Sousveillance Critique

Sousveillance
1NC Sousveillance
Institutional restrictions on surveillance crowds out activism and replicates the very
practices they were purported to reform.
Genosko 6 [Gary, (Im)Possible Exchange: The Arts of Counter-Surveillance, Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian
Culture. Ed. Sheila Petty, Garry Sherbert, and Annie Gerin. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication. pp. 33-34]
Still, social theorist have been struck by the absence of broadly based, unified social movements specifically contesting the rise of
societies of surveillance. Resistance to the diverse modes of surveillance, new social relations, and subordinations of the information
economy by individuals, groups, and institutions have, however, certainly proliferated and become more and more commonplace,
even if these lack a unique, unifying imaginary or shared organizational base. Attention has turned to specific, spontaneous
mobilizations that pose a range of challenges from the non-serious to serious: from teenage pranksterism to workplace avoidance
tactics. Such theorists have not of course been blind to the
burgeoning governmental privacy bureaucracies, not

to mention non-governmental watchdogs, as a dominant form of resistance to surveillance. On a
day-to-day basis, investigative journalism also plays an important role, as does web activism around privacy issues and cyber protest
in all its diversity. Privacy
legislation, initially figured as a form of resistance, tends to crowd out the

social-movements approach. The legal remedies for individuals (dating from the American juridical
perspective of the early 1970s) have included no end of legal speculations around torts such as dollar
compensations for wrongdoing linked to intrusive surveillance, non-legislative solutions,
contracts and warranties, and the fiduciary obligation of the data-holder or handler to use personal
information only for the benefit of the subject. These legal rememdies include leglislative relief from data
gathering, a relief that implies the implementation of wide range of acts (freedom of information, freedom from
commercial solicitation, fair credit reporting, and varieties of consent and refusal of consent mechanisms).
In order to clarify my approach, I want to suggest that privacy
legislation is not obviously a form of resistance ,

want to situate privacy legislation, especially its legal and policy dimensions, squarely in the
institutional domain of surveillance and administrative power. The oft-noted enabling and
constraining elements of surveillanceincreasing involvement, but veering dangerously toward
totalitarianismplace privacy legislation, the protection of personal information, and legal
recourses to freedom of information in the domain of self-reproducing, yet enabling institutional
aspects of surveillance. We are still faced with the problem of a sociological analysis of resistance
to surveillance, and in this approach we may want to regain certain privacy discourses, especially
those of the non-governmental organizations that more closely correspond, in their express aims
to the resistance model advocated by Giddens. But the characteristics of these forms of resistance involve oppositional identities
using Giddens term, I
that are not stable from the outset (contra classist apriorism). New context-dependent identities are only won through struggles of
articulation in the moving equilibria of the field of antagonisms of hegemonic power (struggles articulating the range of differences,
shifting boundaries, relative unities, and elastic hierarchies [subordination by consent] from which they derive their character, and
importantly, create problems around identity formation). The language of new alliances, rainbow coalitions, transversal connections,
alternative flows, and remaking of territories and singularities in the process of subject formation all speak of the fluidity and plurality
of the ideological field int which resistances arise. The
idea, then, that there is a one-to-one correspondence

between institution and social movement is incoherent in these terms. Sensing this incoherence, social theorist
like David Lyon have noted that many of the counter-surveillance activities performed by small groups and
individuals have no formal connections with privacy bureaucracies or official lobbies but
respond, instead on the ground to the technologies of surveillance whose intrusion into the corners of
everyday life seems to intensify and perfuse through new technologies with alarming regularity.
[Insert Specific Link]
State power has grown so big that it now uses technology to maintain a constant
state of emergency which justifies endless wars, military growth, and structural
violence. The impact is even more unregulated domestic surveillance, which turns
the case.
Steinmetz 2003 (George, Prof. of Sociology @ Univ. of Michigan, The State of Emergency and the Revival of American
Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism, Public Culture 15:2)
The
current state of emergency, the threat of terrorism, is constructed as a specifically political
crisis, a shaken sense of political sovereignty. This massive campaign to recentralize power began, somewhat
The manifest regulatory changes over the past year have focused primarily on the structure and role of the (U.S.) state.
ironically, just at the moment when globalization theorists (including Hardt and Negri) were reaching a consensus that the state was
being overshad- owed by transnational, regional, and local organizations. The
refocusing of political power on the

