little benefit to
Americans civil liberties. Left out of the GOP HPSCI memo is the fact that no less a figure than
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that Sec. 702 had in fact been used to
conduct warrantless searches of the stored communications of Americansin violation of the
Fourth Amendments probable cause, warrant-based requirement. House surveillance hawks
have been on the losing end of several recent legislative fights, including the passage
of the USA Freedom Act and a Massie-led amendment to the annual Justice Department
funding bill prohibiting the use of government funds to undermine encryption standards. But the
USA Freedom Acts changes to surveillance law were limited to the illegal telephone
metadata program, which the government is seeking to restartand any
appropriations-related reforms may not survive the legislative process. The
situation in the Senate remains decidedly less favorable to surveillance reform
advocates. In a surprise move, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
elected to attach a highly controversial cyber security bill to the annual National
Defense Authorization Act. The so-called Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is
opposed by dozens of groups, who blasted the bill in a March 2015 letter. McConnells
gambit failed last week when the amendment was derailed by a procedural vote, his
second defeat in as many weeks in his attempt to expand the governments surveillance
authorities. Whether surveillance reformers will be able to consolidate their House gains remains
to be seen. One thing does seem certain. The Surveillance Wars are far from over.
Freedom Act and Reforms cause political conflict.
Hill 6/4[ Selena Hill, 6/4/15, Latin Post,
http://www.latinpost.com/articles/57557/20150604/president-obama-signs-nsa-governmentsurveillance-reform-bill.htm]
President Obama signed the first piece of legislation to reform the government's
controversial surveillance program on Tuesday evening. After a long fight, Congress
passed the USA Freedom Act reform bill just days after political gridlock caused the
National Security Agency's (NSA) powers to expire under the Patriot Act. In a 67-32
vote, the Senate approved the USA Freedom Act, which was designed to prevent the NSA
surveillance program from collecting Americans' phone records. Because it passed more than
36 hours after three parts of the Patriot Act expired, the NSA was forced to shut
down its bulk collection of U.S. phone data. The USA Freedom Act also limits other types
of data collection, while adding new measures for transparency and a new panel to oversee
intelligence activity within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. "It's an historic
moment," Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, one of the authors of the bill, following
the vote, reports The Hill. "It's the first major overhaul in government surveillance
laws in decades and adds significant privacy protections for the American people."
Although Obama welcomed the bill's final passage on Tuesday, he criticized those
who delayed it, like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. "After a needless delay and inexcusable
lapse in important national security authorities, my administration will work expeditiously to
ensure our national security professionals again have the full set of vital tools they need to
continue protecting the country," he said in a statement, according to CNN. Paul, a GOP
presidential candidate and champion for civil liberties, assailed the NSA in a 10hour speech, blasting both those who wanted to renew the Patriot Act and
supporters of the USA Freedom Act, which he argued was an expansion of the
Patriot Act. On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and
other defense hawks including Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham argued that
an expansion of the Patriot Act was essential for national security.
AT XO CP
2AC Perm do the CP
Perm do the counterplan existing legislation proves Congress could curtail
xo 12333
Williams 15
Lauren C., tech reporter, ThinkProgress, March 25, House Members Move To Repeal The Patriot Act With Strongest AntiSurveillance Bill To Date, http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/03/24/3638234/house-members-move-repeal-patriot-act-strongestanti-surveillance-bill-date/
The Patriot Act, as written, is heavily contingent on Executive Order 12333, signed by President
Ronald Reagan more than 30 years ago. The order has been since used as the legal justification for
some of the NSAs surveillance programs including backdoor access to internet companies data centers. If
passed, the Surveillance State Repeal Act would ban the use of order 12333 and
close those data access loopholes built in to software and devices encryption. It would also extend
greater protections to whistleblowers, such as making it illegal to fire or retaliate against them.
More evidence Congress could restrict use of executive authority
Reporter, BeforeItsNews.com, May 26, Executive Spying Goes Further than the Patriot Act, http://beforeitsnews.com/opinionconservative/2015/05/executive-spying-goes-further-than-the-patriot-act-3013080.html
Since 12333 is not a statute on the books, but rather a direct order from the nations
chief executive, it is not subject to the same scrutiny, either public or congressional,
as actual laws like the Patriot Act. It cannot be repealed, because there is no law to repeal.
The only way to stop the bulk spying authorized under the order is with affirmative
legislation forbidding the government from collecting and storing the data of
innocent people. There are several proposed bills that would do this. The Surveillance State Repeal Act bans
bulk spying under Executive Order 12333, and the End Warrantless Surveillance of Americans Act
goes even further, forbidding the use of any executive orders to authorize bulk spying
without a specific warrant. FreedomWorks has issued letters of support for both bills. The current debate on the
Patriot Act is important, but Americans need to realize that the governments ability to spy on them at will goes much deeper, and will
take a lot more effort to root out and end.
Solvency Congress Key
Executive oversight is ineffective Congress is key
Bendix and Quirk 15
William Bendix, assistant professor of political science @ Keene State College, Paul J Quirk, the Phil Lind Chair in U.S. Politics and
Representation @ the University of British Columbia, former research associate @ the Brookings Institute, Issues in Governance
Studies, Number 68, March 2015, Secrecy and negligence: How Congress lost control of domestic surveillance,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/02-secrecy-negligence-congres-surveillance-bendixquirk/ctibendixquirksecrecyv3.pdf
The executive branch has a several watchdogs that monitor surveillance practices,
including the Inspectors General of the NSA and Justice Department, the Presidents Intelligence
Advisory Board, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). Although all serve
important oversight functions, they have mandates that minimize privacy concerns or
they are vulnerable to White House interference. The inspectors general are
concerned about waste and fraud, among many other types of violations, while the Intelligence
Advisory Board serves exclusively the president, making sure that executive orders
and other directives are followed. Currently, only the PCLOB has a mission that considers and
advocates for civil-liberties protections. Over the last year, it has produced several
important reviews that weigh the surveillance benefits of eavesdropping programs against the
privacy costs to Americans. However, prior to the Snowden leaks, both Presidents Bush
and Obama let the Board sit empty for long periods, ensuring that it produced no
oversight reports for most of its ten-year history.61 A president hostile to oversight and
accountability could take similar steps to undermine the Boards activities,
especially once the Snowden scandals have faded. As the investigative wing of
Congress, the GAO faces no risk of presidential intrusion or obstruction, and has
both the authority and know-how to conduct comprehensive intelligence oversight.62
At one time, in fact, it had a fully staffed office at NSA headquarters where it monitored
surveillance activities on an ongoing basis.63 To be sure, resurrecting the GAOs investigations
and analysis of surveillance practices would not force policymakers or intelligence agencies to protect privacy
interests. But it could ensure that legislators are made aware of the privacy considerations in
all major decisions, and that at least one institutional unit seeks ways to minimize
harm to those interests.
Congress k2 solve committee with experts and representatives will limit
domestic surveillance while protecting national security
Bendix & Quirk 15
March, William & Paul, assistant professor of political science at Keene State College & Phil
Lind Chair in U.S. Politics and Representation at the University of British Columbia, Brookings,
Secrecy and negligence: How Congress lost control of domestic surveillance
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/02-secrecy-negligence-congressurveillance-bendix-quirk/ctibendixquirksecrecyv3.pdf
If over the long run surveillance practices are to afford significant protection to
privacy interests, Congress will need to overcome its partisan gridlock and
strengthen the institutional framework for surveillance policymaking. We suggest
two long-term goals. First, C ongress should seek some means of enhancing its capacity
for oversight and policymaking on secret surveillance practices. Some reformers have
called for abolishing or prohibiting any secret laws or interpretations that control investigations.
In his 2011 speech mentioned above, Senator Wyden acknowledged that surveillance activities
are necessarily secret.58 He insisted, however, that the policies governing those activities should
be debated and decided openly, through normal democratic processes. He argued that secret laws,
or secretly sanctioned interpretations of laws, are incompatible with democracy. This position is
appealing from the standpoint of democratic principles. But we find it too simple . There will
inevitably be intelligence methods that offer major benefits for investigations and
that require secrecyeven about general practices or capabilitiesto be fully
effective. These methods will often raise new issues of policy, or require change in existing
policy; but discussing the policy openly will, in itself, reveal the methods and undermine their
effectiveness. In such cases, there are only three options for Congress: forego using the
new methods, despite the resulting sacrifice of investigative effectiveness; delegate
the decisions about them, without legislative guidance, to the intelligence agencies;
or adopt secret laws or interpretations to control their use. We believe the last option
acknowledging the need for secret policiesis the preferable course. Instead of
abolishing secret laws, amendments, or interpretations, reformers should try to establish
processes for making them that help minimize their frequency and provide some
degree of accountability to Congress and the public .59 To those ends, we think that
Congress should attempt to negotiate with the president to adopt a mutually
agreeable, committee-based prior review of secret executive amendments or
interpretations of surveillance laws. The review should take place in closed proceedings
of a modest-sized committee whose members have relevant interest and expertise
perhaps, for example, a select committee with members drawn from the
Intelligence and Judiciary panels of both chambers. Such a review could take different
forms. In our view, the ideal would be a full-blown committee legislative vetoin
which the committee would be required to vote to accept or reject a proposed
secret interpretation before it would go into effect . However, because legislative-veto
provisions operate under a constitutional cloud and are not ultimately enforceable in court, a
plausible alternative is a reportand-wait provision.60 Such a provision would require the
executive to present its intended action to the committee and wait for a specified period of time
before implementing it; the measure should also oblige the committee to take up the proposal and
render a (non-binding) approval or disapproval. Either way, the committee and each of its
members would formally, though in secret, approve or disapprove the executive
proposal. Such a review is hardly guaranteed to provide strong protection for privacy interests.
But unlike merely providing briefings for members, with attendance optional, the committee
review would give an identified group of legislators specific responsibility to vote
up or down on proposed secret policies. With direct responsibility to render
judgment, they would have strong incentives to attend to the information made
available to them. They could not defer to the executive , without taking responsibility
for doing so, by pleading non-involvement. Such a process, even if achievable, would be far
from fully democratic. But it would provide far more accountability to Congress and
the public than do secret executive interpretations reviewed simply by the FISA
Court.
Solvency Congress Overturn
Congress could act to undermine or reverse the order. One, Congress could
refuse to provide financial support for the order
Corcoran, 11
Erin Corcoran, 11, Professor of Law and Director, Social Justice Institute, University of New Hampshire School of Law, University of
New Hampshire Law Review, March 2011, p. 207-9
In the lead up to the 2008 Presidential election, there was broad bipartisan support for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo
Bay. President Bush was quoted as saying, Id like it to be over with. John McCain and General Colin Powell echoed similar
sentiments for ending detention at the naval base. In addition to prominent Republicans calling for closure, public opinion began to
support finding alternative solutions for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama wasted no time once sworn into office
executing his central campaign promises. On
January 22, 2009, two days after becoming the forty-fourth President of the
Obama signed three executive orders in the presence of sixteen retired admirals and generals in
orders (1) suspended military commissions; (2) set a timetable and created
procedures to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility; (3) revoked all existing
the Oval Office. These
executive orders that were inconsistent with U.S. Geneva Convention treaty obligations concerning interrogation of detained
individuals; and (4) created a task force to review U.S. detention policy options and U.S. interrogation techniques. With the public
backing its shutdown, prominent Republicans and Democrats alike calling for its closure, and the Presidents executive orders creating
the framework and timeline for implementation, the end of U.S. detentions at Guantanamo Bay seemed a fait accompli .
Yet, in
2011, Guantanamo Bay continues to operate and currently houses approximately 180 post-9/11 detainees
who have not been tried for any crimes. This essay asks: Why, what happened? The world watched in January 2009 as Obama
delivered his promise to close Guantanamo Bay. However, by May 20, 2009, the U.S. Senate, controlled by
Democrats, voted ninety to six to prohibit the use of federal funds to transfer,
release, or incarcerate detainees detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to or within
the United States. More recently, Congress, in approving the 2010 Defense
Authorization Bill, banned the transfer of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to the
United States, even for criminal prosecution, and required that the Secretary of
Defense sign off on the transfer of any detainee to a third country.
When the President issues an Executive Order, he is acting under authority
under the Constitution or other laws. Congress could pass legislation that
states the President doesnt have the authority.
Burrows, 10
Vanessa Burrows, legislative attorney, 2010, Congressional Research Service, 2010. Executive Orders: Issuance and
Revocation. CRS Report RS20846, March 25, Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20846.pdf
In the 111th Congress, several bills have been introduced regarding the revocation and
modification of executive orders. For example, H.R. 35, H.R. 500/S. 237, and H.R. 1228 would deem particular
executive orders to be without force or effect; H.R. 603 would revoke part of an executive order on certain lands identified for
conveyance; H.R.
3465 would supersede an executive order; and H.R. 4453 would
require the President to revoke an executive order and amend a separate, older executive order to
restore the words removed by the executive order to be revoked. S. 2929 would require notice of
presidential revocations, modifications, waivers, or suspensions of executive orders,
or authorization of such an action, to be published in the Federal Register within 30 days after such action is
Solvency Executive Self Restraint
Executive self-restraint fails future presidents, emergency situations, and
lack of transparency make congressional oversight necessary
For the immediate future, however, Congress appears to have gone out of the business
of determining policy for antiterrorism surveillance. In the near term, the best hope for
privacy interests is for President Obama to make good on his post-Snowden pledge, repeated in
his 2015 State of the Union Address, to reform surveillance programs in order to instill public
confidencethat the privacy of ordinary people is not being violated. He promised to work
with Congress on the issue. If Congress is not capable of acting, the executive
branch can impose its own constraints on surveillance practices.57 But the
maintenance of self-imposed executive-branch constraints would depend entirely
on the strength of the administrations commitmentand, in two years time, on
the disposition of the next president . Because of the presidents central responsibility
for national security, the presidency is hardly a reliable institutional champion for
privacy interests.
Solvency Future Presidents
Future Presidents may rescind previous Executive Orders when they take
office.
Revocation. CRS Report RS20846, March 25. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.
Illustrating the fact that executive orders are used to further an administrations policy goals,
there are frequent
examples of situations in which a sitting President has revoked or amended orders
issued by his predecessor. This practice is particularly apparent where Presidents have used these instruments to
assert control over and influence the agency rulemaking process. President Ford, for instance, issued
Executive Order 11821, requiring agencies to issue inflation impact statements for
proposed regulations. President Carter altered this practice with Executive Order
12044, requiring agencies to consider the potential economic impact of certain rules and identify potential alternatives.
Shortly after taking office, President Reagan revoked President Carters order,
implementing a scheme asserting much more extensive control over the rulemaking process.
Obama and future presidents rollback the CP
Harvard Law Review 12
Developments in the Law - Presidential Authority, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/vol125_devo.pdf
The recent history of signing statements demonstrates how public opinion can
effectively check presidential expansions of power by inducing executive selfbinding. It remains to be seen, however, if this more restrained view of signing statements can
remain intact, for it relies on the promises of one branch indeed of one person to enforce and maintain the
separation of powers. To be sure, President Obamas guidelines for the use of signing statements contain all the hallmarks of good
executive branch policy: transparency, accountability, and fidelity to constitutional limitations. Yet, in
practice, this
apparent constraint (however well intentioned) may amount to little more than voluntary selfrestraint.146 Without a formal institutional check, it is unclear what mechanism
will prevent the next President (or President Obama himself) from reverting to
the allegedly abusive Bush-era practices.147 Only time, and perhaps public opinion, will tell.
Future presidents can chose to un-restrain themselves
Raul 10
Alan Charles, global coordinator of Privacy, Data Security, and Information Law practice, Structural and Procedural Concerns
Regarding CFPB Rulemaking; How Can the Agencys Substantial Discretion and Independence Be Reconciled with Adequate
Oversight and Accountability?, http://www.sidley.com/files/RepresentativeExperience/3aa71821-2731-4a03-9193c7d963e25011/Presentation/ceRepExperienceDocument1/CFPB%20Accountability.pdf
Indeed, if allowed to stand, this dispersion of responsibility could be multiplied. If Congress can shelter the bureaucracy behind
two layers of good-cause tenure, why not a third? At oral argument, the Government was unwilling to concede that even five
layers between the President and the Board would be too many. Tr. of Oral Arg. 4748. The officers of such an agencysafely
encased within a Matryoshka doll of tenure protectionswould be immune from Presidential oversight, even as they
exercised power in the peoples name. Perhaps an
individual President might find advantages in
tying his own hands. But the separation of powers does not depend on the views
of individual Presidents, see Freytag v. Commissioner, 501 U. S. 868, 879880 (1991), nor on whether
the encroached-upon branch approves the encroachment, New York v. United States, 505
U. S. 144, 182 (1992). The President can always choose to restrain himself in his
dealings with subordinates. He cannot, however, choose to bind his successors by
diminishing their powers, nor can he escape responsibility for his choices by
pretending that they are not his own.
Solvency Legalization Better
Congress has access to more information and it is a larger deliberative body,
making it more likely to produce better legislation
Krause, 04
George A. Krause (Associate Professor of Political Science at University of South Carolina) December 2004 The Secular
Decline in Presidential Domestic Policy Making: An Organizational Perspective Presidential Studies Quarterly
The third explanation, which is the focus of this essay, involves a dimension that presidents possess considerably greater
control overthe organizational size and scope of the presidency. Specifically, the
expanding size and scope of
the presidency as an organization can provide us with the basis for a generalizable
theoretical lens regarding why presidents have become less active in terms of both
the volume and substance of legislation. By organizational size and scope of the presidency as an
institution, I am referring to the general size and reach of the Executive Office of the President (EOP). This substantively
differs from Rudaleviges (2002) concept of centralization in several ways that will be discussed in the next section. In this
article, I focus on the nexus between organization and the U.S. presidency with respect to institutional policy performance.
The thesis contained in this article is simple. Viewed in organizational terms, I contend that
the growth in both
the absolute and relative size and scope of the presidency has been a major
contributing factor to the secular erosion of this institutions effectiveness in the area
of domestic policymaking. By effectiveness, I mean the extent to which an administration is successful in terms
of agenda setting, policy formulation, policy adoption, and implementation
processes.
Solvency NSA Ignores
Either the President cheats or security agencies ignore the counterplan
Kasner 15
Alexander J., J.D. Candidate @ Stanford Law School, degree expected in 2015, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 67:241, p. 241-283,
NATIONAL SECURITY LEAKS AND CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY, Stanford Law Review Online
Such a concession might be acceptable if the President and other executive branch
leadership truly exercised strong, hierarchical oversight over constitutional questions.
But this is far from the case. The courts have left the enforcement of constitutional norms in cases of national
security to the executive branch;123 in practice, such executive constitutional analysis is centralized
in . . . the Office of the Solicitor General and the Office of Legal Counsel.124 But these departments often
fail to engage in real constitutional rigor; they may give in to political pressures,
either failing to supply fully effective internal constitutional brakes on executive
conduct125 or, worse yet, engaging in opportunistic, situational constitutionalism.126 And even
if the executive did take up the call for thoughtful executive constitutionalism, the
national security bureaucracy frustrates the executives ability to enforce such
constitutional interpretation throughout the executive branch. First, national security
agencies and agents are less subject to White House control than government actors in other
policy areas.127 This fractured structure, made reality partly through congressional preference,128 leaves
national security agents free to frustrate presidential objectives129 and, accordingly, to
sign off on actions that the President may otherwise deem unconstitutional. Second, the
President may not wish to actually centralize authority to inter-interpretand act uponthe
Constitution in the realm of national security. There is a powerful incentive for the
President to maintain plausible deniability of national security action;130 accordingly, the
individuals making the policy and constitutional judgment calls are, in practice, often going to be
executive officials and employees.131 Compounding this problem is the lack of
mechanisms internal to the executive that could help ensure that such unconstitutional
behavior is uncovered and corrected. Inspectors General (IGs), an often-overlooked investigative
mechanism, are well suited for discovering corruption and mismanagement in the executive. Moreover, there is, at present, at least
one in every significant national security agency.132 Even though one of the initial hopes of IGs was to monitor constitutional
concerns,133 they have
proven relatively inefficacious at determining and remedying such
violations of constitutional rights.134 Another alternative might be the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), whose
province it is to protect government employeesespecially whistleblowers against corrupt and unlawful government
practices.135 But the
OSCs legitimacy has been tested as of late, with a host of internal
scandals marring its ability to uncover unconstitutional conduct.136
Solvency Rollback
If the courts consider the Executive order to be outside the scope of
Presidential authority, the court could rule that the order is illegal.
Moe, 99
Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell, Political science professor, Stanford, and fellow, Hoover Institution, PRESIDENTIAL
STUDIES QUARTERLY, December 1, 1999, p. online (MHDRWE298)
Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. They are not readily controlled by other political actors, are not beholden to political
constituencies, and have substantial autonomy to chart their own courses. Thus, they may use judicial decisions to pursue their own
ideologies or policy agendas. They may also act on their scholarly beliefs in the proper meaning of the law and the constitution. In
either event, they are likely to care about the reputations they are building for themselves as respected public servantstheir historical
legacies. They are likely to care as well about upholding the reputation of the Court as a whole, for their own legacies are heavily
dependent on the prestige of the institution. Because there are only nine justices, moreover, they are far better able than Congress to
act on their common institutional interests. In some sense, then, the
judges on the Supreme Court can do what they
want in resolving the ambiguities of presidential power. They have the autonomy to clamp down
on presidents, if that is what their policy interests or legal philosophies or the integrity of the
institution require. And they have the autonomy to do just the opposite, depending again on how they see the issue. Similarly,
their autonomy allows them to safeguard the prestige of their institution by responding to public opinion and other aspects of the
political environment. When
presidents take unilateral actions that are distinctly unpopular, the Court
can add to its prestige by declaring their actions illegal. And when presidents take unilateral
actions that are popular, the Court can add to its own prestige by upholding him .
Courts are likely to overturn executive orders that are inconsistent with
existing statutes.
Coper, 86
Phillip Cooper (Professor at SUNY-Albany) 1986 Administration and Society, p. 240.
If issued under a valid claim of authority and published, executive orders and proclamations have
the force of law (Armstrong v. United States, 1871; see also Farkas v. Texas Instrument, Inc., 1967; Farmer v. Philadelphia
Electric Co., 1964), and courts are required to take judicial notice of their existence (Jenkins v. Collard, 1893:
560-561). Orders and proclamations may, in some cases, even be grounds for criminal prosecution depending
upon the related legislation.8 In general, executive mandates are not valid if they violate a statute (Cole v. Young,
1956; United States v. Symonds, 1887; Kendall v. United States, 1838; Little v. Barreme, 1804). The legislature may ratify
presidential orders or proclamations after the fact.9 In most cases, it may also modify or rescind
2AC Links to PTX
Counterplan links to politics
a) Bipartisan opposition Congress loves executive surveillance authority
Geller 14
Eric, Deputy Morning Editor, NSA-enabling Executive Order 12333 just passed Congress as a full law,
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/congress-executive-order-12333-surveillance/
Republicans and Democrats can't agree on much these days, but members of
Congress recently joined hands to codify a very worrisome national-security executive
order into law. The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill authorizing funding
for the intelligence community with large bipartisan support. The vote was 325-100.
All tallied, 55 Democrats and 45 Republicans voted against it. The same bill passed the Senate by
unanimous consent, meaning that the only thing standing in its way is a signature from President Barack Obama. The
bill is essentially guaranteed to receive Obama's signaturesomething privacy advocates have been
pushing to prevent. That's because one of the provisions in the bill enshrines Executive Order
12333, a Reagan-era surveillance directive, into law. Executive Order 12333, issued by
Reagan on Dec. 4, 1981, is one of the most controversial presidential directives ever issued. If
Americans know its name at all, it is only because 12333 is at the heart of the sweeping surveillance
apparatus established by the National Security Agency (NSA). To collect contents and metadata from telephone
calls and electronic communications, the NSA relies on Executive Order 12333 and Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, also known as
the "business records" provision, respectively. But where Section 215 features relatively serious privacy protections, 12333 is a
lawless free-for-all by contrast. Section 215 is subject to the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and the
congressional intelligence committees. It prohibits the collection of audio from phone calls, allowing only metadata collection. It
likewise requires the NSA to eliminate the contents of U.S. persons' phone calls if they are "incidentally" collected during an operation
aimed at foreign nationals. Executive Order 12333, wrote former State Department Internet-freedom official John Napier Tye,
"contains no such protections for U.S. persons if the collection occurs outside U.S. borders." Under 12333, while the NSA still can't
individually target U.S. persons and gather content from their phone calls, it is not required to delete such content if it is incidentally
acquired. The NSA, relying on 12333 authority, can keep U.S. persons' phone-call recordings even if they are not implicated in any
criminal behavior as long as the recordings were obtained accidentally. As if that weren't bad enough, 12333
sits outside
the mainstream intelligence apparatus that is subject to congressional oversight.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until January, told McClatchy Newspapers
in November 2013 that Congress could not "sufficiently" monitor 12333 operations. "Twelve-triple-three programs are under the
executive branch entirely," Feinstein said. "I don't think privacy protections are built into it. Its an executive policy. The executive
controls intelligence in the country." By
codifying Executive Order 12333 as Section 309 of the
intelligence community's 2015 budget, Congress has given 12333 operations new
legal footing without actually placing them under new oversight. The House was so
eager to pass the funding bill and move on that it was prepared to do so by unanimous
consent, just like the Senate had done. The only reason there is a recorded vote of the action is because Rep.
Justin Amash (R-Mich.) asked the clerk to call the roll. "Sec. 309 provides the first statutory authority
for the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of U.S. persons private
communications obtained without legal process such as a court order or a subpoena," Amash wrote on his
Facebook page after the vote. "The administration currently may conduct such surveillance under a claim of executive authority, such
as E.O. 12333," he wrote. "However, Congress
never has approved of using executive authority in
that way to capture and use Americans private telephone records, electronic
communications, or cloud data." In July 2013, Amash worked with with Rep. John Conyers (DMich.) to introduce an amendment to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act that would have
ended the NSA's phone-records collection. The House defeated the measure 217-2015.
In his Facebook post, Amash called the legislative language giving 12333 increased legal standing "one of the most egregious sections
of law I've encountered during my time as a representative."
b) Self-restraint links
Healy 9
Gene, Vice President of the Cato Institute, The Cult of the Presidency, http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/documents/cult-ofthe-presidency-pb.pdf
It would take enormous virtue, enormous self-restraint, for any president carrying the burden
of such expectations to resist seeking vast new powers. To suffer the inevitable political
blowback from events that may, in the end, be unpreventablewithout chafing against
the constitutional safeguards that limit presidential power. And yet the system weve adopted to select presidents,
and the environment they enter once they get there, make self-restraint among the least likely of
presidential virtues.
1AR Links to PTX
Although avoiding the need to push the plan through the Congress may save
the President some political capital, the Presidents unilateral action could
alienate the President from Congress.
Ulrich, 04
Marybeth P. Ulrich, July 2004, U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Policy and Strategy, Presidential Leadership and
National Security Policymaking
Executive orders have mainly been used in three areas: to combat various forms of discrimination against citizens, to increase White
House control over the executive branch, and to maintain secrets. When
Congress perceives that executive orders
are taken to bypass Congress on controversial issues, they may elicit great political controversy
and be a source of conflict between the two branches. Even the prospect of an executive order
being issued can erupt in major political controversy, as was the case with President Clintons
proposal to lift the ban on gays serving in the military. There was no question that the president had the legitimate
authority to issue such an order as Truman had done to integrate the armed forces in 1948, but the political backlash was
so strong in 1993 that Clinton abandoned the idea in order to salvage his domestic agenda before
Links to PTX Executive Action
Congress backlashes against controversial executive actionimmigration
Newsweek 12
Newsweek, President Obamas Executive Power Grab, Oct 22, 2012,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/21/president-obama-s-executive-power-grab.html
Eleven months later,
on June 15, 2012, the president strode into the Rose Garden to
make an announcement. For the last five years, congressional Republicans had
been blocking the DREAM Act: a bill designed to provide a conditional pathway
to citizenship for immigrants who were brought to America illegally as children .
Pressed by Latino advocates to take action, Obama had spent 2011 repeating that we are doing everything we can
administratively because this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is not true. But now
president was doing something that hed previously deemed impossible , and that
Congress had repeatedly forbidden: singlehandedly granting relief to an entire
category of young immigrants, as many as 1.7 million people, whod otherwise be
subject to deportation. The reaction from Republicans was swift and severe. The
presidents directive is an affront to our system of representative government and the legislative process, and its an inappropriate
use of executive power, thundered Sen. Chuck Grassley. We should all be appalled at how this plan has been carried out.
Grassleys cri de coeur was, of course, predictable: the posturing of a committed partisan whose side had just seen its chances of
winning over a key voting bloc collapse on the eve of a critical presidential election. But he also had a point.
Draws firestorms of controversy
Kumar 13
Anita Kumar, McClatchy Newspapers, Obama turning to executive power to get what he wants, 3/19/13,
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/19/186309/obama-turning-to-executive-power.html#.UeMQnI3qlsk
President Barack Obama came into office four years ago skeptical of pushing the power of the White House to the limit,
especially if it appeared to be circumventing Congress. Now, as he launches his second term, Obama
has grown
more comfortable wielding power to try to move his own agenda forward, particularly
when a deeply fractured, often-hostile Congress gets in his way. Hes done it with a package of tools, some of
which date to George Washington and some invented in the modern era of an increasingly powerful presidency. And hes
done it with a frequency that belies his original campaign criticisms of
predecessor George W. Bush, invites criticisms that hes bypassing the checks and
balances of Congress and the courts, and whets the appetite of liberal activists
who want him to do even more to advance their goals.
XOs drain PCtrue with Obama
Salsman 13
Richard M. Salsman, Contributor, Forbes, When It Comes To Abuse Of Presidential Power, Obama Is A Mere Piker, 1/28/13,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2013/01/28/when-it-comes-to-abuse-of-presidential-power-obama-is-a-mere-piker/
Republicans and conservatives have complained loudly lately that President
Obama has been resorting to non-democratic and unconstitutional governance;
imperiously ignoring the so-called will of the people by issuing a cascade of
new executive orders. According to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Mr. Obama is acting like a king
by issuing his recent executive orders on gun control. Conservative author and radio talk show host
Mark Levin contends that Obamas executive orders are un-American and even fascistic.