level of the American national state has been most evident in the area of U.S. geopolitical
strategy (unilateralism and preemptive military strikes), but much of the new regulatory
activity has focused on the state apparatus itself and the domestic level of politics, with
the creation of a huge new government agency (the Department of Homeland Security), transformations
of the legal system (e.g., secret trials and arrests, indefinite detentions), and intensi- fied domestic
surveillance: first with the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which dramatically relaxed restrictions on search
and seizure; then with the Total Information Awareness Program, which collects and analyzes
vast amounts of data on private communications and commercial transactions ; and most recently with the
proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. At the same time, there has been no significant change
in the strategies for economic production nothing comparable, that is, to the widespread embrace of flexible
specialization by American (and European) industry a generation ago. Even if the new statism is concerned mainly
with what some describe as security issues, and has not seen changes in, say, social provisioning,
it marks a decisive break with the patterns of deregulation and decentralization pursued by both the
Democratic and Republi- can Parties in previous decades. Helmut Schmidt and others thus underestimate the
pronounced acceleration of tendencies toward explicit U.S. hegemony, imperialism, and
domestic authoritarianism in the past year and a half. The Bush administrations recent paper on
national security offers excellent examples in its emphasis on the need to maintain the
unparalleled strength of the United States armed forces, to maintain bases and stations within
and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, to experiment with new approaches to
warfare, and to prevent potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing,
or equaling, the power of the United States (White House 2002: 29 30). The United States kept its putative NATO allies out of the
loop in its decision-making processes in the Afghanistan war, for example, and resisted the deployment there of an integrated
international security force (see Krnig 2001). 7 The Bush administrations opposition to the International Criminal Court and its
threat to block all United Nations peacekeeping missions as they come up for renewal unless American peacekeepers are granted
immunity from prosecution also demonstrate that it is much more willing to embrace the role of lone hegemonic superpowers than
were the previous Bush and Clinton administrations (see Tyler 1992b; Dao 2002). Once
we connect this aggressively

unilateralist and imperialist stance in the international sphere to the strengthening of the state
domestically, it is possible to speak of an overall shift in the mode of political regulation. It has also
become clearer in recent months that the political emergency is paired with an economic crisis. Yet most of the reforming energy so
far has been directed at the political rather than the economic or social components of the regulatory mode. How can we make sense
of this? It would be unsatisfying to rely on the argument that modes of regulation are, after all, the product of multiple wills
intersecting in unpredictable ways. More convincing is the claim that even if there is a crisis for millions of unemployed workers and
small investors, it is not (yet) perceived as such a serious crisis for the leading sectors of capital and their political representatives.
Counter surveillance is subversive because it constitutes a counter-cultural

movement intended to challenge economic and political power.
Fitzpatrick 2010 [Tony, Univ. of Nottingham UK, Critical Theory , Information Society and Surveillance Technologies,
Information, Communication and Society 5:3]
Organized acts by individuals are here termed subversive. Hacking
is a good example of information subversion