Links to PTX Restraint
Causes huge backlash if there is any national security problem
Goldsmith 10
Jack Goldsmith, Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, The Virtues and Vices of Presidential Restraint, 11/16/2010,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2010/11/the-virtues-and-vices-of-presidential-restraint/
I think there is something to this. In part in reaction to the excesses of the Bush years and in part because of genuine ideological
Obama and his team came to office indisposed towards a
robust conception of presidential power. This attitude extends, of course, to the
Obama administrations approach to counterterrorism. Even as it has embraced much of the
Bush counterterrorism program, it has done so with open regret, and has emphasized its self-restraint. One
and intellectual commitment,
sees this, for example, in the administrations refusal to work with Congress on new detention authorities for fear that Congress
might give it more power than it wants; in its apologetic assertion of a perfectly appropriate state secret claim in al-Aulaqi case; in
its shyness about relying on or discussing Article II powers for targeting terrorist threats; in its arguments for narrower military
powers than courts are inclined to give it; in its acquiescence, despite helpful Article II authorities to the contrary, in Congresss
unprecedented restrictions on the Presidents power to transfer enemy prisoners; and more. There are benefits and costs to this
approach. On the benefit side, the President has developed a deserved reputation for restraint and commitment to the rule of law.
This is good in itself, and serves him well symbolically at home and abroad. It also gives him the credibility and trust to carry
forth with little controversy many of the counterterrorism tactics that under the less self-restrained Bush administration were
deeply controversial. Such credibility and trust, among other things, inform the extent to which courts defer to and approve
wartime presidential actions. I have no doubt that trust of the administration is one reason why the D.C. Circuit declined to extend
habeas corpus review to Bagram, for example. But there are downsides as well. One downside is a slow diminution of
unasserted presidential authority, and a related emboldening of Congress to regulate traditional presidential prerogatives. Another
downside is that the administrations reputation for restraint has become tied to public worries about whether it is tough enough
on terrorism. These worries underly the bipartisan push-back on certain counterterrorism decisions such as trying terrorists in
civilian courts that under Bush brought little controversy. A final downside
is the political risk this
approach entails if and when there is a successful attack on the homeland. For if
there is another attack, and if in the crystal-clear perspective of hindsight it can
be traced to a refusal to exercise presidential powers that were reasonably
available, the political consequences will be devastating.
Links to PTX XO
Even if XOs dont usually link to politics, largely unpopular policies do
Joe Walker, An Executive Order to End Dont Ask Dont Tell Wouldnt Have Caused Blowback, FDL, January 28, 2013,
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2013/01/28/an-executive-order-to-end-dont-ask-dont-tell-wouldnt-have-caused-blowback/
While it is impossible to prove a negative, it is important to set the record straight. Obama promised to end DADT during his
2008 campaign, so if he ended it in his first hundred days that would have bene completely expected. More importantly, ending
DADT was very popular. According to Gallup in May of 2009, an incredible 69 percent of Americans supported letting gays serve
openly. Ending DADT was even supported by a solid majority of Republicans and Conservatives. It
wouldnt have
even been a novel use of executive order, Obama would simply have been following the example of Harry
Truman integrating the armed forces. Actually political blowback is very rare. It normally happens
when a decision results in a true disaster or it is unexpected, very unpopular, and
significant. Ending DADT did not fit the criteria. I know Obama loves to push this narrative because it fits his old message
about bringing people together. It also makes his decision seem smarter in retrospect, but this
is more myth than reality. It is simply not believable that a President using
executive order to fulfill a extremely popular campaign promise would have
caused backlash. The reason the law ending DADT caused almost no controversy wasnt because it was the product of
slow process of bipartisan legislative concession building. It caused no controversy because the vast
majority of Americans saw it as the right thing to do.
Unpopular XOs draw backlashcongressional salary XO proves
Jaffe 13
Alexandra Jaffe, Republican lawmakers seek to block $900-a-year congressional salary hike, The Hill, 12/31/13
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/275049-backlash-growing-to-congressional-pay-increase-
GOP lawmakers are rushing to introduce legislation blocking a congressional pay
increase authorized in a recent executive order signed by President Obama, as
bipartisan backlash to the planned raise grows. Reps. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Michele
Bachmann (R-Minn.) both came out with legislation opposing the executive order. Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio) said in a release
that he planned to introduce his own measure on Monday.
"I am introducing legislation to block Pres.
Obama's exec order that gives Congress a pay raise. We need to cut spending not increase it,"
Bachmann tweeted on Monday afternoon. The draft bill, obtained by The Hill, states that "notwithstanding any other provision of
law, no adjustment shall be made under section 601(a) of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 (2 U.S.C. 31), relating to
compensation of Members of Congress, during fiscal year 2013." A spokesman for Bachmann said she plans to introduce the bill
later Monday, though it's unclear when, as both chambers of Congress have been largely consumed with negotiations working
towards avoiding the impending tax increases and budget cuts known as the "fiscal cliff." Fitzpatrick
said in a
letter to President Obama that he has introduced legislation to block the raise,
because "the misalignment of many Federal salaries compared to the private
sector is yet another example of government spending focused on the wrong
priorities." Fitzpatrick pledged in a release that "should the legislation not pass by March 27th [when the raise will take
effect], I will not accept the funds decreed by President Obama's Executive order." His draft bill differs slightly from Bachmann's
in that it bars a congressional pay raise in both 2013 and 2014. Rep. Ken Marchant (R-Texas) said via Twitter that he is
cosponsoring Fitzpatrick's legislation. And
Renacci called the executive order "ridiculous" and
"nothing short of irrational." "Washingtons dysfunction doesnt deserve a raise, it needs a hard dose of reality
and I am happy to help supply it," he said in a statement concerning the legislation he said he plans to introduce. The three
are not alone in their opposition to the executive order, signed by President
Obama on Friday, that ends the pay freeze on federal salaries. Lawmakers are now slated to make $174,900 in 2013, a raise
of $900 from 2012. GOP Rep. Frank LoBiondo (N.J.) also pledged on Twitter to block a potential pay raise. "DISAGREE
with President's executive order granting pay raise to Congress. I've voted
against automatic increases & will not accept this one," he tweeted. Rep. Jeff
Duncan (R-S.C.) pledged to return a pay raise if he receives one, and said President Obama's decision to
sign the executive order raises doubts about his ability to handle the economy.
"With President Obamas decision to give Congress a pay raise, every American should question his judgment in managing our
nations finances," he tweeted. The House Republicans could find a Senate partner for such legislation in Sen. Kelly Ayotte (RN.H.), who said on Twitter that she planned to introduce legislation to block the raise as well. Ayotte said she will be introducing
the legislation at the beginning of the new Congress. "POTUS approved out of touch pay raise for Cong. Ill intro bill to stop it.
W/16T debt and Americans facing tax hike, Cong $ raise is wrong," she tweeted. Ayotte
was backed up by Sens.
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who both attacked the
executive order on Monday afternoon. Murkowski said on Twitter that she opposes the pay raise and "will
work to prevent this raise from going into effect in April." And Portman, in a statement, called for
Obama to withdraw the executive order that granted it. "At a time when our country is facing
record debt and trillion dollar deficits, the last thing Washington should do is reward itself with a pay increase," he said. "Until a
long-term deficit reduction agreement is reached, we should not consider increasing the pay for Congress."
is coming from both sides of the aisle, though Democrats at this point have not come out in opposition in
nearly the same numbers as the GOP. Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga.) was one of the first lawmakers to express chagrin with the
executive order, issuing a letter to House leadership on Sunday expressing his opposition to the raise which he asked his
colleagues to sign. "We believe that it is inappropriate for Members of Congress to receive a pay increase of any size while
American families and taxpayers continue to face tough economic times," the letter reads. Rep. John Carney (D-Del.) indicated on
Twitter he was one of the lawmakers to sign Barrow's letter, or a similar one, because "Members of Congress don't deserve a pay
raise." And Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) also voiced his distaste for a raise on Twitter. "Congressional Pay Raise? Worst idea ever.
Cut food stamps while boosting Senate salaries? No way!" he tweeted, with a link to a Huffington Post article on the executive
XO links to politics
Clay Risen, Managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, M.A. from the University of Chicago. Published 7/16/04. Accessed
7/13/13. The Power of the Pen: The Not-So-Secret Weapon of Congress-wary Presidents. The American Prospect.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_power_of_the_pen]
The most effective check on executive orders has proven to be political. When it
comes to executive orders, The president is much more clearly responsible, says
Dellinger, who was heavily involved in crafting orders under Clinton. Not only is there no involvement from
Congress, but the president has to personally sign the order. Clinton's Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument executive order may have helped him win votes, but it also set
off a massive congressional and public backlash. Right-wing Internet sites bristled with comments about
dictatorial powers, and Republicans warned of an end to civil liberties as we know them. President Clinton is running roughshod
over our Constitution, said thenHouse Majority Leader Dick Armey. Indeed, an
unpopular executive order can
have immediate--and lasting--political consequences. In 2001, for example, Bush proposed raising the
acceptable number of parts per billion of arsenic in drinking water. It was a bone he was trying to toss to the mining industry, and it
would have overturned Clinton's order lowering the levels. But the overwhelmingly negative public reaction forced Bush to quickly
withdraw his proposal--and it painted him indelibly as an anti-environmental president.
Unilateral Executive Actions that require funding force the president to spend
political capital
Moe and Howell 99
Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell, senior fellow for the Hoover Institution and Associate Professor for the Government
Department at Harvard University, Unilateral Action and Presidential Power: A theory, Published in December 1999. Accessed
7/13/13. Lexis.
Nonetheless, the appropriations constraint remains very real. Presidents are obviously best off if they can take unilateral actions that
do not require legislative appropriations, and they will have incentives to do just that. Similarly, presidents
obviously not want to initiate major new programs through unilateral action, for even if
the courts were to regard egregious instances of presidential lawmaking as constitutional, their need for substantial
budgetary outlays would inevitably single them out for special legislative attention
and lead to a decision process that is no different than what would have occurred
had presidents simply chosen to seek a legislatively authorized program from the
beginning. When presidents do take unilateral actions that require legislative funding, both the actions and their funding
requirements are likely to be moderate and to take legislative preferences into account.
AT Posner and Vermeule
Self-restraint is not always binding their authors
Posner and Vermeule, 10
Eric A. Posner is the Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law @ the University of Chicago School of Law and Editor of the
Journal of Legal Studies, Adrian Vermeule is a legal scholar, Oxford University Press, The Executive Unbound: After
the Madisonian Republic, Google Books
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/sites/lawreview.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/79_2/06%20Huq%20BKR.pdf ZA
This signaling-based mechanism is contestable. I sketch four criticisms here. First, PVs model assumes there are two sorts of
Presidents. Some are well-motivated and choos[e] the policies that voters would choose if they knew what the executive knows (p
130). Others will not. If
voters are capable of reliably selecting well motivated executives, the latter
will not need to distinguish themselves from ill-motivated executives . A premise of the signaling model is
therefore not merely heterogeneity in presidential type but also electors inability to select good types reliably. This is surely right to
some extent. For
every Lincoln there is a Nixon. The model predicts that only well-motivated
Presidents will engage in self-binding. If ill-motivated Presidents could perfectly mimic such
behavior, self-restraint would no longer have a sorting effect . Credibility effects, therefore, are predicted most
often for well motivated Presidents and least often for ill-motivated Presidents (p 152). If the public selects an ill-motivated President,
she has no incentive to exercise constraint. Rather, she should extract maximal rents during the first term in the Oval Office in the
expectation of being turfed out four years later. Thus, precisely when it is most needed, credibility does the least work. When it is least
needed, it is expected to have the greatest effect. This hardly seems ideal.
AT Biopower K
Restricting the state key to check for biopolitics
Edward Ross Dickinson 4, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, Central
European History, Vol. 37 No. 1, p. 34-36
And it is, of course, embedded in a broader discursive complex (institutions, professions, fields of social, medical, and psychological expertise) that pursues these same aims in often even more effective and inescapable ways.89 In short, the
continuities between
biopolitical discourse and the practices of the state
are unmistakable Both are
biopolitical, regulatory, socialengineering modernity
But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it
obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two
kinds of regimes. Clearly the
state is not only formally but also substantively
quite different from totalitarianism
it has nowhere developed the fateful,
radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism
there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate
coercive policies In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully
produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory
programs to enforce it. But there are political and policy potentials
and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics
early twentieth-century
in our own
instances of the disciplinary society and of
, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad
democratic welfare
. Above all, again,
(or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic
population management to mass murder. Again,
that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical
regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have
imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the
really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of
autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as
totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our
understanding of biopolitics
they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least,
, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes
of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power should
not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of
Discursive elements (like the various elements of
biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different
they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but
rather circulate.
autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent.
(like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state);
The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91
NSA bulk data surveillance is a modern-day panopticon
ONeill, 15
University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Film and Digital Media, Faculty Member
http://www.academia.edu/9290473/Michel_Foucault_predicts_the_NSAs_cyber_Panopticon ZA
How does this help us understand the current issue of the NSA, PRISM and the Internet? This requires us to look at the architecture of
the Internet. Now granted, the internet does not have a centre as envisioned in Benthams prison, but it does have ISPs and companies
who monitor (albeit they say loosely) internet traffic and management of metadata. What
we saw with the actions of the
NSA could be seen as the prison guards making us aware of the power of surveillance and their
ability to watch and direct our behavior; i.e. our patterns and content of our internet searches and
telephone calls. Unlike, Benthams aims however, the effects of such surveillance do little to promote a fairer society; instead it
breeds distrust, paranoia and panic. This could be seen as far as the Kremlin where President Putin has issued warnings of the power
and function of the Internet, However Moscow has recently changed its tune, with Mr. Putin branding the internet an ongoing "CIA
project". This
is mirrored in the writings of Foucault where he argued that the Panopticon, or in our
case the internet was used as a way to change peoples behavior,the major effect of the Panopticon [is to]
induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. This makes us see
how through observation, the body and mind of the individual is constantly under interrogation. We need only see how users of
facebook curtail their behavior and body image through the eyes of others. This
impacts on the bio-political aspects of
surveillance, but also and perhaps more importantly it impacts on the way we use the Internet to
seek questions to issues that perhaps runs the risk of establishing the dominant vision of society.
This link to power is at the heart of there levancy of Foucault and the actions of the NSA. In this
way, we could argue that the NSA wanted to be seen as being caught out so that the panic of
observation or surveillance would produce a radical movement towards self-regulating and
docile bodies a situation that would in many ways suit the needs and demands of an elite and their exercise in control, When
one undertakes to correct a prisoner, someone who has been sentenced, one tries to correct the person according to the risk of relapse,
of recidivism, that is to say according to what will very soon be called dangerousness that is to say, again, a mechanism of security.
In this way, we could see that Foucault
warns us to see the controversy as one where that the historically
determined subject/self is the real victim in the cyber attacks . By attempting to mold individuals through
surveillance and self-regulation, it is possible that we are in the middle of a needed reset of individuals in a new age. Whether it be
the chemical weapons of Assad or the actions of ISIS, the national security card is played regularly. In this sense, Foucaults
of surveillance helps us see the NSA as prison guards watching over a yet undisciplined populace.
This is indeed a scary thought and one that should be seen within the dynamics of a battle for the control of power within society. The
West prides itself on freedoms and ideas of enlightened thinking, but also politicians know that with such freedoms comes a potential
crisis in control, legitimacy and in many ways, sovereignty; Sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is
exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population. Security here is quite easily be replaced by
the adjective power. When
power is exercised over the population, we find ourselves in a position of
seeing the state in many ways as a hidden fascist elite, hell-bent on controlling the mind, bodies
and actions of an enslaved prison populace.
The alternatives all-or-nothing choice fails. Small reforms like the plan are key to
institutional change and getting others to sign on to the alternative.
Wright 7 Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin [Erik
Olin. Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias, Soundings, April,
www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Guidelines-soundings.pdf]
5. Waystations The final guideline for discussions of envisioning real utopias concerns the importance of waystations. The central problem of envisioning real
utopias concerns the viability of institutional alternatives that embody emancipatory values, but
the practical achievability of such institutional designs often depends upon the existence of
smaller steps, intermediate institutional innovations that move us in the right direction but only partially embody these values. Institutional proposals which have an all-or-nothing
quality to them are both less likely to be adopted in the first place, and may pose more difficult transitioncost problems if implemented. The catastrophic experience of Russia in the shock therapy approach to market reform is historical testimony to this problem. Waystations are a difficult theoretical
and practical problem because there are many instances in which partial reforms may have very different consequences than full- bodied changes. Consider the example of unconditional basic income. Suppose that a
very limited, below-subsistence basic income was instituted: not enough to survive on, but a grant of income unconditionally given to everyone. One possibility is that this kind of basic income would act mainly as a
subsidy to employers who pay very low wages, since now they could attract more workers even if they offered below poverty level earnings. There may be good reasons to institute such wage subsidies, but they
would not generate the positive effects of a UBI, and therefore might not function as a stepping stone. What we ideally want, therefore, are intermediate reforms that have two main properties: first, they concretely
of convincing people that the alternative is
credible and desirable; and second, they enhance the capacity for action of people, increasing their ability to push further in the future.
Waystations that increase popular participation and bring people together in problem-solving deliberations for collective purposes are particularly
salient in this regard. This is what in the 1970s was called nonreformist reforms: reforms that are possible within existing institutions and that
pragmatically solve real problems while at the same time empowering people in ways which enlarge their scope of action in the
demonstrate the virtues of the fuller program of transformation, so they contribute to the ideological battle
Perm: Do both - NSA bulk data surveillance is a modernday panopticon restricting it can only help fight
biopolitical regimes ONeill, 15
http://www.academia.edu/9290473/Michel_Foucault_predicts_the_NSAs_cyber_Panopticon
How does this help us understand the current issue of the NSA, PRISM and the Internet? This requires us to
look at the architecture of the Internet. Now granted, the internet does not have a centre as envisioned in
Benthams prison, but it does have ISPs and companies who monitor (albeit they say loosely) internet
What we saw with the actions of the NSA could be
seen as the prison guards making us aware of the power of surveillance and
their ability to watch and direct our behavior; i.e. our patterns and content of
our internet searches and telephone calls. Unlike, Benthams aims however, the effects of
traffic and management of metadata.
such surveillance do little to promote a fairer society; instead it breeds distrust, paranoia and panic. This
could be seen as far as the Kremlin where President Putin has issued warnings of the power and function of
the Internet, However Moscow has recently changed its tune, with Mr. Putin branding the internet an
This is mirrored in the writings of Foucault where he argued
that the Panopticon, or in our case the internet was used as a way to change
peoples behavior,the major effect of the Panopticon [is to] induce in the inmate a state of
ongoing "CIA project".
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. This makes us see
how through observation, the body and mind of the individual is constantly under interrogation. We need
impacts on the bio-political aspects of surveillance , but also and perhaps
more importantly it impacts on the way we use the Internet to seek questions
to issues that perhaps runs the risk of establishing the dominant vision of
society. This link to power is at the heart of there levancy of Foucault and the
actions of the NSA. In this way, we could argue that the NSA wanted to be
only see how users of facebook curtail their behavior and body image through the eyes of others.
seen as being caught out so that the panic of observation or surveillance
would produce a radical movement towards self-regulating and docile
bodies a situation that would in many ways suit the needs and demands of an elite and their exercise
in control, When one undertakes to correct a prisoner, someone who has been sentenced, one tries to
correct the person according to the risk of relapse, of recidivism, that is to say according to what will very
soon be called dangerousness that is to say, again, a mechanism of security. In this way, we could see
Foucault warns us to see the controversy as one where that the
historically determined subject/self is the real victim in the cyber attacks . By
attempting to mold individuals through surveillance and self-regulation, it is possible that we are in the
middle of a needed reset of individuals in a new age. Whether it be the chemical weapons of Assad or the
Foucaults idea of
surveillance helps us see the NSA as prison guards watching over a yet
undisciplined populace. This is indeed a scary thought and one that should be seen within the
actions of ISIS, the national security card is played regularly. In this sense,
dynamics of a battle for the control of power within society. The West prides itself on freedoms and ideas of
enlightened thinking, but also politicians know that with such freedoms comes a potential crisis in control,
legitimacy and in many ways, sovereignty; Sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory,
discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population.
When power is exercised over
the population, we find ourselves in a position of seeing the state in many
ways as a hidden fascist elite, hell-bent on controlling the mind, bodies and
actions of an enslaved prison populace.
Security here is quite easily be replaced by the adjective power.
No Impact
The reach and extent of biopower can be controlled at the state, does not lead
to radical impacts if kept in check
Dickinson 4 (Edward Ross Dickinison,Cambridge Journals, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections
on Our Discourse About Modernity http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FCCC
%2FCCC37_01%2FS0008938900002776a.pdf&code=76697c5627d61132ead73b8e039e5e6c)
In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of
social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the volkisch state . In
democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rightsbased strategy of social management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. For
now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the
state. A comparative framework can help us to clarify this point. Other states
passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s indeed, individual states in
the United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to
the next steps adopted by National Socialism mass sterilization, mass
"eugenic" abortion and murder of the "defective." Individual figures in, for example, the
U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states
nor their legal and political principles permitted such policies actually being
enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of
the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a
democratic political context they did not develop the dynamic of constant
radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies.
Power is neither inherently good, nor bad. Our specific context is more
important than their sweeping generalization.
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross,
Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity,
Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are
regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, in
the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of
The concept power should not be read as a universal stifling
night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all
political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the
same. Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees
organizing it.
of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent.
Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in
different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like
totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one
place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of
power in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically
differing potentials.91
Power is not inherently evilit is only a problem when it turns into
domination.
Foucault, 97
Foucault, quoted in an interview published in 97 (Michel, philosopher, professor and chairman of the History of Systems
of Thought @ the College de France, Ethics Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 1, Ed.
Paul Rabinow, 1997, p. 298-299)
Power is not evil. Power is games of strategy. We all know that power is not evil! For example, let us take
sexual or amorous relationships: to wield power over the other in a sort of open-ended strategic game where the situation
may be reversed is not evil; its a part of love, of passion and sexual pleasure. And let us take, as another example,
something that has often been rightly criticizedthe pedagogical institution. I see nothing wrong in the practice of a
person who, knowing more than others in a specific game of truth, tells those others what to do, teaches them, and
transmits knowledge and techniques to them. The
problem in such practices where power
which is not in itself a bad thing must inevitably come into play in
knowing how to avoid the kind of domination effects where a kid is
subjected to the arbitrary and unnecessary authority of a teacher, or a
student put under the thumb of a professor who abuses [their]
authority. I believe that this problem must be framed in terms of rules of law, rational techniques of government
and ethos, practices of the self and of freedom.
All policies are not the samebiopower within a democratic context are
radically different than their fascism examples.
Dickinson 04
Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, Biopolitics,
Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central
European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
In the Weimar model, then, the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by the constitution and substantively by the
welfare system, were the central element of the dominant program for the management of social problems. Almost no
one in this period advocated expanding social provision out of the
goodness of their hearts. This was a strategy of social management, of social engineering. The
mainstream of social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing
basic social rights the substantive or positive freedom of all citizens
was the best way to turn people into power, prosperity, and profit.
In that sense, the democratic welfare state was and is democratic
not despite of its pursuit of biopower, but because of it . The contrast with the
Nazi state is clear. National Socialism aimed to construct a system of social and population policy founded on the concept
of individual duties, on the ubiquitous and total power of the state, and on the systematic absorption of every citizen by
organizations that could implant that power at every level of their lives in political and associational life, in the family,
in the workplace, and in leisure activities. In the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to create
an institutional framework that would give individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves successfully into the
national society, economy, and polity. The
Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the
wherewithal to do with every citizen what it willed . And where Weimar welfare
advocates understood themselves to be constructing a system of knowledge and institutions that would manage social
problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that system by eradicating by finding a final solution to
social problems. Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare structure were open to the idea
that stubborn cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the right to health could easily be redefined as
primarily a duty to be healthy, for example. But the
difference between a strategy of social
management built on the rights of the citizen and a system of racial
policy built on the total power of the state is not merely a semantic
one; such differences had very profound political implications, and
established quite different constraints. The rights-based strategy was actually not very
compatible with exclusionary and coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of armies of
volunteers, it was too embedded in a democratic institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful legal and
institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.
Even if they are right that our policy is biopolitical, the fact that it is carried
out by a democratic state makes it profoundly different.
Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some
Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148)
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in
our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory,
socialengineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National
Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective.
But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and
local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly
the democratic welfare state is
not only formally but also substantively quite different from
totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized
National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management
to mass murder. Again, there
is always the potential for such a discursive regime
to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of
rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can
and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But
again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different
from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic
biopolitical regimes require,
enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is
functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian
structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear,
historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or
imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive
change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in
the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems.
Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for
sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of
power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of
constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our
understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering
Impact Turn
Biopower in a democratic government is vital to rights, tolerance, and
inclusionthis takes out their all of their impacts
In the Weimar model, then, the rights of the individual, guaranteed formally by
the constitution and substantively by the welfare system, were the
central element of the dominant program for the management of
social problems. Almost no one in this period advocated expanding social provision out of the goodness of
their hearts. This was a strategy of social management, of social engineering. The
mainstream of social reform in Germany believed that guaranteeing basic social rights the substantive or positive
freedom of all citizens was the best way to turn people into power, prosperity, and profit. In that sense, the
democratic welfare state was and is democratic not despite of its pursuit of biopower, but
because of it. The contrast with the Nazi state is clear. National Socialism aimed to construct a
system of social and population policy founded on the concept of individual duties, on the
ubiquitous and total power of the state, and on the systematic absorption of every citizen by organizations that
could implant that power at every level of their lives in political and associational life, in the family, in the workplace,
and in leisure activities. In the welfarist vision of Weimar progressives, the task of the state was to create an institutional
framework that would give individuals the wherewithal to integrate themselves successfully into the national society,
economy, and polity. The Nazis aimed, instead, to give the state the wherewithal to do with every citizen what it willed.
And where Weimar welfare advocates understood themselves to be constructing a system of knowledge and institutions
that would manage social problems, the Nazis fundamentally sought to abolish just that system by eradicating by
finding a final solution to social problems. Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare
structure were open to the idea that stubborn cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the
health could easily be redefined as primarily a duty to be healthy , for
example. But the difference between a strategy of social management built
on the rights of the citizen and a system of racial policy built on the
total power of the state is not merely a semantic one; such differences
had very profound political implications, and established quite
different constraints. The rights-based strategy was actually not very compatible with
exclusionary and coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of
armies of volunteers, it was too embedded in a democratic institutional structure and civil society,
it lacked powerful legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was
too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.
AT State Link
Philosophy, pages IX to X)//
State.3 They invent "a properly spiritual... absolute State that ... effectively functions in the mind."
Theirs is the discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by "good" sense, of rocklike identity,
"universal" truth, and (white male) justice. "Thus the exercise of their thought is in conformity
with the aims of the real State, with the dominant significations, and with the requirements of the established
order."4 Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles of his earliest books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants. "What got me by during that period was
conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind
and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous."5 Hegel is absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.6 To Kant he
dedicated an affectionate study of "an enemy." Yet much of positive value came of Deleuze's flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of thinkers who were tied by
opposition to the State philosophy that would nevertheless
accord them minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a "secret
link constituted by the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority
of forces and relations, the denunciation of power."7 Deleuze's first major statements written in his own voice, Difference et repetition (1968) and
Logique du sens (1969), cross-fertilized that line of "nomad" thought with contemporary theory . The ferment of the studentno direct descendance but were united in their
worker revolt of May 1968 and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the intellectual in society8 led him to disclaim the "ponderous academic apparatus"9 still in evidence in
elements of the "philosophy of difference" they elaborated were transfused into a
those works. However, many
continuing collaboration, of which A Thousand Plateaus is the most recent product.
AT Cosmo K
2AC Impact
No impact to nationalism
Brilmayer, 95
(Lea, professor of law at New York University, The Moral Significance of Nationalism, 71 Notre Dame L. Rev. 7, lexis)
One of the puzzling things about nationalism is that it sometimes seems to be a force for good, and sometimes a force for very great evil. At this particular time, we
are more likely to think in terms of the evil nationalism brings about; this association is the legacy of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the killings in Rwanda, the
ongoing fighting in Chechnya, and many other examples that all too easily come to mind. Nationalism now tends to be associated with barbarism: with genocide,
ethnic cleansing, rape and wanton murder. But nationalism can also be a force for great good. When Armenians living in America contribute from their own
limited resources to help Armenian earthquake victims, when Eritreans sacrifice their lives to liberate their country from a colonial power, or when Rigoberta
Menchu commits herself to a life of personal hardship and danger to advance the human rights of Central American native peoples, it is hard to deny that national
nationalism, itself, is morally
transparent, and that this fact accounts for its ability to coexist equally well with
good and evil. The argument is that the overwhelmingly relevant normative feature of today's nationalism is the
sentiment can play a noble role in world events. The hypothesis I want to investigate here is that
justice (or lack of justice) of the claim nationalists advance on behalf of their nation. The single most important normative
feature - indeed, perhaps, the only important normative feature - is the right of the nation to the thing that nationalists
assert on its behalf, and this right is not itself a consequence of nationalism but a consequence of other underlying moral
claims. What matters from a moral point of view is whether the claims of one's nation and conationals are worthy, and
Resistance to colonialism, human
rights abuses, and dictatorship is just, at least so long as morally defensible
means are used, and ethnic cleansing, rape, and genocide are morally wrong; this
is not so because of any reasons involving nationalism, but because of other
moral features of the situation. Nationalism means simply that one identifies
with the claims of one's nations and one's conationals, and takes them as one's own. Nationalists act as agents of their nation, and
whether they are pursued by morally ac- [*8] ceptable means.
when agents act what matters is the rights of the principal (that is, the nation) rather than the agents' motivations (that is, their nationalism). I will refer to the
claim that nationalism is itself not important to the evaluation of nationalistic actions as the irrelevance hypothesis; the most uncompromising version of this
hypothesis holds that nationalism never matters. The irrelevance hypothesis is grounded on the assumption that the entity status of the national group - its
national unity along linguistic, religious, ethnic, or cultural lines - neither adds to nor detracts from the moral legitimacy of the actions that a nationalist movement
undertakes. The alternative to treating the status of the national entity as central is a focus on what I will call the underlying independent moral claim. A moral
claim is independent (in the sense that I intend here) if its moral force does not depend on the sort of entity that is asserting it, and in particular on whether it is
asserted by a certifiably national entity that is homogeneous according to some "national" criteria. In the final analysis, this article will not stake out a position of
complete irrelevance; Part III considers ways that national entity status could reasonably be considered morally significant. But even if the argument for complete
irrelevance is incorrect, an important corrective to much contemporary discussion needs to be observed. The justice of the independent underlying national claim
needs to be put squarely on the agenda, even if it is not the only factor that matters. It is quite striking that philosophical discussions of nationalism have paid
virtually no attention to the justice of the independent underlying claims that nationalists make on behalf of their nations. The only claim of moral justification
that is considered in most philosophical accounts of nationalism is that a nation might be entitled to something simply because granting that entitlement would
promote national flourishing. Philosophers interpret the claims that nationalists make as arguments that "we are entitled to thus-and-such because we are a
nation." This is an argument based on national entity status. But that is not what nationalistic claims are generally about. Instead, nationalist claims typically take
the form "we are entitled to thus-and-such because it was taken from us wrongly," or "because we have suffered injury for which this is the only suitable
reparations," or "because God intended us to have it," or something of that sort. That is why nationalists do not feel any inconsistency in fighting to seize resources
from other nations; if their claim were simply that a group deserves something because it is a nation, then one would expect them to better appreciate the
competing claims of their adversaries, who are typically also behaving nationalistically. [*9] This is not to say that nationalists never rely on nationalistic
the function of national identification
is generally to provide an explanation for why they are fighting, not for whether
their cause is just. Nationalist claims are seriously misserved by the way that
philosophical discussions of the topic are usually conducted. The reduction of
nationalist claims to a claim that "we deserve such-and-such because we are a
nation" lumps all forms of nationalism together, implicitly encouraging the
assumption that either nationalism is good, or nationalism is bad. The philosophers' typical
arguments; nationhood, they recognize, is what draws them together in their fight. But
depiction of what nationalist claims are all about leads to treating nationalistic fighting as prima facie illogical, because those who are involved should
understand (but don't) the similarity of the two competing claims. The standard philosophical interpretation of nationalism envisions a greater
symmetry of rights and wrongs than typically exists.