which we might add those such as crackers, phreakers and cyberpunks, all
of whom use technology to carve out spaces of freedom and autonomy that the same technology
can foreclose in the hands of corporations (Starr 2000: 7380). The downloading of music from the Internet using
(Taylor 2000; Thomas 2000) to
MP3 technology, for instance, is popularly subversive, not only because it is widespread but also because it seems to engender no
more popular disapproval than the use of blank cassettes for taping music off the radio. Another
example of subversion
can be found in the kind of counter- surveillance that some individuals pursue against the
surveillance apparatus; this can mean filming the police who film demonstrations or it can mean
using data protection legislation to expose corporate misdemeanours. At its best, then, subversion
can constitute a counter-cultural movement that, like their predecessors in the 1960s, is not anti-capitalist per se but
does represent a form of resistance against powerful corporations and state agencies. To be subversive, then, hacking et al.
must not be done for its own sake (still less for personal gain) but in order to undermine the information
systems of economic and political power. Subversion can occur both outside the law but also
within it, by exploiting ambivalences within the law and/or by encouraging the legal apparatus to catch up with
developments in ICT, a time lag that governments and corporations are often able to exploit for undesirable ends. Organized acts by
groups can be termed rebellious. For instance, many businesses have found their websites subjected to denial of service attacks,
effectively putting much of that company out of operation for signifcant periods of time of course such attacks can also be the result
of individual grudges against the company in question, or even of random and capricious malevolence. How- ever, the
most
famous example of rebellion remains the Zapatista movements successful and continued
mobilization of world opinion against the attempt by the Mexican government to deprive them of
their land rights (Castells 1997: 7283). In addition, we might also consider the kind of opposition, mentioned in the above
discussion of RIPA, to legislation that threatens civil liberties. The USA has been an important source of
opposition to other attempts at over-regulating cyberspace (Jordan 1999). Acts of resistance, therefore,
consist of material and/or discursive actions that disclose social alternatives by attempting to open
what economic and political powers attempt to close: the heterotopic spaces of autonomy that are
the source of alternative visions of individuality and society (Foucault 1986) but which risk being
silenced by informatic capitalism in its attempt to reduce human diversity to digital bytes and data
streams. Resistance is always a strategy that positions itself against the hegemony of the
dominant nodes of money and power that are embedded in sites of work and consumption (see
above). An act of resistance therefore requires sites of resistance: the sites are the sine qua non of
the acts that simultaneously confirm and destabilize the condition of their existence. A site of
resistance is both materially and culturally transformed by the acts of resistance to which it gives
rise. A site makes an act possible and an act is the means by which we become aware of a sites
transformative potential. Therefore, a site must facilitate an ideological orientation , i.e. a critique of
existing power and its alternatives.
LinkCurtailment
[1NC Evidence] Institutional restrictions on surveillance not only crowd out activist,
but replicate the very practices they were purported to reform.
Genosko 6 [Gary, (Im)Possible Exchange: The Arts of Counter-Surveillance, Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian
Culture. Ed. Sheila Petty, Garry Sherbert, and Annie Gerin. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication. pp. 33-34]
Still, social theorist have been struck by the absence of broadly based, unified social movements specifically contesting the rise of
societies of surveillance. Resistance to the diverse modes of surveillance, new social relations, and subordinations of the information
economy by individuals, groups, and institutions have, however, certainly proliferated and become more and more commonplace,
even if these lack a unique, unifying imaginary or shared organizational base. Attention has turned to specific, spontaneous
mobilizations that pose a range of challenges from the non-serious to serious: from teenage pranksterism to workplace avoidance
tactics. Such theorists have not of course been blind to the
burgeoning governmental privacy bureaucracies, not

to mention non-governmental watchdogs, as a dominant form of resistance to surveillance. On a
day-to-day basis, investigative journalism also plays an important role, as does web activism around privacy issues and cyber protest
in all its diversity. Privacy
legislation, initially figured as a form of resistance, tends to crowd out the

social-movements approach. The legal remedies for individuals (dating from the American juridical
perspective of the early 1970s) have included no end of legal speculations around torts such as dollar
compensations for wrongdoing linked to intrusive surveillance, non-legislative solutions,
contracts and warranties, and the fiduciary obligation of the data-holder or handler to use personal
information only for the benefit of the subject. These legal rememdies include leglislative relief from data
gathering, a relief that implies the implementation of wide range of acts (freedom of information, freedom from
commercial solicitation, fair credit reporting, and varieties of consent and refusal of consent mechanisms).
In order to clarify my approach, I want to suggest that privacy
legislation is not obviously a form of resistance ,

want to situate privacy legislation, especially its legal and policy dimensions, squarely in the
institutional domain of surveillance and administrative power. The oft-noted enabling and
constraining elements of surveillanceincreasing involvement, but veering dangerously toward
totalitarianismplace privacy legislation, the protection of personal information, and legal
recourses to freedom of information in the domain of self-reproducing, yet enabling institutional
aspects of surveillance. We are still faced with the problem of a sociological analysis of resistance
to surveillance, and in this approach we may want to regain certain privacy discourses, especially
those of the non-governmental organizations that more closely correspond, in their express aims
to the resistance model advocated by Giddens. But the characteristics of these forms of resistance involve oppositional identities
using Giddens term, I
that are not stable from the outset (contra classist apriorism). New context-dependent identities are only won through struggles of
articulation in the moving equilibria of the field of antagonisms of hegemonic power (struggles articulating the range of differences,
shifting boundaries, relative unities, and elastic hierarchies [subordination by consent] from which they derive their character, and
importantly, create problems around identity formation). The language of new alliances, rainbow coalitions, transversal connections,
alternative flows, and remaking of territories and singularities in the process of subject formation all speak of the fluidity and plurality
of the ideological field int which resistances arise. The
idea, then, that there is a one-to-one correspondence

between institution and social movement is incoherent in these terms. Sensing this incoherence, social theorist
like David Lyon have noted that many of the counter-surveillance activities performed by small groups and
individuals have no formal connections with privacy bureaucracies or official lobbies but
respond, instead on the ground to the technologies of surveillance whose intrusion into the corners of
everyday life seems to intensify and perfuse through new technologies with alarming regularity.
Digital technology is radically incomplete, which allows it to be repurposed to create

new forms of agency and relationships. Eliminating surveillance technology also
takes away its revolutionary potential.
Lievrouw 2011 [Leah, Prof. of Info. Studies @ UCLA, The Internet, as Though Agency Mattered, preface to (Re)Inventing
the Internet: Critical Case Studies, Feenberg & Frieson, Sense Publishers ISBN 978-94-6091-734-9]
Moreover, the
material infrastructure of the Internet and related technologies is , as Feenberg says,

radically incomplete, not yet approaching the kind of closure and stabilization that have marked
communication technologies in the past. (Indeed, I would go further and argue that Internet design and
architecture, predicated on survivability, redundancy, and openness to diverse devices and
applications, actually resist this type of closure. The recombinant quality of Internet infrastructure is what allows
us to keep calling new media new [Lievrouw & Livingstone, 2006]). This persistent lack of closure, and the
incompleteness, emergence, or recombinant dynamics of new media technologies, in some sense
invite people to tinker with existing features and platforms, and use them to devise new or nonobvious affordances and uses according to their own purposes and interests . Feenberg, of course, has
usefully theorized this process, within his broader critical theory of technology, as instrumentalization: people seeking solutions to
problems recognize potentially useful objects and affordances in the world, remove them from their original settings and purposes to
highlight their new uses, and then reconfigure and fit them back into existing systems, standards, and repertoires of practice in new
ways (Feenberg, 2005). Together, the
ability of Internet infrastructure to support and extend group

interaction, and its radical incompleteness, have fostered a diversified, idiosyncratic,
opportunistic and serendipitous arena for building relationships, interaction and what Feenberg calls
new forms of agency. Actors can use technology to challenge established institutional power
and prerogatives, and in the process reconfigure not only the prevailing social order, but the
technical infrastructure that supports and subtends it. New forms of agency have opened the way
for the new, mediated modes of sociality, reciprocity, participation, mobilization, and resistance
that are highlighted in this book.
LinkFacial Obfuscation
The politics of facelessness presumes a universal plasticity of all subjectseffacing
difference.
Monahan 15 [Torin, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The
Right to Hide? Anti-Surveillance Camouflage and the Aestheticization of Resistance, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Vol. 12 No. 2]
Rather than simply substitute one bizarre collective representation for an alienating singular one, the Facial Weaponization Suite aspires to erase identity
markers altogether. It denies the legitimacy of a market of discrete identities and the systems that would reduce people to them. Blas and colleagues
explain: We want a technology that allows us to
escape regimes of identification standardization and control, like

facial recognition technologies and biometrics. In response to this, we ask, What are the tactics and techniques for making our
faces nonexistent? How do we flee this visibility into the fog of a queerness that refuses to be recognized? We propose to start making faces our weapons.
We can learn many faces and wear them interchangeably. A face is like being armed. . . . Today, in our biometric age, existence has become a means of
control. . . . Becoming nonexistent turns your face into a fog, and fog makes revolt possible.50 This
articulation epitomizes the logic

of the right to hide, a right to become nonexistent and invisible to institutions. The envisioned space of fog
purportedly frees one from social constraint and expectation, affording identity experimentation
and potentially revolt. Oddly, this play with masks and faces references a universal we and
advocates for the erasure of difference, or at least its markers, in the service of individual
autonomy. It performs a kind of post-identity politics right to social and political equality without
any signifiers of difference, which are themselves seen as oppressive impositions on the part of
others. The fog is a utopic non-space where the artist can speak on behalf of others, not because
everyone is him, as in the case with Selvaggios URME project, but because no one is anyonepeople, as defined
by difference, do not exist.
Facelessness is no different than a conservative right to privacy and cedes the

political to the right. Rather than hiding from surveillance, we should engage in
affirmative acts of counter-surveillance.
Monahan 15 [Torin, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The
Right to Hide? Anti-Surveillance Camouflage and the Aestheticization of Resistance, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Vol. 12 No. 2]
The aestheticization of resistance enacted by anti-surveillance camouflage and fashion ultimately fails to address
the exclusionary logics of contemporary state and corporate surveillance . These anti-surveillance practices
emerge at this historical juncture because of a widespread recognition of unchecked, pervasive surveillance and popular criticism of
government and corporate overreach. The key to the
popularity of these artistic efforts may be that they mobilize