2AC AT Alternative
The alternative upholds nationalism
Chakravartty, 06
Comm Professor at Amherst, (Symbolic Analysts or Indentured Servants? Indian High-Tech Migrants in America's
Information Economy, http://people.umass.edu/pchakrav/research/publications/symbolic_analysists.pdf)
The segregation and sense of social isolation experienced by Indian H-1B workers cannot be separated from the
discrimination workers faced both on and off the jobsite. Opponents
1B workers
of the H- 1B visa program argue that H-
are "indentured servants" who are legally prevented from demanding higher wages because of
very same opponents, of what is certainly a flawed
immigration policy, are conspicuously silent about questions of racial discrimination
towards this group of foreign, mainly minority, workers. To be sure, as foreign temporary workers, Indian IT workers on H-1B visas are
their precarious immigration status. However, these
relatively more vulnerable to abuses on the worksite but their status as "skilled" workers does not preclude everyday exposure to both overt and subtle forms of
racial discrimination as well as renewed xenophobic and nativist sentiments. In terms of experiences on the job, most of the workers we interviewed who came
through "bodyshops" felt that they were expected to work for longer hours and for less money than "natives." Akshay, a twenty-five-year-old software engineer
from New Delhi working in San Jose stated: "It's not as free of a market. Maybe not deliberately, but companies take them (H-1Bs) for granted, even clients .... It's
expected, I'd say 20 percent more...sometimes projects require overtime. The pay is lower, $20,000 at my level, because we are less mobile. They take advantage of
the situation. Pay increases are not that often. Hitesh told us he feels there is "discrimination in vacation" where time off is precious and more of a privilege for H1Bs then their "native counterparts." Anuradha, the twenty-nine-year-old computer programmer who felt she had more options as someone with an MBA from the
U.S., describes her situation in the following way: Although personally, I've had no problems, there are restrictions on H-1B holders. We have to work more.
Everyone leaves around 3:30 or 4:00, working 7 to 8-hour days, but H-1Bs stay for 10 to 11 hours. The pay is less. I'd say it's 15 to 20 percent less. We don't get paid
overtime. Natives don't care how much work they do. Professional respect is less than it is for a U.S. native of the same caliber. In general, our interviewees spoke
with greater ease about work-based discriminatory practices having to do with wages and overtime, and were more circumspect in how they described prejudicial
treatment by "American" colleagues or neighbors. Mohan, a thirty-one-year-old from a small town in Andhra Pradesh, working in a small town in New Hampshire
said of his co-workers: "We're viewed as a technical resource .... They look at me different because I'm not aware of the slang and local culture." Later on, he goes
on to say he's living in a place with few immigrants: "Some of them have never seen an immigrant before. Professionally we're in lower positions because of our
ethnic background. You get promotions faster if you're American. Culturally, I don't know how to approach a manager for raises or promotions. I have to learn
every process by myself" In the same way, Rama, a twenty-nine-year-old software architect also from Andhra Pradesh and working in Kalamazoo, Michigan, said
first he did not want to "complain" about co-workers, that it was often a lack of understanding of culture not malice that explained seemingly racist behavior: "I
always feel like a secondrate citizen (laugh), that's obvious. Insecurity, that's the greatest drawback. I never feel free." Many of the workers we spoke to observed
that their clients' co-workers were unlikely to "mingle" and "tend to look down on" us despite "our technical abilities." These
potentially minor
incidences of everyday discrimination, mostly brushed off by our interviewees as "misunderstandings,"
were contrasted with stories of "friends" who had suffered more significant forms
of exclusion and humiliation. Many of these stories were in response to our
question about their experiences after the attacks of September 11, 2001. This question elicited
stories by workers like Chandra, the twenty-eight-year-old from Hyderabad, who told us: A couple friends of mine had a problem shopping. They have dark
complexion(s). They went to the [store] and people mistook them for Middle Eastern guys. They started yelling at him while he was with his wife and family. He
just left quietly. Others told us of anxious moments when traveling. Several male workers, worried about harassment at airports, said they prefer to take the train
as opposed to flying when they have had to change job assignments. Santanu, a thirty-five-year-old software consultant from Ranchi, Bihar, had heard of friends in
Chicago who had been "pushed off a bus" by an "angry American mob." Krishan, eager to make American friends in Indianapolis and careful not to associate with
the "other Indians," told us: A friend of mine was at restaurant and people were looking at them, him and his family. He was a family guy, you know, there with his
our interviewees felt conflicted
about the racism they had witnessed, especially since many of the workers we
spoke to were not likely to see themselves as "victims" of any social order . Several of
kids. This is the first time I've heard someone felt a difference, but me, never. In most cases,
the more privileged H-1B workers in our sample deployed the discourse of the Asian as "model minority." These workers
were clear to distinguish themselves as qualified and therefore deserving immigrants in comparison to the "illegals" who
"should be deported." In contrast, the
majority of our respondents told us of how they had
survived the harsh realities of the downturn in the IT economy and had
experienced a backlash against immigrants "like us" they hoped would recede in
time. Most knew of stories of "guys having to leave their homes overnight"
because they had lost their jobs. As one worker told us, "it isn't easy to sell everything--your car, your
condo---and pack up and move back with no warning." In the period we conducted the interviews-the second half of
2002--more workers were looking at the real possibility of returning to India, despite the fact over half of those we had
talked to had filed for green cards. For
many of these workers, racial discrimination
experienced on the jobsite was coupled with overt forms of American nationalism
and nativism in the post-9/11 political environment where questions of national
security became more directly connected to concerns about skilled immigration
and would eventually be linked to the movement of white collar jobs abroad.
Alt Failsnation state identity is inevitable and key to solving multiple
scenarios for violence and warCalhoun 7
(Craig, Prof of Social Science at New York University and President of the Social Science Research Council, Nations
Matter: Citizenship, Solidarity and the Cosmopolitcan Dream, p 3-7)
The idea of a nation-state is arguably pernicious. The hyphen ties the notion of a historically or
naturally unified people who intrinsically belong together to that of a modern polity with unprecedented
military power and capacity for effective internal administration. It has been a recipe for conflicts both internal and
external. Populations straddle borders or move long distances to new states while retaining allegiances to old nations.
Dominant groups demand that governments enforce cultural conformity, challenging
both the individual freedom and the vitality that comes from cultural creativity. And yet, the nation-state
neither can be nor should be wished away . Source of so many evils, it is also the framework
in which the modern era produced history's most enduring and successful
experiments in large-scale democracy. It continues to shape not just the fact of
democracy but diversity in its forms (as Chapter 7 suggests). It is basic to the rule of law, not
only because most law remains a domestic matter of nation-states but because
most international law is literally that: structured by agreements among nationstates. Not least of all, while globalization has produced innumerable paths across state borders, it has
opened these very unevenly and disproportionately to the benefit of those with access to high levels of
fluid capital. Conversely, it has made belonging to a nation-state and having clear
rights within a nation-state more, not less, important. The fact that Hannah Arendt observed more
than half a century ago remains true: human rights are secured mainly when they are
institutionalized as civil rights.1 In the 1990s, optimistic after the end of the Cold War, a number of
enthusiasts for globalization suggested that sovereign states were obsolete. Money, media, and human migrations all
flowed across borders; Why should military and political power maintain borders? States bolstered by nationalist passions
- and nationalists eager to gain state power - were behind many of the twentieth century's bloody wars. Surely there was and remains - a good prima facie case for hoping nation-states might organize less of human loyalty, power, and conflict.
And of course new reasons for hating abuses of state authority merged with ancient resentments of state power. But it
one thing to seek limits on the exercise of state power and another to contemplate
transcending it.
It is one thing to encourage a cosmopolitan pluralism of perspectives and another to regard nationalism as merely a fading inheritance and not a recurrently renewed source of solidarity. It is one
thing to seek to advance global civil society and another to imagine democracy can thrive without effective states. The many evils of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries called forth a widespread indignation and, among many, a
determination to act. The idea of human rights moved to the forefront not only of discussion but of court cases and treaties. Humanitarian interventions were proposed and implemented in a widening range of circumstances. Ethnic cleansing
and genocidal nationalism made the notion that sovereignty should be a barrier to international efforts to do good ring hollow. An international criminal court was created (if not universally recog-nized). Indeed for a time there seemed no
occupation more virtuous than that of a human rights activist or humanitarian aid worker. Almost imperceptibly these shifted from volunteer pursuits and accidental careers for physicians and pacifists to new professional roles, complete with
academic courses and credentials, funding from major foundations and national governments, and increasing bureaucracy. And humanitarian action became increasingly intertwined with military interventions, whether for peacekeeping or
regime change. At the same time, protesters challenged the dominance of capitalist corporations over the course of globalization. This was misleadingly termed the anti-globalization movement. Though there were some campaigners truly bent on
enhancing the autonomy of local populations, most were actually proponents of a different sort of globalization. They objected to environmental depredation, sweatshops, and high prices for necessary drugs but they worked on a global scale and
imagined the world in terms of global connections - albeit connections among ordinary people without the powerful mediation of corporations and states. The movement contesting capitalist globalization has not been theory-driven, but its
protagonists have shared a general account of the problems of the world in which the twin centers of power - capitalist corporations and nation-states - pursue a logic of self-aggrandizement that neither the natural world nor its human
inhabitants can afford. Many have found the language of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri sympathetic: they represent the heterogeneous "multitude" of the world who struggled to be free of a seamless and destructive but nearly exhausted
"empire."2 Something of the same quasi-theory - that states and corporations are both bad and unnecessary - has been widespread among human rights activists and humanitarian aid workers. Both groups, of course, saw first hand the vicious
ways in which state elites pursued or held on to power and firms sought or sustained profits. The Sudan is one of the largest scale and longest-lasting examples. Its central government has seldom cared much for the people of Darfur in its west,
the non-Arabs of its south, or for that matter most ordinary Sudanese. But the central government has cared about holding the country together and defeating any secessionist movements. It cared all the more when oil was discovered in the
south - as did global corporations seeking to extract that oil in "peace." And it cared all the more when it took on a more pronounced Islamic identity and mission. Despite religious cornrnitment (and partly because of intra-Islamist struggles), it
became a peculiarly bad government, but also one too weak to establish peace or prosperity m the Sudan; it unleashed brutal war and civil violence against and among its own people. So there were refugees and internally displaced people, rape as
by the beginning of the twenty-first century,
there were not many left for whom the fantasy of overcoming the state was not
tinged with anxiety. Yes, state power was often overweaning, often corrupt, and often mobilized in evil ways. But
weak states typically failed their citizens and crises in strong states often
unleashed violence and disrupted both fives and livelihoods. Pandemic diseases, global
crime, human rights abuses, and forced migration all revealed the dark side to globalization yet all seemed to call at least in part for better states, not an end to states . Could
outsiders make peace in Sudan or would that depend on a more representative,
honest, and competent Sudanese government? Or in a range of other African countries, could
outside interventions contain the spread of AIDS unless states joined the
struggle? And yet, partly because of structural adjustment programs pushed with fiscal good intentions and disastrous
a tactic of war, robber militias, and spreading diseases left untreated. The state did not look very good. Yet
human consequences by the World Bank and others, most African states had neither money nor personnel nor health care
systems to address AIDS - or for that matter malaria and other diseases. The
"failed state" seemed as
problematic as the abusive state. And this was not only an issue in Africa but in different local
configurations around the world. A great buzzword of the 1990s was "civil society" (see Chapter 4). And indeed,
strengthening civil society - loose institutions part neither of the state nor of large-scale projects of capital
accumulation - has been an important trend in many places . Both local and transnational voluntary
organizations have grown.and played crucial roles. Many are religiously inspired and some denominationally organized.
Others are secular. All reflect efforts to create social organization on the basis of voluntary relations among people rather
than the coercion of either political authority or capital. And yet, civil society organizations depend on money as well as
personal connections. And except
where states are able to regulate such organizations they
are largely unaccountable and non-transparent. Civil society without a public
sphere is not necessarily democratic. Civil society is a hugely valuable complement and sometimes corrective
to states and markets, but not a substitute for either.3 It is no accident that "global governance" has become almost as
ubiquitous a concern in the current decade as global civil society was in the last. But the
issues are not only
global; they are also national and local. Intermediate powers and solidarities still matter Individual
sovereign states confront a variety of global flows and processes against which they are weak and which in turn weaken
some of their other capacities. Global
currency and equity markets make it hard for
individual countries to operate autonomous fiscal or industrial policies. Global
crime is hard to fight with the tools of national legal systems (and especially their domestic
criminal (aw). Global diseases challenge domestic health care systems . Yet these
challenges faced by contemporary states no more make them irrelevant than the
history of abuse's of state power makes the stability and public services states can
deliver unimportant. And crucially, most actually existing democracy has been achieved in and
through states.
2AC Permutation
The permutation solvescosmopolitanism requires an appeal to nationalism
Janowitz 82
(Morris, Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, Air University
Review, Jan-Feb, Patriotism and the U.S. All-Volunteer Military,
http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1982/jan-feb/janowitz.html)
Therefore, it becomes necessary to ponder the definition and redefinition of the content and meaning of nationalism,
particularly national ideology and patriotism in the contemporary period. Is
it possible to think of a
delicate balance of vigorous national sentiments with ever-strengthened
supranational civic aspirations? In sociological analysis, the distinction between "locals"
and "cosmopolitans" is too often overdrawn and rigidly applied. The United
States is not made up exclusively of nationalists (locals) or internationalists
(cosmopolitans). Those who think of themselves as internationalists constitute a tiny
minority. The bulk of the population is nationalists of varying intensity. It is crucial
that segments of the nationalists have already expanded their sociopolitical space to include in varying degrees a
supranational frame of reference. We
are not dealing with a zero-sum game; international
identifications are not necessarily developed at the expense of more localistic or
delimited affiliations. Nor is patriotism an inherent barrier to the search for world citizenship. Of course,
traditional forms of patriotism that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the
twentieth century are far from appropriate. Articulated
patriotism, incorporating a clear
element of self-conscious awareness, is required for the emergence of
supranational citizenship. In fact, there has been an observable modification of patriotism in the United
States. To describe the situation in alternative terms, the refashioning of nationalist ideology and traditional patriotism
has already proceeded to that point where global international sentiments are not the only alternative to traditional
nationalism and conventional patriotism. In elements of the population a minority though it be one can find a sense
of enlightened self-interested nationalism and patriotism relevant for an expanded scope of citizenship. (It is striking that
the massive machinery of academic and commercial public opinion surveys has completely neglected study of attitudes of
national and international identification.) But there is no need to struggle with traditional terms and concepts in order to
deal with the requirements of contemporary citizenship and patriotism national or supranational. Civic education
limited to the inculcation of traditional patriotism or conventional nationalist ideology is obviously inadequate for the
complexities of an advanced industrial society and a highly interdependent world. In fact, I find the terms nationalist and
patriotic limiting. I offer and make use of the term civic consciousness. It refers to positive and meaningful attachments a
consciousness is a relatively self-critical version of patriotism in an advanced
industrial society. Civic consciousness is compatible with and required for both
national and international responsibilities and obligations. It involves elements of reason and
person develops to the nation-state. It represents strong commitments but not without a self-critical component.
self-criticism as well as personal commitment. In particular, civic consciousness is the process by which national
attachments and national obligations are molded into the search for supranational citizenship. I believe that given the
state of military technology and the forms of international conflict, the concept of civic consciousness is highly relevant
both for the career military and the short-term personnel of the all-volunteer military. A military concerned with effective
national alliances, with arms control and peacekeeping, and with regional political stability cannot hide under oldfashioned patriotism. Its patriotism must be linked to the positive roles it is asked to perform.
Legal engagement is crucial to prevent the domination of elites. Only the
perms legal engagement allows their alt to succeed
Cohen 15 (professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center)
(Julie, 2015, Studying Law Studying Surveillance, Studying Law Studying Surveillance. Surveillance &
Society 13(1): 91-101)
Relative to legal scholarship, work in Surveillance Studies is more likely to build from a solid
foundation in contemporary social theory. Even so, such work often reflects both an insufficient
grasp of the complexity of the legal system in action and lack of interest in the ways that
legal and regulatory actors understand, conduct, and contest surveillance. By this I dont mean to
suggest that Surveillance Studies scholars need law degrees, but only to point out what ought to be
obvious but often isnt: legal processes are social processes, too, and in overlooking these processes,
Surveillance Studies scholars also engage in a form of black-boxing that treats law
as monolithic and surveillance and government as interchangeable . Legal actors
engage in a variety of discursive and normative strategies by which institutions and resources
are mobilized around surveillance, and understanding those strategies is essential to the
development of an archaeology of surveillance practices. Work in Surveillance Studies also
favors a type of theoretical jargon that can seem impenetrable and, more importantly, unrewarding to
those in law and policy communities. As Ive written elsewhere (Cohen 2012a: 29), [t]oo many such
works find power everywhere and hope nowhere, and seem to offer well-meaning
policy makers little more than a prescription for despair .
Returning to the topics already discussed, let us consider some ways in which Surveillance
Studies might benefit from dialogue with law. Let us return first to the problem of digitally-enhanced surveillance by law enforcementthe problem of the high-resolution mosaic. As discussed in the section above, works by Surveillance Studies scholars exploring issues of mobility and control offer profound insights into the ways in which
continual observation shapes spaces and subjectivitiesthe precise questions about which, as we have already seen, judges and legal scholars alike are skeptical. Such works reveal the extent to which pervasive surveillance of public spaces is emerging as a new and powerful mode of ordering the public and social life of civil society. They
offer rich food for thoughtbut not for action. Networked surveillance is increasingly a fact of contemporary public life, and totalizing theories about its power dont take us very far toward gaining regulatory traction on it. That enterprise is, moreover, essential even if it entails an inevitable quantum of self-delusion.
Acknowledgment of pervasive social shaping by networked surveillance need not
preclude legal protection for socially-shaped subjects , but that project requires
To put the point a different way, the networked democratic society and the totalitarian state may be points on a continuum rather than binary opposites, but the fact that the continuum exists is still worth something. If so, one needs tools for assessment and
differentiation that Surveillance Studies does not seem to provide. As an example of this sort of approach within legal scholarship, consider a recent article by legal scholars Danielle Citron and David Gray (2013), which proposes that courts and legislators undertake what they term a technology-centered approach to regulating surveillance.
They would have courts and legislators ask whether particular technologies facilitate total surveillance and, if so, act to put in place comprehensive procedures for approving and overseeing their use. From a Surveillance Studies perspective, this approach lacks theoretical purity because its technology-specific focus appears to ignore the fact
that total surveillance also can emerge via the fusion of data streams originating from various sources. But the proposal is pragmatic; it does not so much ignore that risk as bracket it while pursuing the narrower goal of gaining a regulatory foothold within the data streams. And because it focuses on the data streams themselves, it is
administrable in a way that schemes based on linear timelines and artificial distinctions between different types of surveillance are not. One can envision both courts and legislatures implementing the Citron and Gray proposal in a way that enables far better oversight of what law enforcement is doing. Turning next to the linked practices of
commercial profiling and social media surveillance, we have already seen that work in Surveillance Studies again steps in where legal scholarship badly needs supplementation: on the question of how pervasive surveillance by private market actors shapes the production of culture and the patterns of emergent subjectivity. Such work
typically does not, however, consider or explore the ways that the legal construct of consent mobilizes legal and policy discourses to sanction ongoing expansions of private-sector surveillance and insulate them from regulatory oversight. Work in Surveillance Studies also has not seemed to pay particularly careful attention to the roles that
rhetorics of innovation and competition play in regulatory debates about information privacy. For a discipline that seeks to develop comprehensive and rigorous accounts of surveillance as social ordering and as cultural practice, these are large omissions. As we have seen, the notice-and-choice paradigm has deep roots within liberal theory,
and legal and policy discourses about notice and choice reflect legal culture in action. By the same token, understanding surveillance simply as a means to effective administration, or as a means for pursuing and performing security, misses the extent to which a narrative about the inevitable nature of innovation and knowledge production
positions surveillance as a modality of technical and social progress (Cohen 2015). The surveillance-industrial complex does not simply parallel the military-industrial complex; it is also deeply rooted in Silicon Valleys technoculture and (albeit paradoxically) in the tropes of romantic individualism and cultural iconoclasm with which its
Engagement with legal scholarship on information privacy
would inform the project of understanding surveillance as social ordering
participants self-identify. These themes have been especially salient for privacy regulators.
and as culture in a number of complementary
ways. First and most basically, many legal writings on information privacy are important as primary sources that reveal the notice-and-choice paradigm and the narrative of inevitable innovation at work. But there is also a rich vein of legal scholarship interrogating the assumptions and the politics that underlie privacy and data protection
regulation (e.g., Cohen 2012a, 2012c, 2013, 2015; Kerr 2013; Ohm 2010; Solove 2013). In addition, legal scholars have produced richly detailed and revealing investigations of regulatory and compliance processes; for example, scholars concerned with the operation of surveillant assemblages and digital enclosures ought to read and
consider the important work by Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan on corporate privacy compliance cultures (2011a, 2011b). If Surveillance Studies is to inform the content of laws and the nature of regulatory practice in the domain of commercial profiling and social media, however,
theorists will need to do more than simply read legal sources . Work in Surveillance
Studies so far has not been particularly well-adapted to helping policymakers figure out what, if
anything, to do about evolving practices of commercial surveillance. Once again, if it is to be
useful to policymakers, the view from Surveillance Studies requires translation into a
form that might furnish a framework for action.
Here I want to identify three important sets of questions on which Surveillance Studies scholars who want their work to make a difference might take
their cues from legal scholarship. An initial set of questions concerns how to redefine privacy and data protection in functional terms that do not presuppose the stable, liberal self, and that instead offer real benefit to the situated subjects who might claim their protection. David Lyon (2001) has argued that the organizing concepts of
privacy and data protection are inadequate to comprehend surveillance as a mode of social ordering. From a sociological perspective that is undoubtedly right, but privacy and data protection still might be made effective as legal constructs if articulated differently, in ways that correspond more closely to the ways that surveillance
shapes experience. That project calls for the sort of theoretical cannibalization that makes Ph.D. committees in Real Disciplines nervous, but at which legal scholars excel. With some trepidation, I offer my own work on privacy as boundary management for the postliberal self (Cohen 2012a, 2013), as well as Valerie Steeves (2009) work on
relational subjectivity, as examples of the sort of exercise that is necessary to reframe the effects of surveillance as social ordering in ways to which legal systems can respond. For law to develop a sustainable and effective approach to regulating data protection and protecting privacy, the ways of theorizing about the subject represented by
these projects must become second nature, not only for scholars but also and more importantly for legislatures, regulators, and courts. That in turn requires second process of translation, from the language of academia into a vernacular that can supply inputs into policy processes. A second set of questions concerns how to understand what
constitutes privacy harm in an era in which some surveillance is a constant. To the Surveillance Studies reader this may seem to be a variation on the first question, but it is different: in law, harm is what makes violation of an interest actionable, and the potential for harm is what creates the predicate for comprehensive regulation of
particular domains of activity. Harm need not be individualized or monetizable; environmental regulations and financial market regulations address systemic and often nonmonetizable risk. But it must be reasonably definite; talk of power, power everywhere is plainly insufficient and it should come as no surprise that policymakers find it
risible. Work on this problem is still preliminary, but here legal scholarship has a leg up because it deals in practicalities. Surveillance Studies scholars might profitably read works by Danielle Citron (2007) and Paul Ohm (2010) that identify and name the systemic risks associated with leaky and largely unregulated data reservoirs, and that
draw on resources ranging from the history of tort law to computational science to craft recommendations for more effective regulatory strategies. A final set of questions concerns the design of governance mechanisms. As we have already seen, the flows of surveillance within social media create novel institutional design challenges. In the
domain of commercial profiling, many activities on the business-facing side of personal information markets, removed from consumer-facing processes that purport to ensure notice and choice, have eluded regulatory scrutiny entirely. Some of the classic works on privacy governance originate within the Surveillance Studies tradition; these
include Priscilla Regans (1995) study of the way privacy legislation emerges within the U.S. political system and Colin Bennett and Charles Raabs (2006) work on privacy governance and the emergence of data protection as a regulatory paradigm. But the question of governance badly needs to be revisited; in particular, Surveillance
Studies scholars have not yet engaged with the new privacy governance now emerging as official policy in the U.S. (and as de facto policy in the European Union) in a sustained and meaningful way. Works by legal scholars on the political, epistemological, and normative dimensions of the new governance (e.g., Bamberger 2010; Cohen
2012b, 2013; Freeman 2000; Lobel 2004) offer starting points for an inquiry that moves beyond doing Surveillance Studies to consider the more pressing challenge of doing surveillance regulation wisely and effectively. Conclusion: Doing Law-and-Surveillance-Studies Differently The prospects for fruitful interchange and collaboration
between legal scholars and Surveillance Studies scholars are likely to remain complicated by pronounced differences in underlying theoretical orientation. But since Surveillance Studies is itself an interdiscipline (Garber 2001), and since legal scholarship has thrived on interdisciplinary exploration, the prospects for effective communication
also seem reasonably good.
Bridging the gaps requires, first and foremost, efforts by emissaries from both traditions
to foster a more tolerant and curious dialogue directed toward improved understanding and,
ultimately, toward methodological hybridization. Within ones own academic
community, it can become too easy to mistake consensus on methodological conventions
for epistemological rigor, and to forget that methodological strength also derives from refusal to
be hemmed in by disciplinary boundaries. From the standpoint of theory, a more sustained dialogue
between law and Surveillance Studies would count as a success if it produced a mode of
inquiry about surveillance that melded the theoretical sophistication of Surveillance Studies with
lawyerly attention to the details, mechanisms, and interests that constitute
surveillance practices as legal practices , and to the kinds of framing that
mobilize legal and policy communities. To do Surveillance Studies better, legal scholars
need to challenge their own preference for putting problems in categories that fit neatly within the
liberal model of human nature and behavior, and Surveillance Studies scholars can help by calling
attention to the social and cultural processes within which surveillance practices are embedded.
Surveillance Studies scholars need to do more to resist their own penchant for
totalizing dystopian narratives, and should delve more deeply into the legal and
regulatory realpolitik that surrounds the administration of surveillance systems ; legal
scholars can help by demystifying legal and regulatory processes. From a legal
scholars perspective, however, theory achieves its highest value when it becomes a tool for forcing
productive confrontations about how to respond to real problems. And so I think it would count as an
even bigger success if dialogue between law and Surveillance Studies generated not only a hybridized
theoretical discourse of law-and-Surveillance-Studies but also the beginnings of a more
accessible policy discourse about surveillance and privacy, along with reform
proposals designed to put the animating concepts behind such a discourse into
practice. Here the goal would be a hybridization between laws ingrained pragmatism and
Surveillance Studies attentiveness to the social and cultural processes through which surveillance is
experienced and assimilated. Working together, legal scholars and Surveillance Studies
scholars might advance the project of formulating working definitions of privacy interests and
harms, and might develop more sophisticated projections of the likely effects of different policy
levers that could be brought to bear on systems of surveillance.
Cosmopolitansim Bad
Pure cosmopolitanism justifies imperialism through the universal imposition
of values
Barber 96
(Benjamin, University of Maryland Civil Society Professor, Constitutional Faith, For Love of Country: Debating the
Limits of Patriotism, ed. Nussbaum and Cohen, p. 33)
At times, Nussbaum seems to come close to recognizing as much, acknowledging that even among cosmopolitans the
circles must be drawn toward the center. But she is distrustful, worrying that in the end patriotism, however conceived, is
"close to jingo- ism." She seems diffident in the face of the actual ideals that animate American patriotismhowever little
realized they may be. Yet it is precisely these ideals that give parochial America its global appeal,
these ideals that afforded Lincoln the opportunity to claim that America might yet be the "last best hope" for people everywhere, these ideals that draw peoples damaged by toxic patrio- tisms elsewhere to American shores. Justice Hugo Black
captured America's patriotic idealism in the phrase "constitutional faith." More recently, Sanford Levinson wrote a lively
testament to Black's ideaalso called Constitutional Faith. At its best (it often is not at its best), America's
nativism is, then, a celebration of internationalism, a devotion to values with
cosmopolitan reach. The cosmopolitanization of such values has even gotten
America in trouble (in Mexico under Wilson, in Vietnam under Kennedy,
Johnson, and Nixon, and perhaps now in Bosnia)a reminder to Nussbaum that
cosmopolitanism too has its pathologies and can also breed its own antiseptic
version of imperialism.