the trappings of radical intervention, in highly stylized form, but do so in ways that do not compel
people to challenge state visuality projects. They offer hyper-individualized and consumer- oriented adaptations to
undesired surveillance. To the extent that such efforts can be seen as critical interventions, they rely on an appeal to the pedagogical
potential of art to galvanize meaningful political change. As Jacques Rancire explains: Art is presumed to be effective politically
because it displays the marks of domination, or parodies mainstream icons, or even because it leaves the spaces reserved for it and
becomes a social practice. . . . The logic of mimesis consists in conferring on the artwork the power of the effects that it is supposed to
elicit on the behavior of spectators.65 In the case of the examples covered in this paper, it is clear that while some of the signifiers of
critical art are present, for instance with the Fag Face Masks blurring of institutionally imposed identities, the primary message is
nonetheless one of accommodating pervasive surveillance and inviting a playful dance with it. Recognition of the violent, unequal,
and marginalizing applications of surveillance is bracketed or denied in the presentation of universal, neoliberal subjects in search of a
modicum of (fashionable) control over their exposure. This is not to say that play has no place in resistance efforts. As Jeffrey Juris66
has illustrated in his ethnography of the anti-corporate globalization movement, play and frivolity can sometimes succeed in ways that
oppositional tactics cannot. For example, in spaces of confrontation, people playing music or staging performances while dressed in
elaborate costumes are effective because they are symbolically powerful solidarity-building activities that are not physically
threatening to the police. Juris writes, Such playful provocation represents a form of ritual opposition, a symbolic overturning of
hierarchy much like medieval carnival.... Play, in particular, reveals the possibility of radically reorganizing current social arrangements.67 In the mode of anti-surveillance, groups like the Surveillance Camera Players similarly embody a spirit of play as they
stage performances for video surveillance camera operators and spectators in public places like New York City subway stations.68
Perhaps because of the public setting of these performances, which usually end with police or security guards escorting players off
public property, these interventions may have the effect of fostering in audiences a critique of policing priorities and the
commodification of public space. Play of this sort may be an effective form of resistance that alters public awareness and cultural
sensibilities, but it can be a difficult task for such interventions to problematize inequalities that can fester within assumptions of
shared rights. Ultimately, discourses
of the right to hide are weak variations of the right to privacy,

both of which depend on conceptually inadequate and empirically deficient mobilizations of
universal rights. Indeed, poor and racialized populations subjected to the most invasive forms of
monitoring are much more concerned with issues of domination and control, along with the
practicalities of survival, than they are with legal or philosophical abstractions like privacy .69
Privacy is also a deeply individualistic concept, poorly suited to forestall discriminatory practices
against social groups.70 As Sami Coll explains, The notion of privacy, as a critique of [the] information society,
has been assimilated and reshaped by and in favour of informational capitalism, notably by being overindividualized through the self- determination principle.71 The discourse of the right to hide, as with the right to privacy,
accepts the legitimacy of state demands for legible populations and offers symbolic compromises
to assert degrees of freedom within those constraints. Instead of being content with artistic forms of hiding,
countervisuality projects, by contrast, would look back and pursue alternatives to totalizing regimes
of state visuality. They would seek to undermine the authority of state control by challenging the
capitalist imperatives that lend legitimacy to forms of state violence and oppression.72 What is required is a full
engagement with the political, which, as Rancire describes, is always in opposition to the police: The
police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police
lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living. Its essence lies in a certain way of
dividing up the sensible. . . . Politics, by contrast, consists in transforming this space of move-along, of
circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens. 73 Artistic
intervention, broadly construed, can serve an important role in disrupting the authority of the police to structure the sensible, or
exclusionary logics in societies more generally. Whether
through filming and documenting cases of police

misconduct,74 engaging in culture-jamming activities to raise awareness of corporate malfeasance,75 or
challenging the status quo of rape culture by hacking into computer systems and publicizing attempts
to cover up sexual assault,76 there are many viable prototypes for artists and activists.77
Institutional attempts to stop facial recognition not only leave surveillance

apparatuses intact, they serve the anti-democratic practices they criticize
Lebovic 15 [Nitzan, assistant professor of history and the Apter Chair Of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh
University. Biometrics, or The Power of the Radical Center, Critical Inquiry Vol. 41 No. 4]
Comprehending this antinomy implies a different reading of the friend-enemy distinction in current democratic politics; the
enemy
of the surveillance society is the enemy of the archive or its sovereign, always an internal enemy .
In contrast to how political theorists usually see it, any infiltration from the outside world only strengthens the justifications for the
databases existence, reinforcing the sovereigns control and use of the data. In contrast to the state of exception, as defined by
Agamben, the
biometric database enables us to see that there is no need to suspend the law. The
antinomic structure of the system is the law. It is the norm. As mentioned above, what 9/11 gained for the
biopolitical system was simply the popular legitimacy to make the concealment of the system part and parcel of its operation, its
explicit principle of existence. In What Is an Apparatus? Agamben identifies a new European norm [that] imposes biometric
apparatuses on all its citizens by developing and perfecting anthropometric technologies invented in the nineteenth century in order to
identify recidivist criminals. Surveillance
by means of video cameras transforms the public space of the