Appeals to the nation are vital to resisting corporate dominationthe
discourse of the demise of the nation-state is irresponsible and facilitates both
corporate and national power interests
Brennan, 01
(Timothy, professor of cultural studies, comparative literature, and English at the University of Minnesota, CosmoTheory, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.3, project muse)
In this atmosphere, it is commonplace for even progressive journalists to assume
that "common-sense international law" should "transcend outdated sovereign
rights." 22 One generally does not even feel the need to defend this proposition today. The repeated assumption is that ordinary people have the same access
to education, funding, and travel that intellectuals and businesspeople do, and that they can exploit the same global networks of communication in a variety of
foreign languages. Such mistaken assumptions are the product of the cosmopolitanism of cultural politicians who actually do live transnationally, and whose
Among the issues forgotten
here are those key advantages nations provide the global subalterns they wish to
free from the tyranny of the national stateadvantages that are particularly
condemned by the humanists who are hostile to the myths of national belonging.
And yet, any progressive vision today depends on such myths. For, outside
cosmopolis, they represent the only basis for organizing opposition to the
corporate carnivalesque (to echo Stallybrass and White again). The positive connotations of cosmopolitanism in colloquial usage are so
irrepressible that we continually see the critic "discovering" an ethical stance that
balefully, and without his or her wanting it to, homologizes itself with corporate
interests, echoing official American language, repeating forgotten earlier
movements, and demanding no payment from public sentiment. The stance is
often consonant with power, and ruffles no feathers. National sovereignty is said
to have been transcended, the nation-state relegated to an [End Page 672]
obsolete form, and the present political situation is seen as one in which newly
deracinated populations, NGOs, and web users are outwitting a new world order
in the name of a boldly new, only partially defined, transnational sphere. 23 It is
primarily the cultural discourse of cosmopolitanisma friendly discoursethat
prevents intellectuals from contesting this fallacious account of materialities,
humanist/ethical outlook enlivens and, in some ways, softens their policy suggestions in the public sphere.
blinded as they are by the euphoria of a good will that is conveniently good
business for them and theirs. For what we are really seeing is not a popular
transnationalism but the substantively altered competition among national states
the movement from smaller polities to megastates (with China being the last remaining credible adversary
to the United States). If the world were globalized in the way it is discussed in much of
cultural theory, we would not be seeing such hard negotiations among the
member states of the European Union nor the defections from it; we would not
have the trade showdowns that periodically arise between the United States and
Japan, the United States and Mexico, or between Venezuela and Brazil; and we would not have the national
disparities existing in wage levels, ecological legislation, or the rights of judicial
redressdisparities that arose historically as a result of the different ethnic compositions of the workforce as well as distinct national-political traditions.
Corporations depend on these disparities, and they are enforced only by the
policing operations of national governments. Equally, however, such disparities can be smuggled in through the back
door even as their effectiveness is ushered out the front. To put this more bluntly, nations continue to exist because the
major players have a vested interest in their continuing. Working people need nations in order to have
someone to complain to; corporations need nations in order to ensure a lack of fair competition and the absence of an equality of law, so that a dynamic flux can be
maintained within a setting of monopoly. What ensures the continuity of an albeit altered nation-state system is the desirability of choices for capital mobility, so
that capital can move when it finds too many regulations in one locale and more amenable legislation elsewhere. This sort of flux allows bidding and outbidding
among the clients of monopoly, and stands in as an imposter for the "free market" by simulating it. It is not that no novelty exists in the subsequent demographic
creations of this systemthat there is no reality to what cosmopolitanism calls new "world subjects," new diasporic communities, unrooted and resourceful. 24
But if one means by globalization the creation of new "world subjects" [End Page
673] who are not bound by the laws and territorial limitations of localityor,
indeed, are necessarily happy in their uprootedness one is indulging in a fiction,
and is either missing the point or obscuring it by looking at symptoms whose
significance is always exaggerated.
Nationalism Good
Nationalism is a tool to shape globalizationonly strong nations can facilitate
a transition to globalization
Resina, 03
(Joan, Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, diacritics, 33.3/4 46-74,
projectmuse)
Cosmopolitans make themselves vulnerable to the charge of mistaking the nature
of the political communities on which they rely for the range and resonance of
their voices. It is above all in those states most secure in the permanence of their
political systems, states that can afford a degree of internal skepticism, that
intellectuals may question the conditions of citizenship in effectually but with
impunity. Their ostensible aloofness from nationally vital issueswhich can be a response
to the embarrassment caused by cultural intimacy with their own national group [Herzfeld 2] often strengthens
the state ideologies they rhetorically deplore. One does not have to accept Richard Rorty's
nationalism of global leadership to realize that it recognizes the role that the United States has cut out for itself after 1989,
including the self-given American citizens' duty to act ethically and politically on a world power whose legitimacy devolves
upon them. This nationalism of the New World Order projects its own kind of space. Voicing a conviction that today has
the status of a US dogma, Rorty conceives the globe as a space to be filled with democratic values, which, far from being
universal, have their source in one nation, from whence they spread to the rest of the world. Rorty is not a reactionary
thinker but a pragmatic one. Whether or not he is right about the universalizable nature of American democracy, he surely
is to critique the "futile attempts [of academics] to philosophize one's way into political relevance" [94]. One cannot insert
oneself into the political process while speaking from a transcendent space. "Disengagement from practice produces
theoretical hallucinations" [94], a statement with which Marx would have agreed. Among these hallucinations he includes
the alleged disappearance of the nation into an uncharted territory whose sphericity is about all we know with reasonable
certainty. Belief in the nation's obsolescence, says Rorty, is the major obstacle to tackling problems of social justice, whose
resolution will remain bound to national governments for the foreseeable future. It is possible to object to Rorty's claim
that national governments remain the sole effective agents on matters of social justice, since the power of the United
States is not transferable, and even here, it is questionable that Washington exercises its power of arbitration to achieve a
semblance of social justice. But what about the more obviously dependent nations, those that are vulnerable to
neocolonialism and those that, lacking a state of their own, do not even figure in the global map? Are they dissolving in
postnational space? Whatever their ultimate fate may be, they cannot afford to give up the right to democratic selfregulation any more than influential nation-states can. And this right cannot be exercised if it is not grounded in a
common memory and experiences held in common. National
forms of political organization do not
hinder globalization. Globalization deploys universal principles but needs
popular legitimation, and this is likely to remain national. [End Page 70] The
persistence of nationalism becomes less mysterious when one understands that
nationalism is the oil that lubricates the state. Furthermore, the increasing
interdependence between states does not eject the nation from the political map .
One may call the space of interdependence "postnational" if one wishes, but the entities that relate in this way are national
through and through. As Wallerstein reminds us, "The interstate system is not a mere assemblage of so-called sovereign
states. It is a hierarchical system with a pecking order that is stable but changeable" ["Construction" 82]. If it is not a
constellation of symmetrical democracies, then it can be only an arrangement of spaces with an unequal distribution of
social, economic, cultural, and political opportunities, in other words, a political map. This pecking order is apparent,
quite graphically, in the position taken by heads of state before the camera that records their attendance at G-7 or
European summits. Inequalities within this order, according to Wallerstein, "lead to ideologies able to justify high rank
but also to challenge low rank. Such ideologies we call nationalisms" [82]. Nationalism,
then, is not an
irrational force but a tool, and at times a weapon, in the struggle to alter the
picture of world relations and to recreate the space of the world. It is an
instrument for progress and also an imposing bulwark for immobility . In the conditions
of worldwide interrelatedness, "[f]or a state not to be a nation," Wallerstein states, "is for that state to be outside the game
of either resisting or promoting the alteration of its rank. But then that state would not be part of the interstate system"
[82]. A postnational state, if such a thing existed, would be literally invisible on the political map. The nationalism of
stateless nations or, more exactly, of nations incorporated into a state ruled by a hegemonic nationality is also an attempt
to alter rank by securing a place in the interstate hierarchy.
Nationalism is essential to maintaining the democratic state- any alternative
cannot provide a mechanism to address social injustice and global violence
Calhoun, 7
(Craig, Professor of Social Sciences at New York University, Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan
Dream, pg. 147-149)
If nationalism is over, we shall miss it. Revolution may be the project of a vanguard party acting on behalf of its masses.
Resistance to capitalist globalization may be pursued by a multifarious and
inchoate multitude. But imagining democracy requires thinking of "the people"
as active and coherent and oneself as both a member and an agent . Liberalism informs the
notion of individual agency, but provides weak purchase at best on membership and on the collective cohesion and capacity of the demos. In the modern era, the
discursive formation that has most influentially underwritten these dimensions of democracy is nationalism.' Nationalists have exaggerated and naturalized the
historical and never more than partial unity of the nation. The hyphen in nation-state tied the modern polity - with enormously more intense and effective internal
administration than any large-scale precursors - to the notion of a historically or naturally unified people who intrinsically belong together. The idea that nations
give states clearly identifiable and meaningfully integrated populations, which in turn are the bases of their legitimacy, is as problematic as it is influential. 2 It is of
sure, nationalism has also been mobilized in sharply antidemocratic projects; it has
course an empirically tendentious claim. But it is part of a discursive formation that structures the world, not simply an external description of it.
often organized disturbingly intolerant attitudes; it has led to distorted views of the world and excesses of both pride and
imagined insults. It has also been a recipe for conflicts both internal and external. Populations straddle borders or move
long distances to new states while retaining allegiances to old nations. Dominant groups demand that governments
enforce cultural conformity, challenging both the individual freedom and the vitality that comes from cultural creativity.
These faults have made it easier for liberals to dismiss nationalism from their theories of
democracy. But this has not made it less important in the real world . There are of
course also many problems that affect everyone on earth - environmental
degradation, for example, or small arms trade. Nationalist rhetoric is commonly employed in excuses for
governmental failures to address these problems. Transnational movements press for action. But for the most
part the action comes, if it does, from national states. Likewise, there is no nonnational and cosmopolitan solution available to "complex humanitarian
emergencies" like that in Darfur. International humanitarian action is vitally important,
but more as compensation for state failures and evils than as a substitute for
better states. More generally, lacking a capable state may be as much as source of
disaster as state violence. National integration and identity are also basic to many
efforts at economic development and to contesting the imposition of a neoliberal
model of global economic growth that ignores or undermines local quality of life
and inhibits projects of self-government. Nations also remain basic units of
international cooperation. Though a secular decline in the capacity and importance of nation-states has often been asserted - or at least
predicted - as a result of globalization, this is not evident. Certainly nation-states face new challenges: multinational corporations and global markets organize
production, exchange, and even real estate markets across borders. It is harder for any state to control its fiscal policy autonomously, for example, and harder for
most to control their borders {as not only migrants but money, media, and a variety of goods cross them). The popularity of neoliberal privatization programs has
challenged state enterprises and provision of services that sometimes played an integrating role. The extent to which the integration of nations matches that of
states, has never been complete, and now faces challenges from calls for greater regional, ethnic, and religions autonomy. Proponents of cultural diversity have
often challenged assimilationist approaches to the cultural integration of immigrants. Migration has been organized into diasporic circuits linking communities in
several countries and making returning migrants and remittances significant issues in sender states. Yet nationalism and nation-states retain considerable power
and potential. Rather than their general decline, what we see today is loss of faith in progress through secular and civic nationalism and state-building projects.
Nations provide for
structures of belonging that build bridges between local communities and
mediate between these and globalization. Nations organize the primary arenas tor democratic
This makes it harder to appreciate the positive work that nationalism has done and still does (alongside its evil uses).
political participation. Nationalism helps mobilize collective commitment to public institutions, projects, and debates.
Nationalism encourages mutual responsibility across divisions of class and region. We
may doubt both the
capacities of nation-states and the morality of many versions of nationalism, but
we lack realistic and attractive alternatives. Crucially, we are poorly prepared to theorize democracy
if we cannot theorize the social solidarity of democratic peoples. Substituting ethical attention to the
obligations all human beings share does not fill the void. This effort lacks an
understanding of politics as the active creation of ways of living together, not only
distributing power but developing institutions. And, accordingly, it lacks a sense of
democracy as a human creation necessarily situated in culture and history,
always imperfect and open to improvement, and therefore always also variable. A
deep mutual relationship has tied nationalism to democracy throughout the modern era. Nationalism was crucial to collective democratic subjectivity, providing a
basis for the capacity to speak as "we the people," the conceptualization of constitution-making as collective self-empowerment, and commitment to accept the
judgment of citizens in general on contentious questions. As important, democracy encouraged the formation of national solidarity. When states were legitimated
on the basis of serving the commonwealth, when collective struggles won improved institutions, when a democratic public sphere spanned class, regional,
religious, and other divisions this strengthened national solidarity. It is a pernicious illusion to think of national identity as the prepolitical basis for- a modern
state - an illusion certainly encouraged by some nationalists. It is equally true that national identity is (like all collective identity) inherently political; created in
speech, action, and recognition. A democratic public is not merely contingent on political solidarity, it can be productive of it. Of course political community can be
There are varying degrees
of local autonomy within nation-states, and varying degrees of integration among
neighboring states. And of course nations can be transformed; they need not be
treated as prepolitically given but can be recognized as always made - culturally
as well as politically - and therefore remarkable. But the idea of democracy
requires some structures of integration, some cultural capacity for internal
communication, some social solidarity of "the people."
and is constructed on bases other than nations. Most people live in multiple, overlapping zones of solidarity .
Utopianism Bad (Lacan)
The entirety of the aims to change society and purify it in order to satisfy
the affirmative image of the utopia. This is a codeword for extermination
Starvrakakis, 1999
VISITING FELLOW IN GOV'T, UNIV. OF ESSEX Yannis, Lacan and the Political, pg. 101-102 \\bj
In order to realise the problematic character of the utopian operation it is necessary to articulate a genealogy of this way of
representing and making sense of the world. The work of Norman Cohn seems especially designed to serve this purpose. What is most
important is that in Cohns schema we can encounter the three basic characteristics of utopian fantasies that we have already singled
out: first, their link to instances of disorder, to the element of negativity. Since
human experience is a
continuous battle with the unexpected there is always a need to represent and
master this unexpected, to transform disorder to order. Second, this representation is
usually articulated as a total and universal representation, a promise of absolute
mastery of the totality of the real, a vision of the end of history. A future utopian
state is envisaged in which disorder will be totally eliminated. Third, this symbolisation
produces its own remainder; there is always a certain particularity remaining
outside the universal schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be
easily localised, that all persisting disorder is attributed. The elimination of disorder
depends then on the elimination of this group. The result is always horrible:
persecution, massacres, holocausts. Needless to say, no utopian fantasy is ever realised as a
result of all these crimesas mentioned in Chapter 2, the purpose of fantasy is not to satisfy
an (impossible) desire but to constitute it as such. What is of great interest for our approach is the way in
which Cohn himself articulates a genealogy of the pair utopia/demonisation in his books The Pursuit of the Millennium and Europes
Inner Demons (Cohn, 1993b, 1993c). The same applies to his book Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1996) which will also be implicated
at a certain stage in our analysis. These books are concerned with the same social phenomenon ,
the idea of purifying
humanity through the extermination of some category of human beings which are
conceived as agents of corruption, disorder and evil. The contexts are, of course, different, but the urge
remains the same (Cohn, 1993b:xi). All these works then, at least according to my reading, are concerned with the production of an
archenemy which goes
together with the utopian mentality.
Utopia and apocalypse are interchangeable. The attempt at creating a
harmonious atmosphere requires the extermination of what the affirmative
deems as bad in society.
In the light of our theoretical framework, fantasy can only exist as the
negation of real dislocation, as a negation of the generalised lack, the
antagonism that crosses the field of the social. Fantasy negates the
real by promising to realise it, by promising to close the gap between
the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of realitys
production. Yet any promise of absolute positivitythe construction of an
imaginarised false realis founded on a violent/negative origin; it is sustained
by the exclusion of a reala non-domesticated realwhich always returns to its
place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of
negativity. As we have already pointed out, the fantasy of a utopian
harmonious social order can only be sustained if all the persisting
disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. Since the realisation
of the utopian fantasy is impossible, utopian discourse can remain
hegemonically appealing only if it attributes this impossibilitythat is to
say, its own ultimate impossibilityto an alien intruder. As Sartre has put it the anti-Semite is in the
unhappy position of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy (Sartre, 1995:28). The impossibility of the
Nazi utopia cannot be incorporated within utopian discourse. This truth is not easy to admit; it is easier to attribute all
negativity to the Jew: All
that is bad in society (crises, wars, famines,
upheavals, and revolts) is directly or indirectly imputable to him. The
anti-Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ill-contrived, for
then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the result that
man would be found to be the master of his own destinies, burdened with an agonising and infinite responsibility.
Thus he localises all the evil of the universe in the Jews .
(Sartre, 1995:40) 12 As
Jerrold Post has pointed out, we are always bound to those we hate: We need enemies to keep our treasuredand
idealisedselves intact (Post, 1996:28-9). And this for fear of being free (Sartre, 1995:27). The
fantasy of
attaining a perfect harmonious world, of realising the universal, can
only be sustained through the construction/localisation of a certain
particularity which cannot be assimilated but, instead, has to be
eliminated. There exists then a crucial dialectic between the universal
fantasy of utopia and the particularity of thealways localenemy
who is posited as negating it. The result of this dialectic is always the
same: The tragic paradox of utopianism has been that instead of bringing about, as it
promised, a system of final and permanent stability, it gave rise to utter
restlessness, and in place of a reconciliation between human freedom
and social cohesion, it brought totalitarian coercion . (Talmon, 1971:95) In that
sense, as it was implicitly argued in Chapter 2, the notion of fantasy constitutes an
exemplary case of a dialectical coincidentia opositorum. 13 On the one
hand, fantasy has a beatific side, a stabilising dimension, it is
identical to the dream of a state without disturbances, out of reach of
human depravity; on the other hand, we have fantasy as something
profoundly destabilising: And does the fundamental lesson of socalled totalitarianism not concern the co-dependence of these two
aspects of the notion of fantasy? asks iek. All those who aspire fully
to realise its first harmonious side have recourse to its other dark
dimension in order to explain their failure: the foreclosed obverse of
the Nazi harmonious Volksgemeinschaft returned in their paranoiac
obsession with the Jewish plot. Similarly, the Stalinists compulsive
discovery of ever-new enemies of socialism was the inescapable
obverse of their pretending to realise the idea of the New Socialist
Man. (iek, 1996a:116) For iek, these two dimensions are like front and back of the same coin:
insofar as a community experiences its reality as regulated, structured, by fantasy, it has to disavow its inherent
impossibility, the antagonism in its very heartand fantasy (the figure of the conceptual Jew for example) gives body to
this disavowal. In short, the
effectiveness of fantasy is the condition for fantasy
to maintain its hold (ibid.). Utopia is not that far from dystopia.
This has historical backing. Whenever a utopia has been attempted, what has
happened has been the murder and destruction of the scapegoat.
Starvrakakis, 03
VISITING FELLOW IN GOV'T, UNIV. OF ESSEX Yannis,
Re-activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of Transformation
Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism Parallax, v. 9, no. 2, ebsco
In fact, whenever
a conscious attempt was made to realise utopia , to
institute human reality according to a plan promising to resolve social
contradiction and dissimulate political antagonism, the results were
catastrophic. To use a well-known Lacanian phrase, what was foreclosed in the
symbolic appeared in the real; the real of terror and extermination.
Realising the promise of full positivity seems to open the road to a proliferation of negativity. The result is the triple
knotted effect, of ecstasy, the sacred and terror that Alain Badiou has called disaster.13 There are at least two ways to
ground such a view on modern utopianism.14 One can articulate a historical argument according to which political
attempts to realize modern utopian fantasies (notably the ideal of an
Arian Nazi order and that of a proletarian revolution leading to a
future Communist society) have only reproduced a pattern typical of
pre-modern eschatological discourses such as revolutionary millenarianism. The way all
these discourses deal with negativity is more or less the following: Utopian fantasies promise to
eliminate forever negativity in whatever sociopolitical form it takes.
In order to achieve this impossible goal, utopian discourses localize
the cause of negativity in one particular social group or political actor .
Thus, the essential by-product of the utopian operation is invariably
the stigmatization and even the elimination of the social group
presented as incarnating negativity (qua Evil). This historical argument can be supported by a
psychoanalytic argument, regarding the function of fantasy in politics. From the point of view of a Lacanian ontology,
fantasy becomes the explosive union of two contradictory forces . It
involves the dream of a state without disturbances and dislocations, a
state in which we are supposed to get back the enjoyment (jouissance)
sacrificed upon entering the symbolic order, while at the same time
relies on the production of a scapegoat to be stigmatized as the one
who is to blame for our lack, the Evil force that stole our precious
jouissance. In order to sound credible in its promise to eliminate
negativity it has to attribute to it a localized, controllable cause (be it the
Jews, the kulaks, etc).15
We cannot point to some mythical community of harmony and peace
instead we must rethink politics
Edkins, 1999
Professor of International Politics, University of Wales, Jenny, Poststructuralism & International Relations pg. 6-7 \\ bj
In Western modernity what we call politics is a very specific notion,
located within the conceptions of sovereignty: It entails a sovereign
political order and a sovereign, autonomous subject. Foucault has
argued that what we need is a political philosophy that isn't erected
around the problem of sovereignty. 29 But the problem is not just that of sovereignty or a
sovereign politics. In his critique of Foucault, Barry Hindess
points to the need for a
rethinking of politics; he notes that it is not the problem of sovereignty that we (another fictional
community) need to free ourselves from, but also the problem of political community. In effect, this means finding a way
to think about politics in the absence of its defining, constitutive fiction. 30 Poststructuralist
in its move from politics to the political, attempts to provide the
tools for this rethinking. In iek's work on ideology, we have in particular an explicit focus on what
Hindess calls for, that is, a more general investigation of the role of fictional communities in the social and political
thinking of western societies. The approach of contemporary thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and iek is
helpful here for two reasons. First, it does not see subjectivity and the social order as separable or separate in the first
place. Hindess laments the way attention has been paid to the constitution of the subject at the expense of understandings
of community. But in a poststructuralist view the
constitution of the subject entails and is
inextricably linked with the constitution of a particular social or
symbolic order. Neither one is prior to the other; indeed, notions of
priority and separation are themselves bound up with particular
modern conceptions of a sovereign subjectivity. Hindess accepts what he sees as
Foucault's claim concerning the productivity of power in the formation of human attributes and capacities. 31 But is
there a preexisting, nonsocial, human subject whose attributes and capacities remain as yet unformed? Is it not the very
existence of the subject as such that power relations constitute? 32 For iek, at least, as we shall see, the formation of
subjectivity implicates the social, whether or not social existence is organized around principles such as sovereignty.
Second, for these thinkers there
is not, as in some sense there appears to be for Hindess, a real
community to be found somewhere (behind, underneath, beyond) the
fictional communities that underpin political thought. iek, for example,
believes what we call social reality has the status of a fiction but is no less real for all that. Moreover, there is
nothing behind it, concealed: The fiction conceals precisely the
nothing or the lack at the heart of the social or symbolic order.
Furthermore, it is not only the social, or political community, that
has the status of a fiction but also the subject. Through iek's work
we are led directly to an exploration of the question of the political
that does not see the problem of political community as one to be
resolved, although the need for the fiction of political community and
the fiction of the subject certainly must be examined. iek addresses
these questions through a concern with ideology and subjectivity.
AT Security K
Perm: Do both security can be good when controlled correctly through
action that balances rights and security thats also boosts the economy
Schneier 13 (Bruce, 5/20/13, author, Chief Technology Officer of Resilient
Systems, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and a board member of EFF, DOA
6/23/15, Google, Its Smart Politics to Exxagerate Terrorist Threats
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/20/opinion/schneier-security-politics/index.html)
//kbuck
Terrorism causes fear, and we overreact to that fear . Our brains aren't very
good at probability and risk analysis. We tend to exaggerate spectacular,
strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones.
We think rare risks are more common than they are, and we fear them more
than probability indicates we should. Our leaders are just as prone to this overreaction as we are. But
aside from basic psychology, there are other reasons that it's smart politics to
exaggerate terrorist threats, and security threats in general. The first is that we respond to a
strong leader. Bill Clinton famously said: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have
somebody that's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right ." He's
right. The second is that doing something -- anything -- is good politics. A
politician wants to be seen as taking charge, demanding answers, fixing things. It just doesn't
look as good to sit back and claim that there's nothing to do . The logic is
along the lines of: "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it." Bruce Schneier The third is that the "fear
preacher" wins, regardless of the outcome . Imagine two politicians today. One of them
preaches fear and draconian security measures . The other is someone like
me, who tells people that terrorism is a negligible risk, that risk is part of life,
and that whilesome security is necessary, we should mostly just refuse to be
terrorized and get on with our lives. Fast-forward 10 years. If I'm right and
there have been no more terrorist attacks, the fear preacher takes credit for
keeping us safe. But if a terrorist attack has occurred, my government career
is over. Even if the incidence of terrorism is as ridiculously low as it is today,
there's no benefit for a politician to take my side of that gamble . The fourth and final
reason is money. Every new security technology, from surveillance cameras to high-tech
fusion centers to airport full-body scanners, has a for-profit corporation
lobbying for its purchase and use. Given the three other reasons above, it's easy -- and probably profitable -- for a
politician to make them happy and say yes. For any given politician, the implications of these four reasons are straightforward.
Overestimating the threat is better than underestimating it. Doing
something about the threat is better than doing nothing. Doing something that is
explicitly reactive is better than being proactive. (If you're proactive and you're wrong, you've wasted money. If you're proactive and you're
right but no longer in power, whoever is in power is going to get the credit for what you did.) Visible is better than invisible. Creating
something new is better than fixing something old. Those last two maxims are why it's better for a politician to fund a terrorist fusion center
than to pay for more Arabic translators for the National Security Agency. No one's going to see the additional appropriation in the NSA's secret
budget. On the other hand, a high-tech computerized fusion center is going to make front page news, even if it doesn't actually do anything
useful. This leads to another phenomenon about security and government. Once a security system is in place, it can be very hard to dislodge
it. Imagine a politician who objects to some aspect of airport security: the liquid ban, the shoe removal, something. If he pushes to relax
security, he gets the blame if something bad happens as a result. No one wants to roll back a police power and have the lack of that power
cause a well-publicized death, even if it's a one-in-a-billion fluke. We're seeing this force at work in the bloated terrorist no-fly and watch lists;
agents have lots of incentive to put someone on the list, but absolutely no incentive to take anyone off. We're also seeing this in the
Transportation Security Administration's attempt to reverse the ban on small blades on airplanes. Twice it tried to make the change, and twice
fearful politicians prevented it from going through with it. Lots of unneeded and ineffective security measures are perpetrated by a
government bureaucracy that is primarily concerned about the security of its members' careers. They know the voters are more likely to
punish them more if they fail to secure against a repetition of the last attack, and less if they fail to anticipate the next one. What can we do?
the first step toward solving a problem is recognizing that you
have one. These are not iron-clad rules; they're tendencies. If we can keep these tendencies and
their causes in mind, we're more likely to end up with sensible security
measures that are commensurate with the threat, instead of a lot of security
theater and draconian police powers that are not. Our leaders' job is to resist these tendencies. Our
job is to support politicians who do resist.
Epistemology Good Cyber Security
Grid attack takes out C and C---causes retaliation and nuclear war former
military officer agrees.
Tilford 12 Robert, Graduate US Army Airborne School, Ft. Benning, Georgia, Cyber
attackers could shut down the electric grid for the entire east coast 2012,
http://www.examiner.com/article/cyber-attackers-could-easily-shut-down-the-electric-grid-forthe-entire-east-coa
a cyber attack that can take out a civilian power grid, for example could also cripple the
U.S. military.
backup diesel generators, within hours, not days, fuel supplies would run out
command and control centers could go dark Radar systems that detect air threats
would shut Down completely Communication between commanders and their troops would
also go silent. And many weapons systems would be left without either fuel or electric power,
So in a few short hours or days, the mightiest military in the world would be left
scrambling to maintain base functions
the Secretary of Defense, and the CIA Director have said ,
preventing a cyber attack and improving the nations electric grids is among the most urgent
priorities of our country
A cyber attack today against the US could very well be seen as an Act
of War and could be met with a full scale US military response.
of nuclear
To make matters worse
The senator notes that is that the same power grids that supply cities and towns, stores and gas stations, cell towers and heart monitors also power every military base in our country. Although bases would be prepared to
weather a short power outage with
, he said. Which
means military
to our country
Senator Grassley.
, he said. We contacted the Pentagon and officials confirmed the threat of a cyber attack is something very real. Top national security officialsincluding the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Director of the National Security Agency,
(source: Congressional Record). So how serious is the Pentagon taking all this? Enough to start, or end a war over it, for sure (see video: Pentagon declares war on cyber attacks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kVQrp_D0kY&feature=relmfu ).
That could include the use
, if authorized by the President.
Grids vulnerable and threats are growing---insiders vote aff
Merica 12 Dan, CNN, "DoD official: Vulnerability of U.S. electrical grid is a dire concern",
July 27, security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/27/dod-official-vulnerability-of-u-s-electrical-grid-is-adire-concern/
one defense department official expressed great concern
about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the U.S. electric grid that would cause a
long term, large scale outage . Paul Stockton, assistant secretary for Homeland
Defense and Americas Security Affairs at the Department of Defense, said such an attack
would affect critical defense infrastructure at home and abroad a thought that Stockton said was
keeping him up at night. The DOD depends on infrastructure in order to be able to operate
abroad. And to make those operations function, we depend on the electric grid, Stockton
said. The concern, Stockton continued, was that Americas adversaries would avoid attacking
the pointy end of the spear, meaning combat troops, and would instead look for
homeland, possibly non-military, targets. Our adversaries , state and non-state, are not
stupid. They are clever and adaptive , Stockton said. There is a risk that they will adopt a
profoundly asymmetric strategy, reach around and attack us here at home, the
critical infrastructure that is not owned by the D epartment o f D efense. But Stocktons
concerns were not solely limited to terrorist attacks. Other concerning scenarios, said the
assistant secretary, include geomagnetic disturbances, earthquakes and other natural
disasters that could take down the grid. According to Stockton, a recurrence of a massive
Speaking candidly at the Aspen Security Forum,
earthquake, like the New Madrid earthquake of 1812, would cause a power outage for weeks to
months across a multi-state area, rolling blackouts in the East Coast=
Epistemology Good Econ/Deterrence/Heg
The world is on the brink of war best study concludes aff US economy,
heg and deterrence key its try or die for the aff.
Ward 14 (Alex, 8/22/14, he works at the Atlantic Councils Brent Scowcroft Center on International
Security on U.S. defense policy and strategy. Follow mah homie on twitter @alexwardb. Only US can
prevent Great Power Wars http://thediplomat.com/2014/08/only-us-can-prevent-great-power-war/ )
With todays highly interconnected global
economy underwritten by a liberal order leading to the rise of the rest, it appears unlikely that
any state would want to disrupt the current system. And yet, the constant stream of somber news reignites fears of a calamitous global catastrophe. In
times of international flux, where the worst seems possible, it is important to turn to those who
can best interpret these eras. In the case of great power or hegemonic wars, there is hardly a
greater authority than Robert Gilpin. In his seminal work on the subject, War and Change in World Politics, Gilpin argues that three preconditions
must be met for a hegemonic war to occur. First, Gilpin believes that the soon-to-be warring parties must feel
there is a closing in of space and opportunities. Second, there must be a general perception that a
fundamental historical change is taking place. Finally, events around the world start to escape
human control. Notably, all three of these conditions currently exist in the world. Closing In Europe, where great power
As the World War I centennial is celebrated, repressed thoughts of great power war once again begin to surface.
conflict took place for centuries, was heavily congested and contested. As powers like Britain, France, Germany and others rose, they fought for influence and geography at the expense of the others territory. Due to
the close quarters, any desire for expansion on one countrys part would cause concern in the others. Today, some say, the world is different. The two powers that would compete in a war the United States and
China are separated by a vast ocean, supposedly making it hard for each to antagonize the other. This, however, is not true. The map may show an expansive world, but new technologies leading to
hyperconnectivity and shorter travel times, especially for military equipment have made the world claustrophobic. To wit, when China announced an Air Defense Identification Zone the United States quickly
deployed two B-52 bombers to challenge its claim. And that was using old equipment. Both China and the United States are developing hypersonic missiles andvehicles. Humanity has already conquered physical
space with commercial flight and fast ships. Now, it continues to shrink space even further for potentially decisive advantage. It is also hard to claim that China and the United States are far apart when they regularly
bump up against each other as they have in the South China Sea. Perception Since the dawn of Pax Americana after World War II, belief in the United States as the undisputed global hegemon remained fairly
stable. Until now. According to a recent Pew poll, Americans views of the United States as a global power have reached a 40-year low. Indeed, only 17 percent believe that America plays a more important and
powerful role than ten years ago. Rightly or wrongly, this perception exists. Even though most people still find the United States preferable to China, regional powers can use the widespread belief that America is
declining to make their cases for running the system. In fact they are already doing so to a degree. For example, Chinas Global Times reports that 47 percent of people believe China has achieved major power
status. Should both perceptions keep trending in the same direction the United States is declining while China rises then the feeling of an historic shift is almost inevitable. Human Control As current events
prove, even the great powers cannot stop horrendous things from happening in the world. From Latin America and Africa to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, chaos and turmoil run rampant. While this
is a particularly bad period for international affairs, it is nave to think this may be an isolated epoch. In fact, there is reason to think the world might grow more unstable in the years ahead. Over the next 11 years, the
world can expect another one billion people, reaching a total of around 8 billion by 2030. As technology becomes more powerful, it will do two things. First, it will empower the individual, or a group of individuals,
to do great good or great harm. Second, it will allow individuals to be more aware of how the middle class lives. People around the world will demand similar things, causing stress on governments and brewing civil
unrest and instability. Thus, as people are further empowered and further angered, the probability that these non-state actors indeed, normal, everyday people disrupt international affairs or geopolitics is high.
Governments will continue to have less and less control of the citizenry, allowing the regular citizen to do with her newfound power what she wills. In essence, we will see, in a big way, the diffusion of power.
Although the world currently satisfies Gilpins three preconditions, there need not be pessimism. For one, current relations between the United States and China are nowhere near the point where a potential great war
between them is possible, and there is no other rivalry nearing that of Washington and Beijing. Second, some of the trends that can cause harm, like rapid technological progress, can also be used to help stabilize the
global order. To be sure, technology could be used to curb the desolation brought on by expectedly low water, food, and energy levels. Finally, and most importantly, Gilpins guidance is certainly not comprehensive.
There are more variables for which to account (i.e. the effect of nuclear weapons) that dictate whether or not a great power war may take place. That said, Gilpins framework serves as a good rubric by which to
measure the current global climate. By all measures, this is certainly a dangerous time. But Gilpins preconditions shouldnt be misconstrued as predictive or fatalistic. Indeed, the United States, as the hegemon, has
By keeping good relations with partners and
allies, deterring adversaries, reversing the perception of its decline, and leveraging
technological capabilities for global good, there is a decent chance that the U.S. can make
the great-power-war-incubation period fade away. Should the United States not seize this
moment, and ensure that China is a responsible partner in the current global system alongside it,
then the chance of a great power war cannot be dismissed, however remote.
the capability (and responsibility) to preserve the international order and lead the world out of this mess.
Fear of death solves extinction
Beres 96 - Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University
Louis Rene, Feb., Scholar
Fear of death, the ultimate source of anxiety, is essential to human survival. This is true not only
for individuals, but also for states. Without such fear, states will exhibit an incapacity to
confront nonbeing that can hasten their disappearance. So it is today with the State of Israel.
Israel suffers acutely from insufficient existential dread. Refusing to tremble before the growing
prospect of collective disintegration - a forseeable prospect connected with both genocide and
war - this state is now unable to take the necessary steps toward collective survival. What is
more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe
unawareness of its national mortality deprives its still living days of essential absoluteness and
growth. For states, just as for individuals, confronting death can give the most positive reality
to life itself. In this respect, a cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's pattern
of potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off such an
awareness, a choice currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the altogether
critical benefits of "anxiety."
**NEG**
Executive ignores congressional limits on bulk data
The future of NSAs dragnet is uncertain. With the business-records provision set to expire
in June, the current legal basis for the metadata program will lapse unless Congress passes
another reauthorization. Partisan gridlock on the issue makes a new surveillance law doubtful,
and it raises the possibility of the NSA having to restore the far more restricted pre-9/11
procedures. But legislative inaction in 2015 might not end the NSA metadata
programs, even if it ended their current statutory basis. For one thing, the FISA
Court might approve bulk collection of communication records by reinterpreting
one or more permanent provisions of the PATRIOT Act, much as it did earlier with the
business-records provision. Alternatively, it could stretch an obscure provision in the
PATRIOT Act that appears to permit, indefinitely, new business-records orders for
terrorism investigations that predate the June 1 sunsetsimply by defining those
investigations in very broad terms.54 Supporters of the metadata program may still press for a
bill that authorizes the business-records provision permanently, but they may not regard the June
2015 sunset as a critical deadline for accomplishing it.55 Even if Congress at some point
enacted new restrictions on surveillance, the executive might ignore the law and
continue to make policy unilaterally . The job of reviewing executive conduct would again
fall to the FISA Court.56 In view of this courts history of broad deference to the
executive, Congress would have a challenge to ensure that legislative policies were
faithfully implemented.
AT Cap Adv
No link and turn - NSA Surveillance is a rampant form of capitalist
domination reformation is needed and plan solves.
Price 7/1/14 - http://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/the-new-surveillance-normal/ The New Surveillance
Normal (senior reporter for the monthly review)
The National Security Agency (NSA) document cache released by Edward Snowden
reveals a need to re-theorize the role of state and corporate surveillance systems in an
age of neoliberal global capitalism. While much remains unknowable to us, we now are
in a world where private communications are legible in previously inconceivable ways,
ideologies of surveillance are undergoing rapid transformations, and the
commodification of metadata (and other surveillance intelligence) transforms privacy.
In light of this, we need to consider how the NSA and corporate metadata mining
converge to support the interests of capital. This is an age of converging state and
corporate surveillance. Like other features of the political economy, these shifts develop with apparent independence of institutional motivations, yet corporate
and spy agencies practices share common appetites for metadata. Snowdens revelations of the NSAs global surveillance programs raises the
possibility that the state intelligence apparatus is used for industrial espionage in ways
that could unite governmental intelligence and corporate interestsfor which there
appears to be historical precedent. The convergence of the interests, incentives, and
methods of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the corporate powers they serve, raise
questions about the ways that the NSA and CIA fulfill their roles, which have been
described by former CIA agent Philip Agee as: the secret police of U.S. capitalism,
plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of U.S.
companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.1 There is a
long history in the
United States of overwhelming public opposition to new forms of electronic surveillance. Police, prosecutors, and spy agencies have recurrently used public crisesranging from the
Lindbergh baby kidnapping, wars, claimed threats of organized crime and terror attacks, to marshal expanded state surveillance powers.2 During the two decades preceding the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress periodically considered
developing legislation establishing rights of privacy; but even in the pre-Internet age, corporate interests scoffed at the need for any such protections. Pre2001 critiques of electronic-surveillance focused on privacy rights and threats to
boundaries between individuals, corporations, and the state; what would later be known as metadata collection were then broadly understood as violating shared notions of privacy, and as exposing the scaffolding of a police state or a
corporate panopticon inhabited by consumers living in a George Tooker painting. The rapid shifts in U.S. attitudes favoring expanded domestic intelligence powers following 9/11 were significant. In the summer of 2001, distrust of the FBI
and other surveillance agencies had reached one of its highest historical levels. Decades of longitudinal survey data collected by the Justice Department establish longstanding U.S. opposition to wiretaps; disapproval levels fluctuated
between 7080 percent during the thirty years preceding 2001.3 But a December 2001New York Times poll suddenly found only 44 percent of respondents believed widespread governmental wiretaps would violate Americans rights.4
Public fears in the post-9/11 period reduced concerns of historical abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies; and the rapid adoption of the PATRIOT Act precluded public considerations of why the Pike and Church congressional
committee findings had ever established limits on intelligence agencies abilities to spy on Americans. Concurrent with post-9/11 surveillance expansions was the growth of the Internets ability to track users, collecting metadata in ways
that seductively helped socialize all to the normalcy of the loss of privacy. The depth of this shift in U.S. attitudes away from resisting data collection can be seen in the publics response in the early 1990s to news stories reporting the
Lotus Corporations plans to sell a comprehensive CD-ROM database compiled by Equifax, consisting of Americans addresses and phone numbers. This news led to broad-based protests by Americans across the country angry about invasions
of privacyprotests that lead to the cancellation of the product which produced results less intrusive than a quick Google search would provide today. Similarly, a broad resistance arose in 2003 when Americans learned of the Bush
administrations secretive Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Under the directorship of Admiral John Poindexter, TIA planned to collect metadata on millions of Americans, tracking movements, emails, and economic transactions
for use in predictive modeling software with hopes of anticipating terror attacks, and other illegal acts, before they occurred. Congress and the public were outraged at the prospect of such invasive surveillance without warrants or
meaningful judicial oversight. These concerns led to TIAs termination, though as the Snowden NSA documents clarify, the NSA now routinely engages in the very activities envisioned by TIA. Four decades ago broad public outrage followed
revelations of Pentagon, FBI, and CIA domestic surveillance campaigns, as news of COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and a host of illegal operations were disclosed by investigative journalists and later the Pike and Church Committees. Today, few
Americans appear to care about Senator Dianne Feinsteins recent accusations that the CIA hacked her offices computers in order to remove documents her staff was using in investigations of CIA wrongdoing. 5 Americans now increasingly
accept invasive electronic monitoring of their personal lives. Ideologies of surveillance are internalized as shifts in consciousness embedded within political economic formations converge with corporate and state surveillance desires. The
rapid expansion of U.S. electronic surveillance programs like Carnivore, Naruslnsight, or PRISM is usually understood primarily as an outgrowth of the post-9/11 terror wars. But while post-9/11 security campaigns were a catalyst for these
expansions, this growth should also be understood within the context of global capital formations seeking increased legibility of potential consumers, resources, resistance, and competitors.6 C o n v e r g e n c e o f S t a t e a n d
The past two decades brought an accelerated independent growth
of corporate and governmental electronic surveillance programs tracking metadata
and compiling electronic dossiers. The NSA, FBI, Department of Defense, and CIAs
metadata programs developed independently from, and with differing goals from, the
consumer surveillance systems that used cookies and consumer discount cards, sniffing
Gmail content, compiling consumer profiles, and other means of tracking individual
Internet behaviors for marketing purposes. Public acceptance of electronic monitoring and metadata collection transpired
incrementally, with increasing acceptance of corporate-based consumer monitoring programs, and reduced resistance to governmental surveillance. These two
surveillance tracks developed with separate motivations, one for security and the other for commerce, but both desire to make individuals and groups legible
The collection and use of this metadata finds a synchronic
convergence of intrusions, as consumer capitalism and a U.S. national security state
leaves Americans vulnerable, and a world open to the probing and control by agents of
commerce and security. As Bruce Schneier recently observed, surveillance is still the
business model of the Internet, and every one of those companies wants to access your
communications and your metadata. But this convergence carries its own contradictions. Public trust in (and the economic value of) cloud
for reasons of anticipation and control.
servers, telecommunications providers, email, and search engine services suffered following revelations that the public statements of Verizon, Google, and others had been less than
forthright in declaring their claims of not knowing about the NSA monitoring their customers. A March 2014 USA Today survey found 38 percent of respondents believed the NSA violates their
privacy, with distrust of Facebook (26 percent) surpassing even the IRS (18 percent) or Google (12 percent)the significance of these results is that the Snowden NSA revelations damaged the
reputations and financial standing of a broad range of technology-based industries. With the assistance of private ISPs, various corporations, and the NSA, our metadata is accessed under a
shell game of four distinct sets of legal authorizations. These allow spokespersons from corporate ISPs and the NSA to make misleading statements to the press about not conducting
surveillance operations under a particular program such as FISA, when one of the other authorizations is being used. Snowdens revelations reveal a world where the NSA is dependent on
private corporate services for the outsourced collection of data, and where the NSA is increasingly reliant on corporate owned data farms where the storage and analysis of the data occurs. In
the neoliberal United States, Amazon and other private firms lease massive cloud server space to the CIA, under an arrangement where it becomes a share cropper on these scattered data
farms. These arrangements present nebulous security relationships raising questions of role confusion in shifting patronclient relationships; and whatever resistance corporations like Amazon
might have had to assisting NSA, CIA, or intelligence agencies is further compromised by relations of commerce. This creates relationships of culpability, as Norman Solomon suggests, with
Amazons $600 million CIA data farm contract: if Obama orders the CIA to kill a U.S. Citizen, Amazon will be a partner in assassination. Such arrangements diffuse complicity in ways
seldom considered by consumers focused on Amazon Primes ability to speedily deliver a My Little Pony play set for a brony nephews birthday party, not on the companys links to drone
attacks on Pakistani wedding parties. The Internet developed first as a military-communication system; only later did it evolve the commercial and recreational uses distant from the initial
intent of its Pentagon landlords. Snowdens revelations reveal how the Internets architecture, a compromised judiciary, and duplexed desires of capitalism and the national security state are
today converging to track our purchases, queries, movements, associations, allegiances, and desires. The rise of e-commerce, and the soft addictive allure of social media, rapidly transforms
U.S. economic and social formations. Shifts in the base are followed by shifts in the superstructure, and new generations of e-consumers are socialized to accept phones that track
movements, and game systems that bring cameras into the formerly private refuges of our homes, as part of a new surveillance normal. We need to develop critical frameworks considering
how NSA and CIA surveillance programs articulate not only with the United States domestic and international security apparatus, but with current international capitalist formations. While
secrecy shrouds our understanding of these relationships, CIA history provides examples of some ways that intelligence operations have supported and informed past U.S. economic ventures.
When these historical patterns are combined with details from Snowdens disclosures we find continuities of means, motive, and opportunity for neoliberal abuses of state intelligence for
private gains. T
he NSA and the Promise of Industrial Espionage
Following Snowdens NSA revelations, several foreign leaders expressed
outrage and displeasure upon learning that the NSA had spied on their governments and corporations, yet there has been little consideration of the meaning of the NSAs industrial spying .
The NSA is not the only government-based international hacking unit spying on global
competitors. In China, the Shanghai Chinese Peoples Liberation Armys Unit 61398
purportedly targets U.S. corporate and government computers, with hacking
campaigns supposedly seeking data providing economic or strategic advantage to the
Chinese government or private businesses. Israels Cyber Intelligence Unit (known as ISNU, or Unit 8200) has been linked to several political and economic hacking operations, including the Stuxnet worm and a recent attack on the lyse
Palace. While many Western analysts take for granted that such economic espionage networks exist elsewhere, there is little analysis of the possibility that the NSAs surveillance will be used by rogue individuals or agencies seeking
economic advantages. Yet the leveraging of such information is a fundamental feature of market capitalism. Last January, Snowden told the German ARD television network that there is no question that the U.S. is engaged in economic
spying. He explained that, for example, if there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and theyll take
it. Snowden did not elaborate on what is done with such economic intelligence. Snowden has released documents establishing that the NSA targeted French politicians, business people and members of the administration under a
programme codenamed US-985D with French political and financial interests being targeted on a daily basis. Other NSA documents show the agency spying on Mexican and Brazilian politicians, and the White House authorized an NSA list
of surveillance priorities including international trade relations designated as a higher priority than counterespionage investigations. Leaked NSA documents include materials from a May 2012 top secret presentation used by the NSA to
train new agents step-by-step how to access and spy upon private computer networksthe internal networks of companies, governments, financial institutionsnetworks designed precisely to protect information. One leaked NSA
PowerPoint slide mentions the US$120 billion a year giant Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras with a caption that many targets use private networks, and as the Brazilian press analysis pointed out Petrobras computers contain
information ranging from details on upcoming commercial bidding operationswhich if infiltrated would give a definite advantage to anyone backing a rival bidderto datasets with details on technological developments, exploration
information. In response to Snowdens disclosures, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted the NSA collects financial intelligence, but claimed it was limited to searches for terrorist financial networks and early warning
of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. In March 2013 Clapper lied to Congress, claiming that the NSA was not collecting data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. He has more
recently claimed the NSA does not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf ofor give intelligence we collect toUS companies to enhance their international competitiveness or
increase their bottom line. Over the course of several years, the NSAs Operation Shotgiant hacked into the servers of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Shotgiant initially sought to learn about the Peoples Liberation Armys
ability to monitor Huaweis clients communications, but the NSA later installed hidden back doors in Huaweis routers and digital switchesthe exact activities that the U.S. government had long warned U.S. businesses that Huawei had
done. Such operations raise the possibility of the NSA gaining knowledge to be used for economic gain by the CIA, NSA employees, or U.S. corporations. When pressed on these issues, a White House spokesperson claimed we do not give
intelligence we collect to U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line. Many countries cannot say the same. After this NSA operation was revealed, Huawei senior executive William Plummer
noted that the irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us. There are many historical examples of intelligence personnel using information acquired through the
course of their work for personal gain, such as selling intelligence information to another power. But what we need to focus upon is a qualitatively different phenomenon: the use of such information for corporate profit or market
speculation. In 1972, while investigating Nixons presidential campaign finance irregularities, the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee discovered documents indicating that Northrop had made a $450,000 bribe to Saudi Arabian air force
generals to help secure a $700 million Northrop F-E5 jet contact. Retired CIA agent Kim Roosevelt (then running a multinational consulting firm operating in Saudi Arabia) denied any involvement in these bribes, but the investigation
uncovered documents establishing that Roosevelt used his CIA connections for financial gain. The Senate subcommittee examined correspondence from Kim Roosevelt and Northrop officials, finding repeated references to my friends in
the CIA who were keeping him posted about the moves of commercial rivals. After the subcommittee focused its attentions on other more significant instances of CIA illegal activities, Roosevelt faced no legal consequences for these
activities. The most rigorous study to date documenting intelligence data being used for economic gains in stock market trading was recently published by economists Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu. The authors developed
empirical measures to determine whether classified knowledge of impending CIA operations has historically been used to generate profits in this manner. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu recognized that most regimes historically overthrown by
CIA coups had nationalized industries that were once privately held by international corporations; post-coup these industries returned to the previous corporate owners. Therefore, foreknowledge of upcoming coups had a significant
financial value in the stock market. The authors developed a series of measures to detect whether, during past CIA coups, there were detectible patterns of stock trading taking advantage of classified intelligence directives, which were
known only to the CIA and President. Their study selected only CIA coups with now declassified planning documents, which attempted to install new regimes, and in which the targeted pre-coup governments had nationalized once-private
multinational industries. They sampled five of twenty-four identified covert CIA coups meeting these three criteria: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (19601961), Cuba (failed Bay of Pigs coup, 1961), and Chile (1973). Daily stock
returns of companies that had been nationalized by the governments targeted by CIA coups were used to compare financial returns before presidential coup authorizations and after the coups. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu found that four days
after the authorization of coups their sample of stocks rapidly rose (before public awareness of these coming secret coups): for Congo there was a 16.7 percent increase on the day of the authorization, and a 22.7 percent return from the
baseline four days later. The Guatemala stocks showed a 4.9 percent increase upon coup authorization, a 16.1 percent increase four days later, and 20.5 percent seven days later; the Iranian stocks rose 7.4 percent four days after
authorization, 10.3 percent seven days later, and 20.2 percent sixteen days later. They found evidence of significant economic gains occurring in the stock market, with the relative percentage benefit of the coup attributable to ex ante
authorization events, which amount to 55.0% in Chile, 66.1% in Guatemala, 72.4% in Congo, and 86.9% in Iran. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu concluded that private information regarding coup authorizations and planning increased the stock
prices of expropriated multinationals that stood to benefit from regime change. The presence of these abnormal returns suggests that there were leaks of classified information to asset traders. By focusing on trading occurring at the
point of the top secret presidential authorizations, they found that gains made from stock buys at the time of authorizations were three times larger in magnitude than price changes from the coups themselves. It remains unknown
whether those profiting were lone individuals (either CIA employees or their proxies), or whether these investments were conducted by the CIA to generate funds for its black ops. We do not know how such past measures of intelligenceinsider profiteering do or do not relate to the NSAs present global surveillance operations. While Snowden released documents (and stated that more will be forthcoming) indicating NSA surveillance of corporations around the world, we do
not understand how the NSA puts to use the intelligence they collect. Even with these leaks the NSA largely remains a black box, and our knowledge of its specific activities are limited. Yet, the ease with which a middle-level functionary
like Snowden accessed a wealth of valuable intelligence data necessarily raises questions about how the NSAs massive data collections may be used for self-serving economic interests. Dube, Kaplan, and Naidu establish past insider
exploitations of intelligence data, and with the growth of insider-cheater capitalism of the type documented in Michael Lewiss Flash Boys, and expensive private inside-the-beltway newsletters, there are tangible markets for the industrial
espionage collected and analyzed by the NSA and CIA under these programs. Snowden, after all, was just one of tens of thousands of people with access to the sort of data with extraordinary value on floor of global capitalisms casinos.
Theorizing Capitalisms Pervasive Surveillance Culture
Notions of privacy and surveillance are always culturally constructed and are embedded within economic and
social formations of the larger society. Some centralized state-socialist systems, such as the USSR or East Germany, developed intrusive surveillance systems, an incessant and effective theme of anti-Soviet propaganda. The democraticsocialist formations, such as those of contemporary northern Europe, have laws that significantly limit the forms of electronic surveillance and the collection of metadata, compared to Anglo-U.S. practice
. Despite the
significant limitations hindering analysis of the intentionally secret activities of
intelligence agencies operating outside of public accountability and systems of legal
accountability, the documents made available by whistleblowers like Snowden and
WikiLeaks, and knowledge of past intelligence agencies activities, provide information
that can help us develop a useful framework for considering the uses to which these
new invasive electronic surveillance technologies can be put. We need a theory of
surveillance that incorporates the political economy of the U.S. national security state
and the corporate interests which it serves and protects. Such analysis needs an
economic foundation and a view that looks beyond cultural categories separating
commerce and state security systems designed to protect capital. The metadata,
valuable private corporate data, and fruits of industrial espionage gathered under
PRISM and other NSA programs all produce information of such a high value that it
seems likely some of it will be used in a context of global capital. It matters little
what legal restrictions are in place; in a global, high-tech, capitalist economy such
information is invariably commodified. It is likely to be used to: facilitate industrial or
corporate sabotage operations of the sort inflicted by the Stuxnet worm; steal either
corporate secrets for NSA use, or foreign corporate secrets for U.S. corporate use;
make investments by intelligence agencies financing their own operations; or secure
personal financial gain by individuals working in the intelligence sector. The rise of new invasive
technologies coincides with the decline of ideological resistance to surveillance and the compilation of metadata. The speed of Americans adoption of
ideologies embracing previously unthinkable levels of corporate and state surveillance suggests a continued public acceptance of a new surveillance normal
will continue to develop with little resistance. In a world where the CIA can hack the computers of Senator Feinsteina leader of the one of the three branches
of governmentwith impunity or lack of public outcry, it is difficult to anticipate a deceleration in the pace at which NSA and CIA expand their surveillance
reach. To live a well-adjusted life in contemporary U.S. society requires the development of rapid memory adjustments and shifting acceptance of corporate
and state intrusions into what were once protective spheres of private life. Like all things in our society, we can expect these intrusions will themselves be
increasingly stratified, as electronic privacy, or illegibility, will increasingly become a commodity available only to elites. Today, expensive technologies like
GeeksPhones Blackphone with enhanced PGP encryption, or Boeings self-destructing Black Phone, afford special levels of privacy for those who can pay. While
the United States current state of surveillance acceptance offers little immediate hope of a social movement limiting corporate or government spying, there
are enough historical instances of post-crises limits being imposed on government surveillance to offer some hope. Following the Second World War, many
European nations reconfigured long-distance billing systems to not record specific numbers called, instead only recording billing zonesbecause the Nazis used
phone billing records as metadata useful for identifying members of resistance movements. Following the Arab Spring, Tunisia now reconfigures its Internet
with a new info-packet system known as mesh networks that hinder governmental monitoringthough USAID support for this project naturally undermines trust
in this system.27 Following the Church and Pike committees congressional investigations of CIA and FBI wrongdoing in the 1970s, the Hughes-Ryan Act brought
significant oversight and limits on these groups, limits which decayed over time and whose remaining restraints were undone with the USA PATRIOT Act. Some
future crisis may well provide similar opportunities to regain now lost contours of privacies. Yet hope for immediate change remains limited. It will be difficult
for social reform movements striving to protect individual privacy to limit state and corporate surveillance. Todays surveillance complex aligned with an
economic base enthralled with the prospects of metadata appears too strong for meaningful reforms without significant shifts in larger economic formations.
Whatever inherent contradictions exist within the present surveillance system, and regardless of the objections of privacy advocates of the liberal left and libertarian right, meaningful restrictions appear presently unlikely with surveillance
formations so closely tied to the current iteration of global capitalism.
Cap isnt the root cause of anything greed is
Aberdeen 2003
Richard , A Theory of Root Cause and Solution,
http://freedomtracks.com/uncommonsense/theway.html, August 20th
view shared by many modern activists is that capitalism
globalization are the primary cause of the current global Human Rights
, the root problem of what ills the modern world is
being addressed. This
modern anarchists who resort to violence to solve
the problem are walking upside down and backwards
Violent revolution
becomes a breeding ground for
poverty, disease, starvation and often mass oppression leading to
future violence , publicly traded corporations are created by
individuals or groups of individuals
business enterprises are deliberately structured to be empowered by
a theorized need for offering salaries much
higher than is necessary to secure competent leadership (often
resulting in corrupt and entirely incompetent leadership
major political
and corporate exploitation of third-world nations is rooted in the
individual and joint greed of corporate investors and others who stand
to profit from such exploitation
If one examines the course of human events closely, it can
correctly be surmised that the root cause of humanitys problems
comes from individual human greed and similar negative individual
, free enterprise, multi-national corporations and
and that by striving to change or eliminate these
is a rather unfortunate and historically myopic view, reminiscent of early class struggle Marxists who soon resorted to violence as a means to achieve
rather questionable ends. And like these often brutal early Marxists,
, adding to rather than correcting, both the immediate and long-term
Human Rights problem.
, including our own American revolution,
. Large
, operated by individuals and made up of individual and/or group investors
(or group) investor greed. For example,
), lowering wages more than is fair and equitable and
scaling back of often hard fought for benefits, is sold to stockholders as being in the best interest of the bottom-line market value and thus, in the best economic interests of individual investors. Likewise,
. More than just investor greed, corporations are driven by the greed of all those involved, including individuals outside the enterprise itself who profit
indirectly from it.
. The Marx/Engles view of history being a class struggle does not address the root problem and is thus fundamentally flawed from a true historical perspective (see Gallo Brothers for more details). So-called classes of
people, unions, corporations and political groups are made up of individuals who support the particular group or organizational position based on their own individual needs, greed and desires and thus, an apparent class struggle in reality, is an extension of individual
nations engage in wars of aggression, not because
capitalism or classes of society are at root cause, but because
individual members of a society are individually convinced that
it is in their own economic survival best interest. War, poverty,
motivation. Likewise,
starvation and lack of Human and Civil Rights have existed on
our planet since long before the rise of modern capitalism, free
enterprise and multi-national corporation avarice, thus the
root problem obviously goes deeper than this. Junior Bush and
the neo-conservative genocidal maniacs of modern-day America could
not have recently effectively gone to war against Iraq without the
individual support of individual troops and a certain percentage of
individual citizens within the U.S. population,
While it is true that corrupt leaders often provoke war using all manner
of religious, social and political means to justify,
indeed is a battle only engaged in by these same unscrupulous
miscreants of power
, it takes a very
great many individuals operating from individual personal
motivations of survival, desire and greed to develop these
policies into a multi-national exploitive reality No economic or
political organization and no political or social cause exists unto itself
but rather, individual members power a collective agenda.
each lending support for their own personal motives, whatever they individually may have been
often as not, entirely ludicrous ends,
. And though a few iniquitous elitist powerbrokers may initiate nefarious policies of global genocidal oppression
A workers strike has no
hope of succeeding if individual workers do not perceive a personal benefit. And similarly, a corporation will not exploit workers if doing so is not believed to be in the economic best interest of those who run the corporation and who in turn, must answer (at least
Companies have often been known to
appear benevolent, offering both higher wages and improved benefits,
if doing so is perceived to be in the overall economic best interest of
the immediate company and/or larger corporate entity Non-unionized
business enterprises frequently offer carrots of appeasement to
workers in order to discourage them from organizing and historically in
the United States,
theoretically) to individuals who collectively through purchase or other allotment of shares, own the corporation.
concessions such as the forty-hour workweek, minimum wage, workers compensation and proscribed holidays have been grudgingly capitulated to by greedy capitalist masters as necessary
concessions to avoid profit-crippling strikes and outright revolution.