city into the interior of an immense prison. In the eyes of authorityand maybe rightly sonothing looks more like a
terrorist than the ordinary man. [This] is the beginning, and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every
politics.81 Where does this leave us? As the editors of The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility write in their
introduction, resistance is typically not motivated by a desire to eliminate or modify systems, but to
evade their grasp. As such, it usually leaves the surveillance system intact .82 This is the power of the
new radical center, which hovers in between, or above, both the attempt to deregulate governmental
services and simultaneously supply a universal provider to cope with its damages. 83 The Israeli case,
discussed above, supplies one with a useful example. It shows how the antidemocratic mechanism is grounded in
the contemporaneous structure of democratic procedure and how the legislative mechanism is
serving power rather than limiting or balancing it. The radical center has surfaced not where Democrats or
Republicans meet, and certainly not where and when they speak. It does not answer conventional political divisions or procedures.
Rather, it exists
where the politicians revive an ancient power of the apparatus, which the
information age allows them to hide or cover with the cloth o f divine legitimacy, nicknamed
security. Accordingly, any attempt at resistance has to focus on the issues themselves, rather than the ideological rhetoric
surrounding them. The attempt to stop the legislation and activation of the biometric database in Israel
has failed. In its failure it projected a new light on the possibility of opposing unconstitutional
means of control. What alternative is there? In light of the failure to change democracy from within , new
groups of activists have opted to play by different rules. German and British activists, exhausted by the political maneuvers of both
liberal and conservative politicians, have taken a rather direct course, attacking closed-circuit television cameras in
the public way. This is the unavoidable result of a democratic failure and the zone of indifference
surrounding the heart of politics in general and the society of control in particular . When our bodies are
abstracted from the cycle of birth, maturation, and death, an increasingly ungovernable element will exploit, as Agamben correctly
identifies, the vanishing point of every politics. If inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, threat and violence are diffused, we
might as well knock down the remaining barriers between these formerly opposed pairs. What I imply is
needed here is the

physical act of destroying the machines, the cameras or sensors positioned in the public sphere,
and shaping the gazeless eyes or the black hole of faciality of our time. 84
LinkEncryption
Rather than eliminating surveillance technologies, the open source movement shows
how democratizing software and making it freely available acts as an explicit
political act that promotes social revolution.
Milberry 2012 [Kate, Faculty of Info @ Univ. of Toronto, Hacking for Social Justice: The Politics of Prefigurative
Technology, (Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies, Feenberg & Frieson, Sense Publishers ISBN 978-94-6091-734-9]
Stallman (1999) took the principled stance that proprietary software was antisocial and unethical. He challenged the
assumption that we computer users should not care what kind of society we are allowed to
have. He began developing an operating system, GNU (Gnus Not Unix) that was completed with the addition of the Linux kernel
in 1992 (gnu.org). The free software movement was based upon four essential freedoms: the freedom
to run a program; the freedom to modify a program; the freedom to redistribute copies (either gratis or
for a fee); and the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program. Because freedom is considered in
the context of knowledge rather than markets, the sharing of source code is not regarded as incompatible with selling a finished
program. The
crucial point is that the source codewhether in proprietary or free softwarealways

remains freely available. FREE SOFTWARE VS. OPEN SOURCE It is freedom, and not simply program
development and use, that is the central concern of the free software movement, making it
an explicitly political project3. According to one tech activist, it comprisesa digital revolution that is
social before it is technical (Obscura, 2005). But some in the programming community refuse to recognize the subversive
potential of free software. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), which Eric S. Raymond launched in 1998, is a response to the political or
normative approach of the free software movement. Although it assumes an apolitical stance, this movement reveals its bias in its
overt support for the status quo.
The plan directly hurts the open source movement by further privatizing encryption
technology. This prevents that technology from being used to subvert the dominant
social order.
In keeping with its business-friendly approach, the Open Source Definition logically abandoned all reference to the social and ethical
means and motives of free software, not to mention the fight for freedom as a primary aim (Obscura 2005). The OSI does not disguise
its efforts to make free software more compatible with capitalist discourse, describing itself as a marketing program for free software.
Its a pitch for free software on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping. The winning substance has not
changed, the losing attitude and symbolism have... (OSI, FAQ). For free software advocates, however, the
issue is the ethics