Perm: do both. Exclusive focus on class kills resistance to other forms of
Cornel West, PhD Princeton, Teach @ Yale Divinity, 1988, Marxism and the Interp. Of Culture,
ed. Nelson and Grossberg, p. 18-19
I shall argue that there are four basic conceptions of Afro-American oppression in the Marxist
tradition. The first conception subsumes Afro-American oppression under the general
rubric of working-class exploitation. This viewpoint is logocentric in that it elides and
eludes the specificity of Afro-American oppression outside the workplace; it is reductionistic
in that it explains away rather than explains this specificity. This logocentric and
reductionistic approach results from vulgar and sophisticated versions of economism. I
understand economism to be those forms of Marxist theory that defend either simple
monodeterminist or subtle multideterminist causal relations between an evolving economic base
upon a reflecting and refracting ideological superstructure, thereby giving a priori status to
class subjects and modes of production as privileged explanatory variables . 1n regard to AfroAmerican oppression, economism and its concomitant logocentric and reductionistic approach holds that African
people in the United States of America are not subjected to forms of oppression distinct from general working-class
exploitation. Historically, this position was put forward by the major figures of the U.S. Socialist party
(notwithstanding its more adequate yet forgotten 1903 resolution on the Negro question), especially Eugene Debs. In an
influential series of articles, Debs argued that Afro-American oppression was solely a class problem and that any
attention to its alleged specificity apart from the general labor problem would constitute racism in reverse.4 He
wrote, we [the socialists] have nothing to do with it [the race question], for it is their [the capitalists] fight. We have
simply to open the eyes of as many Negroes as we can and do battle for emancipation from wage slavery, and when the
working class have triumphed in the class struggle and stand forth economic as well as political free men, the race
problem will disappear. In the meantime, Debs added, we have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot
make separate appeals to all races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class regardless of color.5 My
aim is not simply to castigate the U.S. Socialist party or insinuate accusative charges of racism against Debs. Needless
to say, the Socialist party had many distinguished black members and Debs had a long history of fighting racism.
Rather, I am concerned with the fact that the Second Internationa l economism in the U.S. Socialist party lead
to a logocentric and reductionistic approach to Afro-American oppression, thereby
ignoring, or at best downplaying strategies (as opposed to personal moral duties) to struggle
against racism.
War Turn
Capitalism empirically leads to peace economic interdependence ensures no
Bandow 5 - (Doug, 11/10/5 senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He served as a special assistant to President
Reagan. Google, Spreading Capitalism is Good For Peace DOA 6/22/15)
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/spreading-capitalism-is-good-peace //kbuck
What causes peace? Many people, including U.S. President George W. Bush, hope that spreading
democracy will discourage war. But new research suggests that expanding free markets is a far more
important factor, leading to what Columbia Universitys Erik Gartzke calls a capitalist peace . Its a
In a world that seems constantly aflame, one naturally asks:
reason for even the left to support free markets. The capitalist peace theory isnt new: Montesquieu and Adam Smith believed in it. Many of Britains classical liberals, such as Richard Cobden, pushed free markets
economic ruin did not prevent rampant
nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets . An even greater conflict followed
a generation later. Thankfully, World War II left war essentially unthinkable among leading industrialized - and democratic - states. Support grew for the argument, going
back to Immanual Kant, that republics are less warlike than other systems . Todays corollary is that creating
democracies out of dictatorships will reduce conflict . This contention animated some support
outside as well as inside the United States for the invasion of Iraq . But Gartzke argues that the democratic peace
is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom . That is, democracies
typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states . Thus, while democracy is desirable for many
reasons, he notes in a chapter in the latest volume of Economic Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, representative governments are
unlikely to contribute directly to international peace. Capitalism is by far the more important
factor. The shift from statist mercantilism to high-tech capitalism has transformed the
economics behind war. Markets generate economic opportunities that make war less desirable.
Territorial aggrandizement no longer provides the best path to riches. Free-flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization
simultaneously draw nations together and raise the economic price of military conflict. Moreover, sanctions,
while opposing imperialism. But World War I demonstrated that increased trade was not enough. The prospect of
which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive step short of war to achieve foreign policy ends. Positive economic trends are not enough to prevent war, but then, neither is democracy. It long has been
obvious that democracies are willing to fight, just usually not each other. Contends Gartzke, liberal political systems, in and of themselves, have no impact on whether states fight. In particular, poorer democracies
nations with very low levels of economic freedom
are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels . Gartzke considers other variables, including alliance
perform like non-democracies. He explains: Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while
memberships, nuclear deterrence, and regional differences. Although the causes of conflict vary, the relationship between economic liberty and peace remains. His conclusion hasnt gone unchallenged. Author R.J.
Rummel, an avid proponent of the democratic peace theory, challenges Gartzkes methodology and worries that it may well lead intelligent and policy-wise analysts and commentators to draw the wrong conclusions
If it is true that democratic
states dont go to war, then it also is true that states with advanced free market economies never
go to war with each other, either. The point is not that democracy is valueless. Free political systems naturally entail free elections and are more likely to protect other forms of
about the importance of democratization. Gartzke responds in detail, noting that he relied on the same data as most democratic peace theorists.
liberty - civil and economic, for instance. However, democracy alone doesnt yield peace. To believe it does is dangerous: Theres no panacea for creating a conflict-free world. That doesnt mean that nothing can be
spreading capitalism - is the best means to encourage peace as well
as prosperity. Notes Gartzke: Warfare among developing nations will remain unaffected by the capitalist
peace as long as the economies of many developing countries remain fettered by governmental
control. Freeing those economies is critical. Its a particularly important lesson for the anti-capitalist left. For the most part, the enemies of economic liberty also
done. But promoting open international markets - that is,
most stridently denounce war, often in near-pacifist terms. Yet they oppose the very economic policies most likely to encourage peace. If market critics dont realize the obvious economic and philosophical value of
markets - prosperity and freedom - they should appreciate the unintended peace dividend. Trade encourages prosperity and stability; technological innovation reduces the financial value of conquest;
globalization creates economic interdependence, increasing the cost of war . Nothing is certain in life, and people are
motivated by far more than economics. But it turns out that peace is good business. And capitalism is good for peace .
Alt Fails
Neoliberalism is resilient and the alternative fails their optimism that the
system will collapse on its own underestimates neoliberalisms ability to reorganize in response to financial crises aftermath of 2008 recession proves
Mirowski 13
(Phillip, Prof. of Economics @ Notre Dame, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to
Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, pgs. 7-8)
Conjure, if you will, a primal sequence encountered in B-grade horror films, where the celluloid protagonist suffers a terrifying encounter with
disaster abruptly wakes to a different world, which initially seems normal, but eventually is revealed to be
a second nightmare more ghastly than the first.1 Something like that has become manifest in real life
since the onset of the crisis which started in 2007. From the crash onward, it was bad enough to
doom, yet on the cusp of
endure house prices sinking under water, dangling defaults and foreclosures, the collapse of what remained of manufacturing employment,
the reduction of whole neighborhoods to bombed-out shells, the evaporation of pensions and savings accounts, the dismay of witnessing the
hope of a better life for our children shrivel up, neighbors stocking up on firearms and people confusing bankruptcy with the Rapture. It was an
unnerving interlude, with Nietzschean Eternal Return reduced to an Excel graph with statistics from the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Fast forward to 2011. Whether it was true or not, people had just begun to
hope that things were finally turning around. Moreover, journalists in mainstream
publications bandied about the notion that academic economics had
failed, and hinted that our best minds were poised to rethink the doctrines that had led the world astray. Yet, as the
year grew to a close, it slowly dawned upon most of us that the natural
presumption that we were capable of rousting ourselves from the
gasping nightmare , that we might proceed to learn from the
mistakes and fallacies of the era of Neoliberal Follies, was itself
just one more insidious hallucination . A dark slumber cloaked the land. Not only
had the sense of crisis passed without any serious attempts to
rectify the flaws that had nearly caused the economy to grind to a halt, but unaccountably, the political
right had emerged from the tumult stronger, unapologetic, and even
less restrained in its rapacity and credulity than prior to the crash. In 2010, we were ushered into a grim era of confusion
and perplexity on the left. It took a rare degree of self-confidence or fortitude not to gasp dumbfounded at the roaring resurgence of the right
so soon after the most dramatic catastrophic global economic collapse after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Incongruity seems too polite
Austerity became the
watchword in almost every country; governments everywhere became
the scapegoats for dissatisfaction of every stripe, including that provoked by austerity. In the name of
probity, the working class was attacked from all sides, even by nominal socialist parties. In the few instances
when class mobilization was attempted by trade unions to counterattack, as in the recall
petition for Scott Walker in the state of Wisconsin, the birthplace of American progressivism, it failed . The
pervasive dominance of neoliberal doctrines and right-wing parties worldwide from
Europe to North America to Asia has flummoxed left parties that, just a few short years ago, had
been confident they had been finally making headway after decades of neoliberal
encroachment. Brazenly, in many cases parties on the left were unceremoniously
voted out because they had struggled to contain the worst
fallout from the crisis. By contrast, the financial institutions that had
precipitated the crisis and had been rescued by governmental
a term to describe the unfolding of events; contradiction seems too outmoded.
action were doing just finenay, prospering at precrisis ratesand in a bald display of uninflected
ingratitude, were intently bankrolling the resurgent right. Indeed, the astounding recovery of corporate profits practically guaranteed the
luxuriant postcrisis exfoliation of Think Tank Pontification
Local movements get co-opted - and totalizing depictions of capitalism
preclude the possibility of concrete changes that can challenge the worst
aspects of capitalism.
J.K. Gibson-Graham Professor 06 (JK, The End of Capitalism as We Knew It, pg. 255-257)
What is important here, for my purposes, are not the different metaphors and images of
economy and society but the fact that they all confer integrity upon Capitalism . Through its
architectural or organismic depiction as an edifice or body, Capitalism becomes not an uncentered aggregate of
practices but a structural and systemic unity , potentially co-extensive with the national or global economy as a whole. 11
As a large, durable, and self-sustaining formation, it is relatively impervious to ordinary
political and cultural interventions. It can be resisted and reformed but it cannot be
replaced, except through some herculean and coordinated struggle. Understood as a unified system or structure, Capitalism is not
ultimately vulnerable to local and partial efforts at transformation. Any such efforts can
always be subverted by Capitalism at another scale or in another dimension . Attempts to transform
production may be seen as hopeless without control of the financial system. Socialisms in one city or in one country may be seen as undermined by
Capitalism at the international scale. Capitalism
cannot be chipped away at, gradually replaced or
removed piecemeal. It must be transformed in its entirety or not at all. Thus one of the
effects of the unity of Capitalism is to present the left with the task of systemic
transformation. Singularity If the unity of Capitalism confronts us with the mammoth task of
systemic transformation, it is the singularity and totality of Capitalism that make the task
so hopeless. Capitalism presents itself as a singularity in the sense of having no peer or
equivalent, of existing in a category by itself; and also in the sense that when it appears fully realized within a particular social formation, it tends
to be dominant or alone. As a sui generis economic form, Capitalism has no true analogues. Slavery, independent commodity
production, feudalism, socialism, primitive communism and other forms of economy all lack the systemic properties of Capitalism and the ability to
reproduce and expand themselves according to internal laws. 12 Unlike
socialism, for example, which is always
struggling to be born, which needs the protection and fostering of the state, which is fragile
and easily deformed, Capitalism takes on its full form as a natural outcome of an internally
driven growth process. Its organic unity gives capitalism the peculiar power to regenerate
itself, and even to subsume its moments of crisis as requirements of its continued growth and development. Socialism has
never been endowed with that mythic capability of feeding on its own crises; its reproduction was never driven from within by a life force but always
from without; it could never reproduce itself but always had to be reproduced, often an arduous if not impossible process. 13 Other
modes of
production that lack the organic unity of Capitalism are more capable of being instituted or
replaced incrementally and more likely to coexist with other economic forms. Capitalism, by
contrast, tends to appear by itself. Thus, in the United States, if feudal or ancient classes exist, they exist as residual forms; if
slavery exists, it exists as a marginal form; if socialism or communism exists, it exists as a prefigurative form. None of these forms truly and fully
coexists with Capitalism. Where Capitalism does coexist with other forms, those places (the so-called Third World, for example, or backward regions in
what are known as the "advanced capitalist" nations) are seen as not fully "developed." Rather than signaling the real possibility of Capitalism
coexisting with noncapitalist economic forms, the coexistence of capitalism with noncapitalism marks the Third World as insufficient and
incomplete. Subsumed to the hegemonic discourse of Development, it identifies a diverse array of countries as the shadowy Other of the advanced
capitalist nations. One effect of the notion of capitalist exclusivity is a monolithic conception of class, at least in the context of "advanced capitalist"
countries. The term "class" usually refers to a social cleavage along the axis of capital and labor since capitalism cannot coexist with any but residual or
prefigurative noncapitalist relations. The
presence and fullness of the capitalist monolith not only denies
the possibility of economic or class diversity in the present but prefigures a monolithic and
modernist socialism - one in which everyone is a comrade and class diversity does not exist .
A2: NSA =/= Capitalist
More ev - Unwarranted collection of data on populations is
a method adopted only by totalitarian states privacy is
handed over in exchange for capital gain Henry A Giroux 10 February 2014, Henry Giroux, is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. Giroux received his doctorate from
Carnegie Mellon University; Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State; http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-
Kbuck
paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state //
The revelations of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden about government lawlessness and corporate spying provide a new meaning if not a revitalized urgency and relevance to George Orwell's dystopian fable 1984. Orwell offered his readers an image of the modern state that had become dystopian - one in which privacy as a civil virtue and a crucial right was no longer valued as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving democracy. Orwell was clear that the right to
privacy had come under egregious assault. But the right to privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation of individual rights. When ruthlessly transgressed, the issue of privacy became a moral and political principle by which to assess the nature, power and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. As important as Orwell's warning was in shedding light on the horrors of mid-20th century totalitarianism and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on citizens, the text serves as a brilliant but limited metaphor for
mapping the expansive trajectory of global surveillance and authoritarianism now characteristic of the first decades of the new millennium. As Marjorie Cohn has indicated, "Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use." In his videotaped Christmas
message, Snowden references Orwell's warning of "the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us,"2 allowing the state to regulate subjects within the most intimate spaces of private life. But these older modes of surveillance, Snowden elaborates, however, are nothing compared to what is used to infringe on our personal privacy today. For Snowden, the threat posed by the new surveillance state can be measured by its reach and use of technologies that far outdate anything Orwell envisioned and pose a much
greater threat to the privacy rights of citizens and the reach of sovereign powers. He reiterates this point by reminding his viewers that "a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all - they will never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought."3 Snowden is right about the danger to privacy rights but his analysis fails to go far enough in linking together the question of surveillance with the rise of "networked societies," global flows of power and the emergence
of the totalitarian state. In a world devoid of care, compassion and protection, privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. The democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy under the modernist state in which Orwell lived out his political imagination has been transformed and mutilated, almost beyond recognition. Just as Orwell's fable has morphed over time into a combination of "realistic novel," real-life
has been redefined through the material and
ideological registers of a neoliberal order in which the right to privacy has succumbed to the
seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism's unending necessity to turn every
relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life visible and subject to
data manipulation.5
, privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its
connection to public life,
In a world in which the worst excesses of capitalism
are unchecked, privacy is nurtured in a zone of historical amnesia, indifferent to its
transformation and demise under a "broad set of panoptic practices." 6
Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life.
, the surveillance and security state is one that not only listens , watches and gathers
massive amounts of information through data mining necessary for identifying consumer
populations but also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of surveillance
technologies and privatized commodified values into all aspects of their lives. Personal
information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based websites and
gathered daily as people move from one targeted web site to the next across multiple screens and
digital apparatuses.
documentary and a form of reality TV, privacy has been altered radically in an age of permanent, 'nonstop' global exchange and circulation. So, too, and in the current period of historical amnesia
, privacy
In a world devoid of care, compassion and protection
the common good or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life.
Consequently, culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory in a social order where a consumerist-driven ethic "makes impossible any shared
recognition of common interests or goals" and furthers the collective indifference to the growth of the surveillance state.7
In fact, it is more appropriate to analyze the culture of surveillance, rather than address exclusively the
violations committed by the corporate-surveillance state. In this instance
As Ariel Dorfman points out, social media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons, all the while endlessly shopping online and texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the streets, commercial establishments and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as in the
myriad scanners placed at the entry points of airports, stores, sporting events and the like. Yet the most important transgression may not only be happening through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting of information but also in a culture that normalizes surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and enticements for consumers who use the new digital technologies and social networks to simulate false notions of community and to socialize young people into a culture of security and commodification in which their
identities, values and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of private addictions, self-help and commodification. Surveillance feeds on the related notions of fear and delusion. Authoritarianism in its contemporary manifestations, as evidenced so grippingly in Orwell's text, no longer depends on the raw displays of power but instead has become omniscient in a culture of control in which the most cherished notions of agency collapse into unabashed narcissistic exhibitions and confessions of the self, serving as willing fodder for the
spying state. The self has become not simply the subject of surveillance but a willing participant and object. Operating off the assumption that some individuals will not willingly turn their private lives over to the spying state and corporations, the NSA and other intelligence agencies work hard to create a turnkey authoritarian state in which the "electronic self" becomes public property. Every space is now enclosed within the purview of an authoritarian society that attempts to govern the entirety of social life. As Jonathan Schell points
out: Thanks to Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist. They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our
communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state. Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others. This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching
corporations, which use it for commercial purposes. Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex. Every human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook or some other social network. Social cynicism and societal indifference accelerate a broken culture in which reason has been replaced by consumer-fed hallucinatory hopes.9 Surveillance and its accompanying culture of fear now produce subjects that revel in
being watched, turning the practice if not the threat posed by surveillance into just another condition for performing the self. Every human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook or some other social network. Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the endless public display of the self. Zygmunt Bauman echoes this sentiment in arguing that: These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of
privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to wring out and tear away the secrets from behind the ramparts of privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody's shared property and a property everybody wishes to share. Everything that moves is monitored, along with information that is endlessly amassed and stored by private and government agencies. No one, it
seems, can escape the tentacles of the NSA or the spy agencies that are scouring mobile phone apps for personal data and intercepting computer and cellphone shipments to plant tracking devices and malware in them.11 Surveillance is now global, reaching beyond borders that no longer provide an obstacle to collecting information and spying on governments, individuals, prominent politicians, corporations and pro-democracy protest groups. The details of our daily lives are not only on full display but are being monitored, collected
and stored in databanks waiting to be used for commercial, security or political purposes. At the same time, the right to privacy is eagerly given up by millions of people for the wonders of social networking or the varied seductions inspired by consumer fantasies. The loss of privacy, anonymity and confidentiality also has had the adverse effect of providing the basis for what Bauman and David Lyons call the undemocratic process of "social sorting," in which different populations are subject to differential treatment extending from
being protected by the state to being killed by drone attacks launched under the auspices of global surveillance and state power. Privacy is no longer a principled and cherished civil right. On the contrary, it has been absorbed and transformed within the purview of a celebrity and market-driven culture in which people publicize themselves and their innermost secrets to promote and advance their personal brand. Or it is often a principle invoked by conservatives who claim their rights to privacy have been trampled when confronted with
ideas or arguments that unsettle their notions of common sense or their worldviews. It is worth repeating that privacy has mostly become synonymous with a form of self-generated, nonstop performance - a type of public relations in which privacy makes possible the unearthing of secrets, a cult of commodified confessionals and an infusion of narcissistic, self-referencing narratives, all of which serve to expand the pleasure quotient of surveillance while normalizing its expanding practices and modes of repression that Orwell could
never have imagined. Where Orwell's characters loathed the intrusion of surveillance, according to Bauman and Lyons, today We seem to experience no joy in having secrets, unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of researchers and editors of TV talk shows, tabloid front pages and the....covers of glossy magazines.Everything private is now done, potentially, in public - and is potentially available for public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as
the internet 'can't be made to forget' anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people's views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. Orwell's 1984 looks subdued next to the current parameters, intrusions, technologies and disciplinary apparatuses wielded by the new corporate-government surveillance state. Surveillance
has not only become more pervasive, intruding into the most private of spaces and activities in order to collect massive amounts of data, it also permeates and inhabits everyday activities so as to be taken-for-granted. Surveillance is not simply pervasive, it has become normalized. Orwell could not have imagined either the intrusive capabilities of the the new high-powered digital technologies of surveillance and display, nor could he have envisioned the growing web of political, cultural and economic partnerships between modes of
government and corporate sovereignty capable of collecting almost every form of communication in which human beings engage. What is new in the post-Orwellian world is not just the emergence of new and powerful technologies used by governments and corporations to spy on people and assess personal information as a way to either attract ready-made customers or to sell information to advertising agencies, but the emergence of a widespread culture of surveillance. Intelligence networks now inhabit the world of Disney as well as
the secret domains of the NSA and the FBI. I think the renowned intellectual historian Quentin Skinner is right in insisting that surveillance is about more than the violation of privacy rights, however important. Under the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy, but the fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary power it no longer seems interested in contesting. And it is precisely this existence of unchecked power and the wider culture of political indifference that
puts at risk the broader principles of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself. According to Skinner, who is worth quoting at length: The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it's true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails
but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.14 The dangers of the surveillance state far exceed the attack on privacy or warrant simply a discussion about balancing security against civil
liberties. The latter argument fails to address how the growth of the surveillance state is connected to the rise of the punishing state, the militarization of American society, secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, a growing culture of violence, the criminalization of social problems, the depoliticization of public memory, and one of the largest prison systems in the world, all of which "are only the most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse security regime in which we are all interned and enlisted."15 The authoritarian nature of
the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system with its "urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet"16 can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the rise in super-max prisons, the hyper-militarization of local police forces, the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act
of terrorism in the United States.17 The reach of the surveillance culture can also be seen in the use of radio chips and GPS technologies used to track a person's movements across time and space. The point of no return in the emergence of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus is not strictly confined to the task of archiving immense pools of data collection to be used in a number of illegal ways.18 It is in creating a culture in which surveillance becomes trivialized, celebrated, and legitimated as reasonable and unquestioned
behavior. Evidence that diverse forms of public pedagogy are sanctioning the security state is on full display in post-Orwellian America, obvious in schools that demand that students wear radio chips so they can be tracked.19 Such anti-democratic projects are now also funded by billionaires like Bill Gates who push for the use of biometric bracelets to monitor students' attentiveness in classrooms.20 The normalization of surveillance is also evident in the actions of giant Internet providers who use social messaging to pry personal
information from their users. The reach of the surveillance culture can also be seen in the use of radio chips and GPS technologies used to track a person's movements across time and space. At the same time, cultures of surveillance work hard to trivialize the importance of a massive surveillance environment by transforming it into a source of entertainment. This is evident in the popularity of realty TV shows such as "Big Brother" or "Undercover Boss," which turn the event of constant surveillance into a voyeuristic pleasure.21 The
atrophy of democratic intuitions of culture and governance are evident in popular representations that undermine the meaning of democracy as a collective ethos that unconditionally stands for social, economic, and political rights.22 One example can be found in Hollywood films that glorify hackers such as those in the Matrix trilogy, or movies that celebrate professionalized modern spying and the government agents using their omniscient technological gizmos to fight terrorists and other forces of evil. What is lost in the culture of
spying and the unwarranted collection of personal information from people
commercial purposes is a procedure often adopted by totalitarian states.
surveillance is that
who have not broken the law in the name of national security and
AT Democracy
Open Internet Turn
TURN - U.S. internet freedom push is self-defeating.
Morozov 11 (Evgeny Morozov, visiting scholar in the Liberation Technology Program at
Stanford University and a Scwhartz fellow at the New America Foundation, former Yahoo fellow
at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a former fellow at the
Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program, Contributing
editor at Foreign Policy and the New Republic, Foreign Policy, January/February 2011,
"Freedom.gov", http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/freedomgov?page=full)
A year ago this January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage at Washington's
Newseum to tout an idea that her State Department had become very taken with: the Internet's
ability to spread freedom and democracy. "We want to put these tools in the hands of people who
will use them to advance democracy and human rights," she told the crowd, drawn from both the
buttoned-up Beltway and chronically underdressed Silicon Valley. Call it the Internet
Freedom Agenda: the notion that technology can succeed in opening up the world where
offline efforts have failed. That Barack Obama's administration would embrace such an idea was
not surprising; the U.S. president was elected in part on the strength of his online organizing and
fundraising juggernaut. The 2009 anti-government protests in Iran, Moldova, and China's
Xinjiang region -- all abetted to varying degrees by communications technology -- further
supported the notion that the Internet was, as Clinton said in her speech, "a critical tool for
advancing democracy." A year later, however, the Internet Freedom Agenda can boast of
precious few real accomplishments ; if anything, it looks more and more like George W.
Bush's lower-tech "Freedom Agenda," his unrealized second-term push for
democratization across the broader Middle East. Clinton's effort has certainly
generated plenty of positive headlines and gimmicky online competitions, but not much
else. In July, the New York Times Magazine lavished almost 5,000 words on a profile of Jared
Cohen and Alec Ross, the State Department's digital-diplomacy wunderkinds. But it's hard to
say what exactly they succeeded in doing , beyond getting in trouble for tweeting from Syria
about how delicious the frappuccinos were. The only big move that the State Department did
make was granting $1.5 million to Falun Gong-affiliated technologists based in the United States
to help circumvent censorship -- a step that instead angered Falun Gong's numerous supporters in
Washington, who had originally asked for $4 million. Elsewhere, the State Department's
enthusiasm for technology has surpassed its understanding of it . Early last year, in an
effort to help Iranian dissidents, the U.S. government granted an export license to the company
behind Haystack, a privacy-protecting and censorship-circumventing technology then being
touted in the media as a revolutionary tool for Internet freedom. But Haystack proved to be
poorly designed and massively insecure in its early tests in Iran, putting its users -- the democracy
advocates it was supposed to protect -- in even greater danger. It was summarily shut down in
September. Since October 2009, the State Department has been working to launch an anonymous
SMS tip line to help law-abiding Mexicans share information about drug cartels. Like Haystack,
it attracted plenty of laudatory coverage, but it succumbed to (still ongoing) delays when it ran
into a predictable problem: Ensuring the anonymity of text messages is not easy anywhere, let
alone when dealing with Ciudad Jurez's corrupt police force. But the Internet Freedom
Agenda's woes extend far beyond a few botched projects . The State Department's
online democratizing efforts have fallen prey to the same problems that plagued
Bush's Freedom Agenda. By aligning themselves with Internet companies and
organizations, Clinton's digital diplomats have convinced their enemies abroad that
Internet freedom is another Trojan horse for American imperialism . Clinton went
wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom:
Don't talk about promoting Internet freedom . Her Newseum speech was full of
analogies to the Berlin Wall and praise for Twitter revolutions -- vocabulary straight
out of the Bush handbook . To governments already nervous about a wired citizenry,
this sounded less like freedom of the Internet than freedom via the Internet: not just
a call for free speech online, but a bid to overthrow them by way of cyberspace . The
lessons of the first Freedom Agenda should have been instructive. After youthmovement-driven "color revolutions" swept Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan from
2003 to 2005, Bush openly bragged about his support for such groups and vowed to help
the new pro-democracy wave go global. The backlash was immediate. Countries like Russia,
which had previously been relatively blas about such activism , panicked , blocking
foreign funding to civil society groups and NGOs and creating their own pro-government
youth movements and civil society organizations. The end result in many countries was a
net loss for democracy and freedom . The Internet Freedom Agenda has similarly
backfired . The state of web freedom in countries like China, Iran, and Russia was far
from perfect before Clinton's initiative, but at least it was an issue independent of those
countries' fraught relations with the United States. Google, Facebook, and Twitter were
hardly unabashed defenders of free speech, but they were nevertheless emissaries ,
however accidentally, of a more open and democratic vision of the Internet. Authoritarian
governments didn't treat them as a threat, viewing them largely as places where their
citizens chose to check their email, post status updates, and share pasta recipes. Most
governments, China being the obvious exception, did not bother to build any barriers to them.
But as the State Department forged closer ties with Silicon Valley, it vastly
complicated the tech companies' inadvertent democracy promotion . The department
organized private dinners for Internet CEOs and shuttled them around the world as part of
"technology delegations." Cohen, who recently left Foggy Bottom to work for Google, called
Facebook "one of the most organic tools for democracy promotion the world has ever seen" and
famously asked Twitter to delay planned maintenance work to keep the service up and running
during Iran's 2009 Green Revolution. Today, foreign governments see the writing on the
virtual wall . Democratic and authoritarian states alike are now seeking
"information sovereignty" from American companies, especially those perceived as
being in bed with the U.S. government. Internet search, social networking, and even
email are increasingly seen as strategic industries that need to be protected from
foreign control. Russia is toying with spending $100 million to build a domestic alternative to
Google. Iranian authorities are considering a similar idea after banning Gmail last February, and
last summer launched their own Facebook clone called Velayatmadaran, named after followers of
the velayaat, or supreme leader. Even Turkey, a U.S. ally, has plans to provide a
government-run email address to every Turkish citizen to lessen the population's
dependence on U.S. providers. Where the bureaucrats and diplomats who touted the
Internet Freedom Agenda went wrong was in thinking that Washington could work
with Silicon Valley without people thinking that Silicon Valley was a tool of
Washington. They bought into the technologists' view of the Internet as an unbridled, limitless
space that connects people without regard to borders or physical constraints. At its best, that
remains true, but not when governments get involved. The Internet is far too valuable to become
an agent of Washington's digital diplomats. The idea that the U.S. government can advance
the cause of Internet freedom by loudly affirming its commitment to it -- especially
when it hypocritically attempts to shut down projects like WikiLeaks -- is
delusional . The best way to promote the goals behind the Internet Freedom Agenda
may be not to have an agenda at all.
AT Cyber Security Adv
NSA surveillance kills cybersecurity
Danielle Kehl is a polic y ana lyst at Ne w Amer ica 's Ope n Technology Institute, whe re she
re searche s and wr ites about br oadband polic y, Interne t free dom, and other tec hnology polic y issues. How the
NSA Hurts Our Economy, Cybersecurity, and Foreign Policy, July 31, 14
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/31/usal_freedom_act_update_how_the_nsa_hurts_our_economy_cybersecurity_and
_foreign.html //Csmith
theres growing evidence that certain NSA surveillance techniques
are actually bad. As the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recently explained: The
United States might have compromised both security and privacy In a failed
attempt to improve security. Weve learned in the past year that the NSA has been
deliberately weakening the security of the Internet, including commercial
products that we rely on every day, in order to improve its own spying capabilities.
The agency has apparently tried everything from
secretly undermining essential encryption tools and standards to
inserting backdoors into widely used computer hardware and software products,
stockpiling vulnerabilities in commercial software, and building a vast network of
spyware inserted onto computers and routers around the world. A former U.S.
ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Eileen Donahoe, wrote a forceful article back in March about
how the NSAs actions threaten our national security. When you weigh these costs against the
programs, the need to rein in the NSA and restore
international confidence in the U.S. becomes obvious. The USA FREEDOM Act
questionable benefits of the
is historic not because it would solve all of our problems, but rather because it would be a much-needed first
step in the long road to recovery from the effects of widespread NSA surveillance.
Impact Defense China War
No US-China war economic and geopolitical constraints
Goldstein, 11
[Joshua S., professor emeritus of international relations at American University,
Sept/October, Think Again: War, Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/15/think_again_war?page=full]
"Wars Will Get Worse in the Future." Probably not. Anything is possible, of course: A full-blown war between India and Pakistan, for
instance, could potentially kill millions of people. But so could an asteroid or -- perhaps the safest bet -- massive storms triggered by
climate change. The big forces that push civilization in the direction of cataclysmic conflict, however, are mostly ebbing. Recent
technological changes are making war less brutal, not more so. Armed drones now attack targets that in
the past would have required an invasion with thousands of heavily armed troops, displacing huge numbers of civilians and
destroying valuable property along the way. And improvements in battlefield medicine have made combat less lethal for participants.
In the U.S. Army, the chances of dying from a combat injury fell from 30 percent in World War II to 10 percent in Iraq and
Afghanistan -- though this also means the United States is now seeing a higher proportion of injured veterans who need continuing
support and care. Nor
do shifts in the global balance of power doom us to a future of
perpetual war. While some political scientists argue that an increasingly multipolar world is an increasingly volatile one -that peace is best assured by the predominance of a single hegemonic power, namely the United States -- recent geopolitical history
suggests otherwise. Relative U.S. power and worldwide conflict have waned in tandem over
the past decade. The exceptions to the trend, Iraq and Afghanistan, have been lopsided wars waged by the hegemon, not challenges by
up-and-coming new powers. The best precedent for today's emerging world order may be the 19th-century Concert of Europe, a
collaboration of great powers that largely maintained the peace for a century until its breakdown and the bloodbath of World War I.
What about China, the most ballyhooed rising military threat of the current era? Beijing
is indeed modernizing its
armed forces, racking up double-digit rates of growth in military spending, now about $100 billion a year. That is
second only to the United States, but it is a distant second: The Pentagon spends nearly $700
billion. Not only is China a very long way from being able to go toe-to-toe with the
United States; it's not clear why it would want to. A military conflict (particularly with its
biggest customer and debtor) would impede China's global trading posture and
endanger its prosperity. Since Chairman Mao's death, China has been hands down the most
peaceful great power of its time. For all the recent concern about a newly assertive
Chinese navy in disputed international waters, China's military hasn't fired a single
shot in battle in 25 years
MAD prevents US China war the cold war proves
professor of political science at Boston College, associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, senior
advisor of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Council on Foreign
Relations. He is one of the foremost American specialists on Chinese foreign and defense policy and U.S.-China relations. (Robert S.
Ross, Navigating the Taiwan Strait: Deterrence, Escalation Dominance, and U.S.-China Relations, International Security, Vol. 27,
No. 2 (Fall, 2002), pp. 48-85, JSTOR)
The key to the extended deterrence problem is the role of nuclear weapons in the conventional use of force. Leaders in Beijing may
believe that China's nuclear weapons can deter U.S. conventional use of force in defense of Taiwan, thus enabling the Chinese to start
a war. This is the core issue in the "stability- instability paradox."10 On the one hand, t he
history of the Cold War
suggests that the deterrence of conventional war by the danger of accidental or unin- tended
escalation to mutually assured destruction (MAD) may be a reality.11 On the other hand, during the Cold War,
U.S. officials feared that although the risk of nuclear war would deter the United States from launching a conven- tional war, they
could not be sure whether the Soviet Union would respond similarly to the risk of an unintended nuclear exchange. Thus, after the
Soviet Union acquired a second-strike nuclear capability in the mid-1960s, many U.S. government officials and defense analysts
argued that deterrence required ro- bust U.S. conventional and/or nuclear war-fighting capabilities and "escala- tion dominance."12
These concerns contributed to NATO's deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Western Europe.13 Regarding contemporary East
Asia, some U.S.
policy analysts fear that lead- ers in Beijing may believe that China's
limited nuclear capability deters U.S. in- tervention on behalf of Taiwan, thus tempting China to use
force for unification. These concerns drive much of the desire of the Bush administra- tion to enhance U.S.- Taiwan defense
cooperation and missile defense. But
if Chinese leaders are like their U.S. counterparts during the
Cold War, they will lack confidence in the utility of nuclear weapons to deter U.S.
intervention in a mainland-Taiwan war; instead they will focus on China's
conventional capa- bilities as its deterrent force. The capabilities and credibility of the status quo state
interact with the revi- sionist state's interest in challenging the status quo to create the expected costof the use of force and thus the
effectiveness of deterrence. During the Cold War, the probability that the United States would risk a U.S.-Soviet nuclear ex- change in
retaliation for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe may have been low, but the costs for the Soviet Union would have been
catastrophic, thus cre- ating sufficient expected costs to deter the Soviet use of force.'4 To determine the expected cost of the use of
force in the Taiwan Strait, Chinese
leaders must balance the credibility of a U.S. threat to
intervene, the likely costs for China of U.S. intervention, and the potential benefits
of unification.
Chinas growing presence in international organization gives it has a vested
interest in maintaining peace
Friedberg 05
PhD in Politics from Harvard, served as Director of Princeton's Research Program in International Security at the Woodrow Wilson
School, served from 2003 to 2005 in the office of the Vice President of the United States as deputy assistant for national-security
affairs and director of policy planning. (Aaron L. Friedberg, The Future of U.S.-China Relations: Is Conflict Inevitable?,
International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Fall, 2005), pp. 7-45, JSTOR)
In addition to their faith in trade as an instrument of peace, liberal optimists place great store in
the role of international institutions of various kinds. These can help to improve
communication between states, reducing uncertainty about intentions and
increasing the capacity of governments to make credible, binding commitments to
one another. By so doing, they can help to ease or counteract some of the pernicious
effects of international anarchy, clearing the way for higher levels of cooperation
and trust than would otherwise be attainable.16 As regards U.S.-China relations, liberal
optimists note that since the end of the Cold War there has been a proliferation of regional
institutions in East Asia. Included among these are APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation forum); the ARF (the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] Re- gional
Forum); ASEAN + 3; the East Asia Summit; an expanding network ofbilateral military-tomilitary talks; and an even wider array of quasi-official track-2 security dialogues
involving scholars, analysts, and bureaucrats from countries in the region. Over the course of the
last decade, China has also sought entry into several important global institutions,
including the WTO (which it entered in 2001) and the nuclear nonproliferation regime
(which it joined in 1996). In addition, it has begun to play a more active and prominent
role in the United Nations. By one count, the PRC's membership in formal, in- ternational
governmental organizations more than doubled between 1977 and 1997 (from 21 to 52), while its
membership in international nongovernmental organizations soared during the same period from
71 to 1,163.17 The growth of international institutions in Asia and the expansion of
both U.S. and Chinese participation in them are drawing the United States and the
PRC into a thickening web of ties that liberal optimists believe will promote contact,
communication and, over time, greater mutual understanding and even trust, or at
the very least, a reduced likelihood of gross misperception. Aside from whatever direct
effects it may have on bilateral relations with the United States, China's increasing
participation in international institutions should also give it a growing, albeit more
diffuse, stake in the stability and continuity of the existing global order. The desire of
China's leaders to con- tinue to enjoy the benefits of membership in that order
should make them less likely to take steps that would threaten the status quo. This,
in turn, should re- duce the probability that the PRC will act in ways that could
bring it into conflict with the United States, which is, after all, the principal architect,
de- fender, and beneficiary of the contemporary international system .'8
Impact Defense No Cyber Terror
Terrorists rely on the internet too much to attack it
Kohlmann 06 (Evan F. Kohlmann, Foreign Affairs, The Real Online Terrorist
Threat http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85510/evan-fkohlmann/the-real-online-terrorist-threat.html)
although catastrophic computer attacks are not entirely inconceivable, the
prospect that militants will be able to execute them anytime soon has been overblown. Fears of such
science-fiction scenarios, moreover, have led policymakers to overlook the fact that
terrorists currently use the Internet as a cheap and efficient way of communicating
In truth,
and organizing. These militants are now dedicated to waging an innovative, low-intensity military campaign against the United States.
Jihadists are typically organized in small, widely dispersed units and coordinate their
activities online, obviating the need for a central command. Al Qaeda and similar groups rely on the
Internet to contact potential recruits and donors, sway public opinion, instruct would-be terrorists, pool tactics and knowledge, and
organize attacks. The RAND Corporation's David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla have called this phenomenon "netwar," which they define as a form
groups use the Internet in the same way that peaceful political organizations
do; what makes terrorists' activity threatening is their intent.
of conflict marked by the use of "network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies." In many ways,
Impact Inevitable
Cyber-attacks unavoidable - firms increase incident response spending
Correa 15
Danielle Correa, Production Editor
June 01, 2015 http://www.scmagazineuk.com/cyberattacks-unavoidable--firms-increase-incident-response-spending/article/417957/
Firms are shifting their cyber-security spend away from traditional 'prevent and protect' advances towards 'detect and respond'
operations, according to a new study by the analysis and consultancy company, Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC).This
new research found that a shift in spending is due to an acceptance that cyber-attacks
are unavoidable. The study has
questioned 200 people from leading companies in the UK, France and Germany with support from FireEye, HP,
Telefonica and Resilient Systems.The research showed firms spending 77 percent of their security budgets using endpoint solutions including firewalls. But spending is moving towards the post-breach 'detect and respond' capability.
It also reported that firms struggled to identify cyber-breaches.The cost of cyber-breaches continues to rise and as a
result, firms are anticipating increasing external arrangements for Incident response to achieve cost efficiency and access to the
required expertise. Firms are coming to terms with the inevitability of a cyber-breach, said Duncan Brown, research director at PAC
and lead author of the study. Rather than spending a majority of security budget on prevention, firms will apply a more balanced
approach to budgeting for cyber-attacks.Cyber-attacks have become increasingly personalized resulting in many more organizations
being compromised with a much greater business impact, commented Greg Day, EMEA VP & CTO, FireEye. This shows that
companies can no longer afford to focus solely on defense they need to also balance it with incident response. Furthermore, the
study suggests that there is a lack of order between a business' confidence to react to a breach and their true efficiency. The main issue
is people skills, typically not a quick or simple fix. Most CIOs worry about outsourcing security due to a perceived loss of visibility
and control. Brown continued that, With incident response it's better to have an external resource standing by, possibly on retainer,
than divert internal staff from their core responsibilities when an attack occurs. A cyber-breach may be inevitable but the nature and
timing of an attack is unpredictable.
AT Racism Adv
Turn Law is Racist
The law is inherently dehumanizing. Working through the government
cannot solve dehumanization.
(Steven R. Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, Criminal Law, Fall 06, Dartmouth Law Journal, Dehumanization and
Recreation: A Lacanian Interpretation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, pp. 108-109, Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law
School, 06
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=steven_morrison)
suggests that the law tends to dehumanize people and recreate them as
less than human but more suitable for governance. Marvin Frankel has described
the "gross evils and defaults in what is probably the most critical point in our system of
administering justice, the imposition of a sentence." Frankel goes on to assert a need to "humanize criminal sentencing."
Lacan clearly
He calls to Lacan in stating that "the Guideline range is not sufficiently broad to accommodate relevant differences among offenders.
The judges power to depart therefore became the crucial mechanism for avoiding undue rigidity." This argument derives from Lacans
law does away with individuality. It ignores
individual uniqueness and instead installs a system with a philosophy of human
sameness, a kind of blind equality. The FSG thus, by universalizing the offender, become "offensive to the
notion of law that "universalizes significations," meaning that
whole notion of human dignity" by ignoring the offenders personal characteristics.
Legal means fail to accept that race was socially constructed as if it were fixed
not socially constructed
Gloria Sandrino-Glasser, Associate Professor of Law, California Western School of Law, Chicano-Latino Law Review, Spring,
1998, 19 Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 69, p. 131
Law mirrors society.
As Neil Gotanda has recently demonstrated, the term "race" has been used to stand for
several different concepts. n243 A
survey of the Supreme Court's varying definitions of race
reveals that unitary definitions and either/or frameworks prevail in judicial
attempts to determine the meaning of "race." In legal discourse, the notion that
race is constructed in social contexts and has had a multitude of meanings is
virtually nonexistent. The idea that race is fixed and inherited remains widely
accepted and reflected in the law. The Supreme Court adopted this conception of law in Shaw v. Reno.
Alt Causes
Aff cant solve things like language, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and
nationality that are all root causes of racism, discrimination, and inequality
James 1996
(Charles. Perspectives on racism and the human services sector. Pg. 194. http://books.google.com/books?
id=4uTrgB0tbysC&pg=PA194&lpg=PA194&dq=social+services+perpetuates+racism&source=bl&ots=aWsZXHafpc&sig=yx8ITGGt
hYiJyTCakgzwsJXPig&hl=en&ei=hUNSSs_TL8WktweX4Y2rBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3
Just as multiculturalism has tended to be blind to the unique ways that colour operates to perpetuate inequity, anti-racists
realize that, at various times and places, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender, nationality,
and disability are the basis of discrimination and inequity. The expanded anti-racist cast of mind
accommodates the paradox of the similarity and uniqueness of each oppression. It does not
require the ranking of pain to claim strategic leverage in anti-racist work.
Racism Inevitable
Agnese 05
http://media.www.mcquadrangle.org/media/storage/paper663/news/2005/09/28/Perspectives/Poverty.And.Racism.In.America1001728.shtml9/28/05
Race issues never go away, do they? There's a reason for that: racism is still very evident
in our society, and it contributes to poverty. Forty-one years have passed since President
Lyndon Johnson declared, "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war
on poverty in America." Over four-and-a-half years have passed since we have had a
president who understood the problems of racism and poverty in our country.
Politics DA
Plan is a loss for Obama lobbied against expiration of the Patriot Act and
for the current USA Freedom Act
5/26 BYRON TAU And SIOBHAN HUGHES Obama Urges Lawmakers to Pass NSA
Surveillance Bill http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-urges-lawmakers-to-pass-nsa-surveillancebill-1432676351
WASHINGTONPresident Barack Obama, facing the expiration of certain government
spying and surveillance capabilities, on Tuesday urged lawmakers to pass legislation
by Sunday to keep the programs from shutting down at the end of this week. The
programs, authorized under a section of a 2001 law that expires on Sunday, allow
for a range of National Security Agency activities, including the sweeping up of telephone
records from millions of Americans. Civil libertarians have complained that the phonerecords program is an inappropriate government intrusion into Americans lives ,
while supporters of the program say it would be wrong to eliminate a U.S. intelligence capability
for investigating potential threats without offering a replacement. The problem we have now is
that those authorities run out at midnight on Sunday. So, I strongly urge the Senate to work
through this recess and make sure that they identify a way to get this done, Mr. Obama said
Tuesday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. Mr. Obama said that he strongly
urged the Senate to keep working on a compromise bill known as the USA Freedom
Act that has passed the House. The Senate blocked consideration of that bill last week.
Neoliberalism K
Biopolitics Link
Their form of Biopolitics ignores the fact that neoliberalism undergirds
biopower neoliberalism abandons massive populations in the name of
economic management which ultimately leads to biopower in itself
Willse, 12
Craig Willse is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at George Mason University. He is co-editor, with Patricia Clough, of
Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death. Surplus Life: Biopower and Neoliberalism
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/surplus-life-biopower-and-neoliberalism/ //ZA
In the context of neoliberalism, we must not only think about the connections between
disciplinary and biopolitical technologies of race/sex regulation,[4] but we must also
attend to the ways that life gets figured differently in financialized postindustrial
capital.[5] While Foucault does not describe his work this way, looking back we can
see that his model of biopower charts the emergence of the modern nation-state,
especially in its early twentieth-century welfare state form. In the context of a Keynesian political
economy, the life of the national population is set to positively correlate with the life of
the economy: both must grow for either one to grow. In a post-Fordist, deregulated capitalism, the
economy becomes divorced from labor; the abandonment of mass segments of the
US population (through the dismantling of social welfare programs, increased privatization of healthcare, defunding of public
education) is not only social, but, very literally, economic. The economy moves on without many of us. The
expansion of prison industries has served to capture and contain the racialized populations made surplus by neoliberal capital.[6] My
work looks at social service regimes as the softer side of the neoliberal management of its own excesses by charting the emergence
of federal homelessness policy in the mid-1980s. This is only the second time in US history (the first occurred during the early New
Deal) that the federal government has intervened in what has been understood as a local, bounded problem to be dealt with on the
ground, where it supposedly takes place. That this policy, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, emerged during the
Reagan administration is neither ironic nor contradictory. Rather, the
birth of federal homelessness policy
was the remaking of homelessness into a problem of economic management. It
effected a neoliberalization of homelessness which has brought with it a
biopoliticization. This means thatin addition to disciplinary-level management techniques of pathologizing/reforming the
individual aberrant homelesswe have an interest in homelessness as a specific kind of population to which inheres patterns,
tendencies, and, of course, costs. This has been enabled by social science, as quantitative work has sought to capture demographic
characteristics that, divorced from social, political-economic contexts, come to be explanatory predictors of homelessness,[7] rather
than being seen as the cumulative effects of racialized/gendered labor, housing, and social service markets. Feminist, critical race
critiques of the culture of poverty thesis helps us to flip this, and we can begin to understand that those who are targeted by the
homeless services nexuspredominantly single, adult men, especially Black and Latino men, and, in some regions, Nativeare also
those who have been organized outside of labor and family networks. Thus, the
work and cost of their
management falls directly on the state (or municipal and nonprofit forms as its stand-ins). Here, qualitative
social science in an ethnographic mode has tried to show the good men of the homeless, leaving untouched the processes of
gender/sex/race that make these populations, as well as the cultural narratives about them. This is also a place where we can clearly
see that the mass redundancies produced by neoliberalism are set to market logics and processes, and become both socially and
economically productive. I have talked about this in terms of surplus life, to bring together a notion of productive life-forms with the
Marxist notion of surplus populations. But rather than a category of labor, we have a category of raw material to be labored on by
the knowledge and service industries that constitute a homeless management nexus,
and which include federal, state, county, and municipal government agencies;
nonprofit service providers and advocacy organizations; and social science research
centers. Looking at the context of global neoliberal humanitarianism, Aihwa Ong has argued this is why inclusion/exclusion
models (as in Agamben) are insufficient, as industries of working on (behalf of) the excluded have proliferated.
Racism Link
Racist Experience is just another site for articulating the dominant ideology
of neoliberalism because it ignores the historical continuity of class
domination in favor of a local understanding of oppression locking race
into a system of itself neglects that the foundation of racism was brought
about by capitalism slavery - metaphysically deconstructing neoliberalism
solves Young 6 (, professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama, 2006 [Dr. Robert, Putting
Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race, The Red Critique,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/printversions/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm]) //Kbuck
Bourgeois philosophical assumptions haunt the Afrocentric project and, in the domain of black
, Patricia Hill Collins provides an instructive example of this intersection. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits the "special angle of vision" that black women bring to knowledge production process (21), and this "unique
angle" (22) provides the "standpoint" for Afrocentric feminism, a feminism that she equates with humanism (37). Similar to the experiential metaphysics of Black women's standpoint theory, Collins also situates Afrocentric feminist epistemology "in the everyday
experiences of African-American women" (207). Consequently, Collins suggests that "concrete experience" constitutes a criterion of meaning (208). However, the experiential, the "real", does not adequate the "truth", as Collins implies. Collins rejects the "Eurocentric
Masculinist Knowlege Validation Process" for its positivism but, in turn, she offers empiricism as the grounds for validating experience. Hence, the validity of experiential claims is adjudicated by reference to the experience. Not only is her argument circular, but it also
If race, class, gender, and the accompanying ideological apparatuses are interlocking
systems of oppression
the experiential is not the site for the "true" but rather the site for
the articulation of dominant ideology.
experience is self-intelligible and in their discourse it functions as the limit text of the
it is true that a person of color experiences oppression, this
experience is not self-explanatory and, therefore, it needs to be situated in relation to other social
practices.
specifically Marxist
theory, provides an explanation of this outside by reading the meaning of all experiences as
determined by the economic realities of class
race in the United Statesfrom slavery to Jim Crow to Katrinais written in the
fundamental difference of class
experience does not speak the real, but rather it is the site
of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration to break from cultural common
sense, a conduit for dominant ideology
positions subjectivity beyond the reach of
undermines one of her key claims.
, as Collins suggest, then
On what basis then, could the experiential provide grounds for an historical understanding of the structures that make experience itself possible as experience?
Asante and Collins assume that
However, I believe experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. Though
Experience seems local but it is, like all cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences. Thus its explanation come from its "outside". Theory,
. While Asante's and Collins' humanism reads the experience of race as a site of "self-presence",
. In other words,
. It is this outside that has come under attack by black (humanist) scholars through the invocation of the black (transcendental) subject. Indeed,
of the subject operates as an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black experience and, consequently, it
. For example, in the Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses Marxism because it is Eurocentric (8), but are the core concepts of Marxism, such as class and mode of production, only relevant for European social formations? Are African and African-
American social histories/relations unshaped by class structures? Asante assumes that class hierarchies do not structure African or the African-American social experiences, and this reveals the class politics of Afrocentricity: it makes class invisible. Asante's assumption,
which erases materialism, enables him to offer the idealist formulation that the "word creates reality" (70). The political translation of such idealism is not surprisingly very conservative. Asante directs us away from critiquing capitalist institutions, in a manner similar to
the ideological protocol of the Million Man March, and calls for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts it, "symbol imperialism, rather than institutional racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (56). In the realm of
African-American philosophy, Howard McGary Jr. also deploys the discourse of the (black) subject to mark the limits of Marxism. For instance, in a recent interview, McGary offers this humanist rejection of Marxism: "I don't think that the levels of alienation
experienced by Black people are rooted primarily in economic relations" (Interview 90). For McGary, black alienation exceeds the logic of Marxist theory and thus McGary's idealist assertion that "the sense of alienation experienced by Black people in the US is also
rooted in the whole idea of what it means to be a human being and how that has been understood" (Interview 90). McGary confuses causes and effects and then misreads Marxism as a descriptive modality. Marxism is not concerned as much with descriptive accounts,
Social alienation is an historical
effect and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself; therefore, it needs explanation
and such an explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of concepts
First, he argues that black alienation results from cultural "beliefs". Then, he
suggests that these cultural "norms" and "practices" develop from slavery and Jim Crow, which
are fundamentally economic relations for the historically specific exploitation of black people
the effects, as much as it is with explanatory accounts. That is, it is concerned with the cause of social alienation because such an explanatory account acts as a guide for praxis.
. In theorizing the specificity of black alienation, McGary reveals
his contradictory ideological coordinates.
. If these
cultural norms endogenously emerge from the economic systems of slavery and Jim Crow, as McGary correctly suggests, then and contrary to McGary's expressed position, black alienation is very much rooted in economic relations. McGary's desire to place black
subjectivity beyond Marxism creates contradictions in his text. McGary asserts that the economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural norms. Thus in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an economic structure maintaining contemporary
oppressive normsfrom McGary's logic this must be the case. However, McGary remains silent on
alienation: capitalism
the contemporary economic system structuring black
. Apparently, it is legitimate to foreground and critique the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present day connection between economics and alienation is off limits.
the exploitative infrastructure which
produces and maintains alienation for blacks as well as for all working people
This other economic structurecapitalismremains the unsaid in McGary's discourse, and consequently he provides ideological support for capitalism
. In a very revealing moment, a moment that confirms
my reading of McGary's pro-capitalist position, he asserts that "it is possible for African-Americans to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing capitalism" (20). Here, in a most lucid way, we see the ideological
connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism). Philosophy provides ideological support for capitalism, and, in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class politics at the level of theory (Althusser Lenin 18). McGary
points out "that Black people have been used in ways that white people have not" (91). His observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes, whites may be "used" differently, but they are still "used" because that is the logic of
This view disconnects black
alienation from other social relations; hence, it ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so,
suppresses materialist inquiries into the class logic of race. That is to say, the meaning of race is
exploitative regimespeople are "used", that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit. McGary's interview signals what I call an "isolationist" view.
not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as an
ideological justification of the exploitative wage-labor economy.
This isolationist position finds a fuller and, no less problematic, articulation in Charles W.
Mills' The Racial Contract, a text which undermines the possibility for a transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and consequent politics of the isolationist view in a long endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges race oppression,
but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of oppression, such as gender and class. Mills acknowledges that there are gender and class relations within the white population, but he still privileges race, as if the black community is not similarly divided along gender
and class lines. Hence, the ideological necessity for Mills to execute a double move: he must marginalize class difference within the white community and suppress it within the black community. Consequently, Mills removes the possibility of connecting white
supremacy, a political-cultural structure, to its underlying economic base. Mills empiricist framework mystifies our understanding of race. If "white racial solidarity has overridden class and gender solidarity" (138), as he proposes, then what is needed is an explanation
of this racial formation. If race is the "identity around which whites have usually closed ranks" (138), then why is the case? Without an explanation, it seems as if white solidarity reflects some kind of metaphysical alliance. White racial solidarity is an historical
articulation that operates to defuse class antagonism within white society, and it is maintained and reproduced through discourses of ideology. The race contract provides whites with an imaginary resolution of actual social contradictions, which are not caused by blacks,
but by an exploitative economic structure. The race contract enables whites to scapegoat blacks and such an ideological operation displaces any understanding of the exploitative machinery. Hence, the race contract provides a political cover which ensures the ideological
reproduction of the conditions of exploitation, and this reproduction further deepens the social contradictionsthe economic position of whites becomes more and more depressed by the very same economic system that they help to ideologically reproduce. Mills points
out that the Racial Contract aims at economic exploitation of black people, and this is certainly the case, but it also exploits all working peoplea notion suppressed within Mills' black nationalist problematic. From Mills' logic, it seems that all whites (materially)
benefit from the Racial Contract, but, if this true, then how does he account for the class structure within the white community? His argument rests upon glossing over class divisions within American and European communities, and I believe this signals the theoretical
The vast majority of white/Europeans are workers and therefore are subjected to
capitalist exploitation through the extraction of surplus value, and this structural relationship
operates irrespective of race/ethnicity/gender/sexuality. In other words, neither whiteness nor the
race contract places whites outside the logic of exploitation
and political limits of his position.
. Indeed, the possibility for transracial collective praxis emerges in the contradiction between the
(ideological) promise of whiteness and the actual oppressed material conditions of most whites. The class blindness in Mills is surprising because he situates his discourse within "the best tradition of oppositional materialist critique" (129), but that tradition foregrounds
political economy. Mills undermines his materialism through the silent reinscription of idealism. For example, he argues that "[t]he Racial Contract is an exploitation contract that creates global European economic domination and national white privilege" (31). Indeed
for Mills, "the globally-coded distribution of wealth and poverty has been produced by the Racial Contract" (37). However, the "Racial Contract" does not create global European economic dominationthis results from control of capital by the international ruling class
but it ideologically legitimates the "color-coded distribution of wealth and poverty". Thus the race contract effectively naturalizes a racial division of labor, and, of course, this operation fractures (multi-racial) class solidarity. As Cheryl I. Harris insightfully puts it,
"[i]t is through the concept of whiteness that class-consciousness among white workers is subordinated and attention is diverted from class oppression" (286). Therefore, if whites organize around race, as Mills asserts, then this is only because of an always already
the project of
materialist analysis involves a critique of ideology and not the reification of common sense
a more effective materialist class analysis foregrounds exploitative social-economic
structures and the consequent class struggle between the international ruling class and the
international proletariat
Race emerges historically and within
specific political-economic coordinates. These coordinates link the logic of race to the logic of
capitalist exploitation
race is implicated in the historic and ongoing (class) struggle to
determine the ratio of surplus value.
race signals a marking for exploitation, and this
economic assignment, in turn, generates an accompanying ideological machinery to justify and
increase that exploitation
an historic apparatus for the production, maintenance, and
legitimation of the inequalities of wage-labor
race participates in
naturalizing asymmetrical social relations
ideological interpellation (to "whiteness") and not a divine (racial) mandate, even though it has the appearance of obviousness. Indeed, the very aim of ideology is to produce cultural obviousnesses; hence,
. Contrary to
Mills, I believe
. My project situates race in relation to the international division of labor.