of software use and developmentwhat Stallman (1999) calls community practice and values.
This vision extends beyond the computer industry and embraces the ideal of a just society.
According to Stallman, such a challenge to the status quo caused a strong reaction, including hysterical
charges of communism against the movement. He explains: Talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about
responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort,
and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things.
In contrast with the Open Source Initiative, the
free software movement offers a working example of an

alternative social model, one based on decentralization, volunteerism, cooperation and selfempowerment, with the ultimate goal of creating a freer society. It is an example of
democratic rationalization, with users redeploying technology (software) to subvert the
dominant social order. In this case, democratic control of software suggests a different
Internet and, broadly considered, a different world. It is evident, however, that while the free software
movement continues to advocate its political program, grounding its position in a critique of capitalism, the broader programming
community has drifted away from its more radical origins. Open source softwares compatibility with capitalist discourse and practices
has been demonstrated in many contexts. But the work of tech activists at Indymedia over more than a decade has challenged this.
The plan makes it easier for private companies to encrypt information, which
decreases the ability of the public to repurpose software to achieve social justice.
Milberry 2012 (Kate, Faculty of Info @ Univ. of Toronto, Hacking for Social Justice: The Politics of Prefigurative
Technology, (Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies, Feenberg & Frieson, Sense Publishers ISBN 978-94-6091-734-9)
Tech activists combat power imbalances in the technical sphere through their development
and use of free software. In this way, they carve out their own virtual terrain oriented
toward the community model of the Internet, which is based on democratic practice. This
model, which contrasts with the commercial model in objectives and orientation, has
profound ethical implications for the future of the Internet (Feenberg & Bakardjieva 2004, p. 2).
Recognizing communication as central to achieving the goals of the global justice movement,
activists created their own media system. In the case of the ongoing hacking of Active10, the geeks of IMC-Tech were
keenly aware that each technological design or set of features creates a particular publishing structure and, as a result, empowers
users...in an equally particular way (Hill 2003, p. 2). However, it also became apparent that transmitting
movement ideals
of social, economic and environmental justice to the world through a global digital newswire
depended upon internal communication within Indymedia. The IMC tech collective initially communicated by email
lists and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). But by 2002, a number of wikis were set up with the idea of creating a sustainable system for
documenting IMCs history and ongoing activities. A wiki is a dynamic website made up of a series of interlinked webpages that can
be created and edited by users. As one member of the Docs Tech Working Group observed early on: Getting a functioning and used
wiki is really vital for the network...Email lists just arent cutting it for the level of organizing and information exchange and growth
we need to help facilitate.11 Techs needed a virtual workspace with a constant online presence, where they could work jointly yet
asynchronously, on common projects and tasks. In addition to facilitating workflow, the wiki had the benefit of constructing and
cohering an online community of tech activists who identified with the goals of the GJM and worked to provide the technical
infrastructure and support the movement required.
LinkFoucault
Foucauldian concepts of surveillance misread digital and algorithmic monitoring
practices and disempower those who actively resist surveillance in the technological
age.
Martin 2009 [Aaron & Rosamunde van Brakel & Daniel Bernhard, London School of Econ. Understanding Resistance to
Digital Surveillance: Towards a Multi-Disciplinary, Multi-Actor Framework, Surveillance and Society 6:3]
According to Haggerty and Ericson (2000), surveillance
is one of the main institutional components of late

modernity. They prefer the concept of an emerging surveillant assemblage over the Panopticon. The assemblage operates by
abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separates them into a series of discrete flows, which can be reassembled
into distinct data doubles, analysed, and targeted for intervention. A rhizomatic levelling of the hierarchy of surveillance occurs;
groups which were previously exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored (Haggerty and Ericson 2000,
606). Theories
of resistance within surveillance studies must thus take into account these digital,
algorithmic and rhizomatic aspects of new surveillance practices. Traditional ways of
understanding surveillance, by focussing on the increasing capabilities of the surveyors and the
expansion of surveillance to include previously exempt groups, reinforce the conception that
surveillance is a party for two: an exclusive relationship between the surveyor and her subjects.
Looking at the world this way not only ignores some of the actors who resist surveillance, but
also excludes the assemblages that conduct the surveillance. We seek to bring these other actors to the fore. To
this end, the remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In the next section we review how resistance has been discussed to date
by authors normally associated with surveillance studies. Then, after briefly introducing our case study, we review resistance
discourses from other academic fields and disciplines. We then return to the case study to apply lessons learned from these other fields
and disciplines. This allows us to better understand current and emerging resistance between the various actors. Finally, we ask: how
might we generalise a new framework for understanding resistance in surveillance studies that takes into account these additional
actors and their multi-dimensional interactions?
The panopticon fails to account for the infinite encounters that take place in urban
space the panopticon is not a meaningful analogy to understand power in digital
and urban spaces.
Koskela 2003 [Hille, Dept. of Geography @ Univ. of Helsinki Finland, Cam Era: the Contemporary Urban Panopticon,
Surveillance and Society 1:3]
He writes about space of our dreams, internal and external space, and a space that can be flowing like a sparkling water.
Foucault glorifies space by talking about the epoch of space (1986: 22) which is replacing the important role of time (i.e. history)
but simultaneously builds concepts that are disengaged from architecture and come close to the idea of the social production of space.
Rather than politics and economy (which have quite often been the basis for the argument that space is socially produced) he describes
the spaces created by human habits, cultures and religions. This means that Foucaults
ideas come close to Lefebvres