For me then,
. Any understanding of this economic assignment, which represents an historically objective positionality, has been removed from the contemporary intellectual scene.
not just a cultural or political category as many critics attest to, but it represents
. Similar to other modes of social difference, like gender and sexuality,
. The materialist view outlined above has been systematically erased from contemporary cultural intelligibility. I have already critically engaged some
exemplary instances of black humanist discourses and specifically, their invocation of the transcendental subject to dismiss Marxism. If the humanists deploy the problematics of (black) subjectivity to suppress materialist notions of race, the postmodernists draw upon
the problematics of signification to deconstruct materialism. At this point, I shift to probe into the politics of poststructuralist accounts of race. One can trace the shift in African-American cultural theory from the subject to semiotics as early as the 1980's. Houston Baker
announces this paradigm shift in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. In this text, Baker "envision[s] language (the code) 'speaking' the subject" and consequently, "[t]he subject is 'decentered'" (1). Throughout the 1980's and 1990's, Baker and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., in particular, have been principal architects in advancing a tropological theory of race. The textualization of race represents one of the hegemonic views of race, and it is evident in the writings of theorists like Lawrence Hogue, Claudia Tate, Anthony Appiah,
Barbara Johnson, David Theo Goldberg, Paul Gilroy, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, Tommy L. Lott, Valerie Smith, Mason Stokes, Siobhan B. Somerville, Cornel West, and Howard Winant, among others. The linguistic turn in social theory enables the recent antireductionist views on race. Concepts like Winant's "racial formation" ("Racial Formation Theory" 130), Paul Gilroy's "multi-modal" (There Ain't 28) and David Theo Goldberg's "grammatical" reading of race ("Racist Discourse" 95) reflect the current anti-reductionist
logic that currently dominates contemporary theorizing on race. All three theorists vigorously oppose reducing race to class, but apparently, it is acceptable to "reduce" race to a "hybridity" of factors (Goldberg 93), which once again establishes liberal pluralism as the
limit of politics. Indeed, at the moment, it is fairly commonplace to "reduce" race to culture, or politics, or desire. Hence, these theorists are not so much opposed to reductionist theories, they simply are opposed to class understandings of race and, in this way, they
articulate a conceptual displacement of materialism (in the name of epistemological skepticism) and, consequently, they reclaim the autonomy of race (in the name of liberalism). The logic of autonomy moves away from transcendental subject, but it gives way to
reification of discourse. For instance, Goldberg theorizes race and class as autonomous "fields of discourse" ("Racist Discourse" 87). After de-totalizing the social, Goldberg introduces a very problematic split between racism, which deals with the issue of "exclusion",
and class theory, which deals with the issue of "exploitation" (97). Goldberg's text raises an important question concerning the relationship between exclusion and exploitation. However, he is unable to provide an effective response because of his commitment to a nonreductive analysis of race and this leaves him without an historical explanation of the constitution of (racist) discourse. Goldberg examines racist discourse "in own terms", but he has very difficult time accounting for the "persuasiveness" of racist discourse. In its own
terms, racist discourse is very compelling for racists, but this begs the questions: why is racist discourse so persuasive in the first place? Why does the social formation make available such a subject position? This is an urgent question because of the nature of Goldberg's
project, which attempts to identify "racists on the basis of the kinds of beliefs they hold" (87). The identification of racists based on their beliefs does not explain the origin of such beliefs in the first place. Thus, the question remains: why do racists hold such (racist)
beliefs? For Goldberg, it appears that racists hold racist beliefs because of Racist discourse! Goldberg can not offer an explanation of these beliefs because this would take him outside of the formal grammar of racist discourse. In Goldberg, the obsession with autonomy
engenders a reification of discourse and the political implications of this are quite revealing. For Goldberg, discoursenot class strugglebecomes the motor of history: "it is in virtue of racist discourse and not merely rationalized by it that such forced manipulations of
individual subjects and whole populations could have been affected" (95). He continues: "[i]nstruments of exclusionlegal, cultural, political, or economicare forged by subjects as they mould criteria for establishing racial otherness" (95). Racial alterity makes sense
not on its own terms but in relation to "instruments of exclusion". However, to move beyond Goldberg, I suggest that these instruments, in turn, must be related to existing property relationships. In short, the logic of alterity justifies and hence assists in the maintenance
The preoccupation with
"racial discourse formation" makes it seem as if social
life is a matter of "contingency". This view blocks our understanding of the one constant feature
of daily life under capitalism: exploitation. Under capitalism, exploitation is a not a discursive
contingency but a structural articulation, and this structure of exploitation underpins
(post)modern social life
of class generated social inequality.
"autonomy" and
. At the moment then, the discourse of autonomy displaces the structure of exploitation and, in this regard, I believe one can map out the ideological collusion taking place in race theory. As I pointed out
earlier, the humanists posit the "uniqueness" of black subjectivity and now we can see the postmodern corollary which posits the "uniqueness" of racial discourse. I refer to these positions as the "pedagogy of autonomy" because both instruct subjects to value the local.
In both instances, the discourse of autonomy provides an ideological framework for protecting the "unique" against its conceptual otherknowledge of the social totality. The pedagogues of autonomy assume that the "unique", in its immediacy to the concrete, provides
access to the real and therefore grounds knowledge. These (anti-reductionist) pedagogues reduce knowledge to the concrete and, consequently, mystify our understanding of race because they disconnect it from larger social structures like class and ideology. By
downplaying the determinate structures of class and ideology, it seems as if one could merely dispense with race because of a crisis in raciology, as Gilroy suggests in his recent book, Against Race. Gilroy's notion of "post-race" offers a cultural cosmopolitanism to
resolve the crisis in racial representation, but he has very little to say about economics. In fact, he is explicitly anti-Marxist (336) and in this regard, his text continues his long standing and unrelenting attacks against Marxism. His notion of "cosmopolitanism" provides
the most recent concept for displacing class theory. According to Gilroy, by locating those moments when race is dispersed into singularities that resist conceptualization, "cosmopolitanism" will take us beyond the positivistic faith of Marxism and usher in a post-race
dispensation. Of course, his caricature of Marxism runs counter to one of the core concepts of Marxismclass struggle. Recall the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (9). What is
significant about this reading of history is that, in contrast to the "cosmopolitan" embrace of the local and the singular, for Marx and Engels the localities of "history" are never meaningful in themselvesthey are not auto-intelligiblebecause the meaning of the local
always refers back to the broader global relations (totality) from which it emerges. In other words, if Marxism highlights the historicity of class antagonism, then, contrary to Gilroy, there is very little room for transhistorical positivistic pieties. But Gilroy is not as
interested in seriously engaging Marxism as much as he is in constructing an ideological alibi for dismissing Marxism. Gilroy idealist understanding of post-race emerges from his post-Marxism, which he launched in an earlier work. Indeed, it is his earlier work that
clearly shows the link between the discourse of (racial) autonomy and the politics of reformism. Specifically, in There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, Gilroy "supplements" class analytics with new urban social movements. However, with Gilroy the "supplement"
operates as a code for recuperating liberal pluralism (what Gilroy calls "multi-modality" 28). Consequently, we do not get a sustained theorizing of the dialectical relationship between class and race; rather, we get what ultimately amounts to an abandonment of class
theory (245). Here is why he must abandon class theory: the trajectory of class theory calls for revolutionary transformation of existing capitalist society. However, this is not Gilroy's project, nor the project of the new urban movements. Gilroy endorses the new social
movements precisely because "the new movements are not primarily oriented towards instrumental objectives, such as the conquest of political power or state apparatuses" (226). Instead, the new social movements desire autonomy within the existing system (226) and
therefore foreground the "sphere of autonomous self-realization" (233). In other words, they do want to change an exploitative system, they merely want a little more (discursive) freedom within it, and this (reformist) project signals agency for Gilroy. For Gilroy, the
new social movements represent agency, and in this regard, they replace the proletariatthe historic vehicle for social transformationbut their agency, to repeat, is directed toward reforming specific local sites, such as race or gender, within the existing system. In
short, they have abandoned the goal of transforming existing capitalisma totalizing system which connects seemingly disparate elements of the social through the logic of exploitationfor a new goal: creating more humane spaces for new movements within
capitalism. So, then, what is so new in the new social movements? It is certainly very "old" in the way it rehabilitates liberal notions of the autonomous subject. Its newness is a sign of the contemporary crisis-ridden conjuncture in capitalist social relations.
crisis of capital and the ensuing rupture in its ideological narrative provides the historical
condition for articulating resistance along the axes of race
capitalist exploitation brings every social sphere under its
totalizing logic
, class, gender, ecology, etc. Even though resistance may take place in very specific domains, such as race,
gender, ecological, or sexuality, among others, this does not mean that the crisis is local. It simply indexes how
. However, rather then point up the systematicity of the crisis, the theorists of the new social movements turn to the local, as if it is unrelated to questions of globality. With Gilroy and the new social movements, we are returned,
once again, to the local and the experiential sets the limits of understanding. Gilroy asserts that people "unable to control the social relations in which they find themselveshave shrunk the world to the size of their communities and begun to act politically on that basis"
(245). If this is true, then Gilroy, at the level of theory, mirrors this as he "shrinks" his theory to the dictates of crude empiricism. Rather than opening the possibility of collective control over social relations, which points in an emancipatory direction, Gilroy brackets the
question of "social relation" and consequently, he limits politics to the cultural (re)negotiations of identity. If Gilroy deploys the post-colonial racialized agent for displacing class, then Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theory detaches race from political economy by
reinscribing race within the problematics of signification. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha's last chapter, "Race', time and the revision of modernity", situates the question of race within the "ambivalent temporality of modernity" (239). In this way, Bhabha
foregrounds the "time-lag" between "event" and "enunciation" and, for Bhabha, this produces space for postcolonial agency. Political agency revolves around deconstructing signs from totalities and thereby delaying the connection between signifier and signified and
resistance is the effect of this ambivalence. Hence, for Bhabha, "the intervention of postcolonial or black critique is aimed at transforming the conditions of enunciation at the level of the sign" (247). This idealist reading of the social reduces politics to a struggle over the
sign rather than the relations of production. Indeed, Bhabha re-understands the political not as an ideological practice aimed at social transformationthe project of transformative race theory. Instead, he theorizes "politics as a performativity" (15). But what is the social
effect of this understanding of politics? Toward what end might this notion point us? It seems as if the political now calls for (cosmopolitan) witnesses to the always already permanent slippage of signification and this (formal) process of repetition and reinscription
outlines a space for "other forms of enunciation" (254). But will these "other forms of enunciation" naturally articulate resistance to the dominant political and ideological interests? For Bhabha, of course, we "need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial
However, cultural differences, in themselves, do not
necessarily mean opposition. Indeed, at the moment, cultural difference represents one of the
latest zones for commodification and, in this regard, it ideologically legitimates capitalism
subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences" (1).
. Bhabha
homogenizes (cultural) difference and, consequently, he covers over ideological struggles within the space of cultural difference. In short, this other historical site is not the site for pure difference, which naturally resists the hegemonic; for it, too, is the site for political
contestation. Bhabha's formalism makes it seem as if ambivalence essentially inheres in discourse. Ambivalence results from opposed political interests that inflect discourses and so the ambivalence registers social conflict. In Marxism and the Philosophy and Language,
Voloinov offers this materialist understanding of the sign: Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the
same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of class struggle. (22) The very conceptideologythat could delineate the political character and therefore class interests involved in structuring the
content of discourses, Bhabha excludes from his discourse. In the end, Bhabha's discourse advocates what amounts to discursive freedom and he substitutes this for material freedom. Like Gilroy, Bhabha's discursive freedom takes place within the existing system. In
contrast to Bhabha, Marx theorizes the material presupposition of freedom. In the German Ideology, Marx argues that "people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity" (61). Thus for
Marx "[l]iberation" is an historical and not a mental act" (61). In suppressing the issue of need, Bhabha's text reveals his own class interests. The studied preoccupation with "ambivalence" reflects a class privilege, and it speaks to the crisis for (postcolonial) subjects torn
between national affiliation and their privileged (and objective) class position within the international division of labor. The ambivalence is a symptom of social antagonism, but in Bhabha's hands, it becomes a transhistorical code for erasing the trace of class.
Here, then, is one of the primary effects of the postmodern knowledge practices: class is
deconstructed as a metaphysical dinosaur
. In this regard, postmodernists collude with the humanists in legitimating the sanctity of the local. Both participate in narrowing cultural
intelligibility to questions of (racial) discourse or the (black) subject and, in doing so, they provide ideological immunity for capitalism. It is now very difficult to even raise the issue of class, particularly if you raise the issue outside of the logic of supplementarity
today's ruling intellectual logic which provides a theoretical analog to contemporary neo-liberal
political structures
Schmitt K
(We produced this to answer the Racism advantage)
This explains the overall thesis of the K pretty well if you still dont
understand your lab leader probably knows.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 14 ( 11/1/14, group of college professors
monitor and edit on the histories of certain philosophers,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/ The Concept of the Political and the Critique of
Liberalism, Google, DOA 6/26/15)//Kbuck
The sovereign dictator has the power, in taking the decision on the exception, to set aside
the positive legal and constitutional order in its entirety and to create a novel positive
legal and constitutional order, together with a situation of social normality that fits it. It follows
that the sovereign dictator cannot base his claim to be acting in the name of the people on any kind of formal authorization. If the old constitution no longer exists and the new one
is not yet in force, there is no formal procedure for generating a public will. And yet, the sovereign dictator claims to exercise the constituent power of the people. What is more,
Schmitt's view
assumes that it is possible to speak of the existence of a people in advance of the creation
of any positive constitutional framework. Schmitt therefore has to explain what it means for a people to exist prior to any constitutional
the constitutional order he is to create is to be considered as legitimate since it rests on the people's right to give itself a constitution (CT 1369).
framework, and he has to give an account of how the people's political existence prior to any constitutional framework can ground a sovereign dictatorship. Schmitt's The Concept
of the Political phrases the answer to this question as an account of the nature of the political. (Sartori 1989; Gottfried 1990, 5782; Meier 1998; Hofmann 2002, 94116;
the specific political distinction is that
between friend and enemy. (CP 26) The distinction between friend and enemy, Schmitt
elaborates, is essentially public and not private. Individuals may have personal enemies,
but personal enmity is not a political phenomenon. Politics involves groups that face off
as mutual enemies (CP 289). Two groups will find themselves in a situation of mutual enmity
if and only if there is a possibility of war and mutual killing between them. The
distinction between friend and enemy thus refers to the utmost degree of intensity of
an association or dissociation. (CP 26, 38) The utmost degree of association is the willingness
to fight and die for and together with other members of one's group, and the ultimate
degree of dissociation is the willingness to kill others for the simple reason that they are
members of a hostile group (CP 323). Schmitt believes that political enmity can have
many different origins. The political differs from other spheres of value in that it is not based on a substantive distinction of its own. The
ethical, for example, is based on a distinction between the morally good and the
morally bad, the aesthetic on a distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, and
the economical on a distinction between the profitable and the unprofitable. The
political distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to these other distinctions
or, for that matter, to any particular distinction be it linguistic, ethnic, cultural,
religious, etc. that may become a marker of collective identity and difference (CP 257). It is possible, for instance, to be enemies
with members of a hostile group whom one judges to be morally good. And it is equally
possible not to be engaged in a relationship of mutual enmity with a group whose
individual members one judges to be bad. The same holds, Schmitt thinks, for all other substantive distinctions that may become markers
of identity and difference. This is not to say, however, that one's conception of moral goodness or badness, for instance,
will never play a role in a relationship of political enmity. Any distinction that can serve as a marker of collective identity
Mehring 2003; Kennedy 2004, 92118; Slomp 2009, 2137) Schmitt famously claims that
and difference will acquire political quality if it has the power, in a concrete situation, to sort people into two opposing groups that are willing, if necessary, to fight against each
other (CP 378). Whether a particular distinction will come to play this role is not determined by its own intrinsic significance but by whether a group of people relies on it to
define its own collective identity and comes to think of that identity, as based on that distinction, as something that might have to be defended against other groups by going to war.
Since the political is not tied to any particular substantive distinction, Schmitt argues, it is
nave to assume that the political will disappear once conflicts arising from a particular
distinction no longer motivate opposing groups to fight. Political identification is likely to latch on to another distinction
that will inherit the lethal intensity of political conflict (See ND). But wherever a distinction has political quality, it will be the decisive distinction and the community constituted
Since the political community is the social unit that can dispose of
people's lives, it will be able, where it exists, to assert its superiority over all other social
groups within its confines and to rule out violent conflict among its members (CP 3745). Schmitt
claims that one cannot judge, from an external perspective, that a group is morally
unjustified in defining its own identity in a certain way and to introduce political
enmity, with the attendant possibility of killing, to preserve that identity. Only
members of a group are in a position to decide, from the perspective of an existentially
affected participant, whether the otherness of another group amounts to a threat to their
own form of life and thus potentially requires to be fought (CP 27; See also CT 767, 136). Schmitt's reasoning implicitly
relies on a collectivist version of the logic of self-defence. The decision whether someone else's behaviour constitutes a
threat to one's own life, in some concrete situation, and the decision whether it is necessary to use
reactive or even pre-emptive violence to remove or to escape that threat, cannot be
delegated to a third person. A group that perceives its own existence to be threatened by
some other group, Schmitt argues, finds itself in an analogous position. The possibility of third-party mediation is therefore
ruled out in a truly political conflict (CP 4553). A political community exists, then, wherever a group of
people are willing to engage in political life by distinguishing themselves from
outsiders through the drawing of a friend-enemy distinction (CP 38, 434). A group's
capability to draw the distinction between friend and enemy does not require, Schmitt holds, that
the group already possess a formal organization allowing for rule-governed collective
decision-taking. A people, thus, will have an existence prior to all legal form as long as there is a sense of shared identity strong enough to motivate its members to
by it will be the decisive social unit.
fight and die for the preservation of the group. And as long as a people exists in this way it is capable, through its support, to sustain a sovereign dictatorship exercised in its name
(CT 12635). Of course, Schmitt's analogy between the collective and the individual interest in self-preservation papers over an important difference between the two cases. A
The drawing of a friendenemy distinction, therefore, is never a mere reaction to a threat to a form of existence
that is already given (but see Mouffe 1999, 4950). Rather, it actively constitutes the political identity or existence of the people and determines who belongs
to the people. To belong one must identify with the substantive characteristic, whatever it may
be, that marks the identity of the people, and one must agree that this characteristic
defines a form of life for the preservation of which one ought to be willing to sacrifice
one's own life, in the fight against those who don't belong (CP 46). Schmitt realizes, of course, that it is possible for
political community does not enjoy simple biological existence. It might die though all of its individual members continue to live.
people who are not willing to identify in this way to be legally recognized as citizens, and to live law-abidingly, under the norms authorized by some positive constitution.
Liberal states, in Schmitt's view, have a tendency to fail to distinguish properly between friends and
enemies, and thus to extend rights of membership to those who do not truly belong to the
political nation. In a liberal state, Schmitt fears, the political nation will slowly whither and die as a result of spreading de-politicization, it will succumb to internal
strife, or it will be overwhelmed by external enemies who are more politically united (CP 6979; L 3177). To avert these dangers, Schmitt suggests, it is necessary to make sure
that the boundaries of the political nation and the boundaries of citizenship coincide. This demand explains Schmitt's claim, in the first sentence of The Concept of the Political,
a state can only be legitimate if its
legal boundaries embody a clear friend-enemy distinction. In order to achieve this aim,
Schmitt clearly implies, a sovereign dictator, acting in the interstices between two periods
of positive constitutional order, must homogenize the community by appeal to a clear
friend-enemy distinction, as well as through the suppression, elimination, or expulsion of
internal enemies who do not endorse that distinction (CP 468). In so doing, the sovereign dictator
expresses the community's understanding of what is normal or exceptional and of
who belongs, and he creates the homogeneous medium that Schmitt considers to be a
precondition of the legitimate applicability of law. Schmitt observes that his concept of the political is not belligerent. It does not
that the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political (CP 19). The point of this remark is that
glorify war, but merely claims that a community that is interested in living politically needs to be willing to go to war if it perceives its political existence to be threatened (CP 32
Schmitt's conception of political existence
demands the active elimination of those whom a majority perceives as internal enemies,
and even celebrates that elimination as the essential activity of the popular sovereign. Schmitt's understanding of the political provides the
5). But the intended analogy with self-defence seems to make little moral sense, given that
basis for his critique of liberalism (Holmes 1993, 3760; McCormick 1997; Dyzenhaus 1997, 5870; Kahn 2011). On a descriptive level, Schmitt claims that liberalism has a
tendency to deny the need for genuine political decision, to suggest that it is neither necessary nor desirable for individuals to form groups that are constituted by the drawing of
friend-enemy distinctions. Liberals believe that there are no conflicts among human beings that cannot be solved to everyone's advantage through an improvement of civilization,
technology, and social organization or be settled, after peaceful deliberation, by way of amicable compromise. As a result, liberalism is unable to provide substantive markers of
identity that can ground a true political decision. Liberal politics, consequently, boils down to the attempt to domesticate the polity, in the name of the protection of individual
freedom, but it is unable to constitute political community in the first place (CP 6979; CPD 3350). If this is a correct account of the character of liberal ideology and of the aims
of liberal politics, Schmitt is right to conclude that liberalism has a tendency to undermine a community's political existence, as he understands it. But in order for this observation
to amount to a critique of liberalism, Schmitt needs to explain why a liberal subversion of the political would be undesirable. Schmitt's political works contain a number of rather
different answers to this question. A first line of thought emphasizes, with appeal to Hobbes, that a state can only be legitimate as long as it retains the capacity to offer protection
to its members (for Schmitt's engagement with Hobbes see McCormick 1994; Tralau 2011; and Schmitt's L; SM; VR). And a state that has suffered a subversion of the political,
induced by liberal ideology, Schmitt argues, will be unable to offer protection to its members, because it will fail to protect them from the indirect rule of pluralist interest-groups
If a
people is no longer willing to decide between friend and enemy the most likely result
will not be eternal peace but anarchy or subjection to another group that is still willing to assume
the burdens of the political. This first answer, however, is not Schmitt's last word on why liberal de-politicization is undesirable. Schmitt seems to admit
that have successfully colonized the state (LL 1736, L 6577) and, more importantly, because it will lack the power to protect them from external enemies (CP 513).
that a global hegemon might one day be able to enforce a global de-politicization, by depriving all other communities of the capacity to draw their own friend-enemy distinctions,
or that liberalism might one day attain global cultural hegemony, such that people will no longer be interested in drawing friend-enemy distinctions (CP 35, 57-8). Schmitt, then,
cannot rest his case against liberal de-politicization on the claim that it is an unrealistic goal. He needs to argue that it is undesirable even if it could be achieved (Strauss 2007).
Schmitt replies to this challenge that a life that does not involve the friend-enemy distinction would be shallow, insignificant, and meaningless. A completely de-politicized world
would offer human beings no higher purpose than to increase their consumption and to enjoy the frolics of modern entertainment. It would reduce politics to a value-neutral
technique for the provision of material amenities. As a result, there would no longer be any project or value that individuals are called upon to serve, whether they want to or not,
and that can give their life a meaning that transcends the satisfaction of private desires (CP 35, 578; RK 217; PR 10962). But that a world in which one does not have the
opportunity to transcend one's interest in individual contentment in the service of a higher value would be shallow and meaningless does not suffice to establish that a willingness
to kill or to die for a political community will confer meaning on a life, much less that it is the only thing that can do so. When Schmitt claims that the defense of the political is the
only goal that could possibly justify the killing of others and the sacrifice of one's own life (CP 35; 489) he assumes without argument that the life of political community, as he
willingness to distinguish between friend and enemy is a theological duty (Mehring 1989; Meier 1998;
understands it, is uniquely and supremely valuable. Some interpreters have explained Schmitt's hostility towards liberal de-politicization as being grounded in the view that
Groh, 1991). Schmitt argues in Political Theology that all key concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts, which suggests that a political
all true political
theorists base their views on a negative anthropology which holds that man is by nature
evil and licentious, and thus needs to be kept in check by a strong state capable of
drawing a friend-enemy distinction if there is to be social order (CP 5868). This latter thesis, Schmitt admits, can
theory that continues to use these concepts needs a theological foundation (PT 3652). In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt claims that
take a secular form, as in Hobbes or Machiavelli, as the purely descriptive claim that man is inherently dangerous to man. But Schmitt suggests that this secular version of a
negative political anthropology is open to be transformed into the view that man, though by nature dangerous, is perfectible or into the view that man's dangerous behavior is a
mere contingent consequence of a mistaken form of social organization (PT 5366; L 319). In order to establish a permanent need for political authority, negative political
anthropology must be given a theological reading that portrays the dangerous nature of man as an irrevocable result of original sin. Liberal de-politicization, from this perspective,
is to be rejected as a sign of human pride that rebels against God, who alone, but only at the end of history, can deliver humanity from political enmity. Schmitt himself admits that
the theological grounding of politics is based on an anthropological confession of faith (CP 58). And one is tempted to say that Schmitt's theory turns out to be philosophically
humanity can overcome
political enmity, and that to do so is desirable, is also an article of faith. The theological partisan of the
political, in Schmitt's view, is as justified in practicing his creed as the liberal cosmopolitan and to engage in a deliberate cultivation of political enmity (CPD 6576). As
long as the political theologian can make sure that the friend-enemy distinction survives,
liberals will be forced to enter the arena of the political and to go to war against the
partisans of the political. And this fight, Schmitt hopes, is going to secure the continuing
existence of political enmity and prevent the victory of liberal de-politicization (CP 36-7).
irrelevant if this is really the last word. Schmitt would likely have replied that the liberal assumption that man is perfectible, that
1NC Shell
The NSA is key to ensuring the friend-enemy dichotomy reversing bulk data
collection rejects our ability to identify threats.
Chamayou 6/15 (Gregoire, 6/15/15, DOA 6/26/15 Google, philosopher, renowned author, published by Princeton
University Press, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/oceanic-enemy A brief philosophical history of the NSA)
6 July 1962, NAVFAC base, Barbados. A grey building stands at the foot of a stone lighthouse overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Inside, a military serviceman is examining the lines being recorded on an enormous roll
of paper by the stylus of a sort of gigantic electrocardiogram. We are in one of the secret bases of the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network, established by the US Navy in the 1950s. Among the clutter of
with submarine warfare was that enemy vessels were hidden from view. But what one
could not see, one could nonetheless hear: the water in which the submarines hid carried
the sound of their engines far into the distance. This is how the sea was put under
surveillance. The sound waves could be captured by hydrophones and transmitted by cables to coastal stations where machines transcribed them into graphs. The ocean technicians who deciphered
zigzags, from which he has learnt to read the sound of the oceans, the man is looking for a signature. Today, for the first time, he spots the signal of a Soviet nuclear submarine. [1]
them were able to discern subtle nuances in sound signals via intensity, colour, shape, and shade that often made the difference between seeing a school of fish or a submarine on a Lofargram. [2] They listened with
their eyes. Typical patterns corresponding to known entities were called signatures. The metaphor spoke for itself: there, like elsewhere, an identity would be certified by some lines inscribed on a piece of paper.
Yet all this met with a very unexpected fate. A model that had combined a global listening
system, the mass collection of signals, and remote sensing via signature recognition, a
few decades later would provide the conceptual basis for an altogether different kind of
surveillance apparatus. At the end of the 1990s, the National Security Agency (NSA)
understood that something new was in the offing that promised, excepting the need to
overcome certain obstacles, an unheard-of extension of its empire. Historically, the
agency had been charged with the task of intercepting electromagnetic signals for
external intelligence diplomatic cables, military communications, satellite beams, and
so on. But with the close of the millennium, civil populations were themselves
becoming signal transmitters. The whole world was becoming connected, and creating one in which each of us would soon produce more data than any Soviet embassy
of the past. Recalling the reigning zeitgeist of this era, the ex-director of the NSA Michael Hayden today admits: prior to 9/11, when we were looking at modern telecommunications, we said we had the problem
of what we would call V cubed volume, variety and velocity that the modern telecommunications were just exploding in variety and in size. But also, we knew that our species was putting more of its
knowledge out there in ones and zeroes than it ever had at any time in its existence. In other words, we were putting human knowledge out there in a form that was susceptible to signals intelligence. So to be very
candid, I mean, our view even before 9/11 was if we could be even half good at mastering this global telecommunications revolution, this would be the golden age of signals intelligence. And candidly, thats what
NSA set out to do. [3] The utopia of anti-terrorist data mining The logo depicts a pyramid topped by an all-seeing eye, Illuminati-style, floating in space and bombarding Earth with luminous rays. This was the
emblem of a research programme launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an electronic surveillance project entitled Total Information Awareness. This idiotic design, which seemed
deliberately created to stoke crazy conspiracy theories, was emblazoned with a Latin motto which, in a sense, rescued the entire design: scientia est potentia, knowledge is power. That was, effectively, what it was all
about. In August 2002, the programme director John Poindexter presented it with great pomp at the DARPATech conference that was being held at Anaheim in California. What is at stake, he began, is somewhat
analogous to the anti-submarine warfare problem of finding submarines in an ocean of noise we must find the terrorists in a world of noise. The oceanic analogy was not by accident. The admiral had begun his
career in the Navy at the end of the 1950s in a unit tasked with the tracking of Soviet submarines. He added, referring to the terrorists, that they will leave signatures in this information space. [4] The parallel was
what had once been done in the ocean was now going to be done in an ocean of
information. Instead of the old lofargrams, computers would now be used to sieve
through an immense mass of heterogeneous data telecommunications, bank details, administrative files, and so on searching
for signatures of terrorist behaviour. A red team would be charged with the task of enumerating potential scenarios of terrorist attack and coming up with the necessary preparative
clear:
measures: These transactions would form a pattern that may be discernible in certain databases. [5] [Diagram of a terrorist pattern in an activity graph [6]] For example, if Bill and Ted live at the same address,
rent a truck, visit a sensitive location and buy some ammonium nitrate fertilizer (known to be used for growing potatoes but also for the production of home-made bombs), they would exhibit a behavioural pattern
that corresponds to that of a terrorist signature,
and the algorithm designed to process this data would then sound the
alarm. However, as one sceptical expert has remarked during a hearing, one of the worries is that by defining a terroristic profile in this manner those who would suddenly find themselves on a list of suspects
would not only be potential Timothy McVeighs, but also the majority of farmers in Nebraska, who also very often live on the same farm, buy fertilizer and rent trucks. [7] Even supposing that terrorism is detectable
through signatures that could be spotted through data mining which is a risky hypothesis to say the least such a system would inevitably throw up a plethora of suspects, with an overwhelming majority of false
leads with the latter, it has been estimated, in the millions. [8] The other fundamental problem concerns the very notion of terrorism, which is too vague to be given a satisfactory operational definition. What is
terrorism? Lets assume the following official definition: all illegal and calculated use or threat of violence aimed at producing a feeling of terror for political ends. [9] This conception is not defined by certain
operational modes, but by an intention whose objective is to produce a subjective effect, an emotion fear. What algorithm would be capable of detecting behavioural indices that could unmask this kind of
intentionality? There are a million and one ways to want to terrorize. Brains that had been trained during the Cold War enacted a false analogy as they sought to graft a mechanistic model (the signal of a submarine
engine, necessary and constant) back onto the realm of the living (a political intentionality, polymorphous and adaptive). The entire project rested on the premiss that terrorist signatures actually existed. Yet this
premiss did not hold up. The conclusion was inevitable: The one thing predictable about predictive data mining for terrorism is that it would be consistently wrong. [10] To the critics who pointed out the
epistemological limits of such a programme, its creators responded with procedures designed to mitigate its excesses. Confronted with the problem of exploding numbers of false positives, itself linked to the low
frequency of the phenomenon in question within a considered totality, they borrowed their solutions from the methods of medical screening: by isolating from a general population subgroups at risk. As some of
Poindexters collaborators explained, the idea was to combine the approaches of propositional data mining (based on requests of the type: search for all entities exhibiting properties x and y) and relational data
Groups of individuals would thus be targeted on the
basis of their relationships, a bit like in a medical screening, which starts by tracking
family histories in the hope of flushing out a rare illness
mining (based on requests of the type: search for all entities related to entity A).[11]
. One implication of this solution barely emerged in the debates, even though it was politically crucial: in the prevailing context, the
so-called populations at risk seriously risked being defined according to a thinly veiled logic of racial profiling. For instance, the preferential targeting of individuals with regular connections to persons living in the Near and Middle East meant constituting the Arab-American population as a target group. Under the apparent colour blindness of
computational analysis, an old racist vision did not fail to resurface. In some NSA documents, the target type has a revealing sobriquet: Mohammed Raghead. [12] By admission of its own creators, t