concept of representational space (1991: 39) which he describes as space as directly lived through
its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of "inhabitants" and "users" [...] space which
the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. Unfortunately, this work was never published by Foucault himself and the concepts
used were never developed further. In
analysing the parallelisms and differences with the Panopticon and

contemporary cities, it is important to acknowledge that urban space is far more complex than the
concept of space in Foucaults interpretations of the prison. In cities, people may sometimes be
metaphorically imprisoned but, nevertheless, they are not under isolation but quite the opposite: a
city is a space of endless encounters. Whereas a prison is an extremely homogenous space, a city
is full of diversity. This diversity of both spaces and social practices makes it impossible to
compare urban space simply and directly to the Panopticon. Too much happens in the city for
this to be true, as Soja (1996: 235) points out. However, there are several principles, characteristic to the mechanism of the
Panopticon, which are clearly present in the surveillance of cities. Some are almost self- evident some more unexpected, but yet, they
are all worth specifying.
Viewing state surveillance as a panopticon destroys any possibility for ethical

surveillance which subverts institutional forms of power.
Lievrouw 2011 [Leah, Prof. of Info. Studies @ UCLA, The Internet, as Though Agency Mattered, preface to (Re)Inventing
the Internet: Critical Case Studies, Feenberg & Frieson, Sense Publishers ISBN 978-94-6091-734-9]
Hamilton and Feenberg make the case that effective
online teaching, like effective face-to-face instruction, is

fundamentally relational and not merely a matter of information delivery. Understood this way, online
pedagogy has the potential to enrich and extend the traditional values of scholarship and teaching, and to resist the deskilling and
reduction of higher education to David Nobles feared digital diploma mills. Friesen, Feenberg
and Smith call for a

move away from framing surveillance in Foucauldian, panoptic terms that emphasize the
unseen power embodied in remote databases, and toward a framework that recognizes peoples
own power to understand, act on, and undermine the interests of surveilling interests and advance
their own. This notion of surveilled persons as subjective, and active, agents and actors, rather
than acted-upon representations, is broadly congruent with much recent work in surveillance
studies that emphasizes ethical surveillance and peoples capabilities to recognize, resist, and
even play with the information that they reveal about themselves and thus subvert institutional
aims and power (Monahan, Murikami-Woods & Phillips, 2010; boyd, 2011). This collection, then, is not just a set of empirical
tests of the critical theory of technology. More importantly, it is another step in the movement in new media scholarship toward an
understanding of communication technologies as inextricably entwined in everyday experience, and of mediated communication as a
complex, contingent and continuous process that articulates the symbolic and the material, technology and experience, structure and
action, constraint and agency.
Surveillance is inevitable but Foucaults analogy of the panopticon fails to empower

communities to extract phenomenological value from it.
Frieson 2009 [Norm & Andrew Feenberg & Grace Smith, School of Education @ Thompson Rivers Univ., Phenomenology
and Surveillance Studies: Returning to the Things Themselves, The Information Society 25:84]
In everyday experience, we engage in transactions, fill out forms , create online profiles, pass through security
checks, and participate in myriad other situations in which our movements are registered, our
identities verified, and the minutiae of our lives recorded. The vicissitudes of these everyday
experiences reveal an ambivalent mix of freedom and control, security and uncertainty . On the one
hand, the Internet and other forms of data transmission coupled with cameras, databases, detectors, etc.have
enabled powerful subject-generating structures and processes . These have received theoretical treatment in a
wide range of texts referencing Michel Foucaults early analyses of panoptic and other controlling structures. On the other hand,
these subject-forming social mechanisms do not generally produce the pathological consequences
evoked in such analyses of surveillance. We are not, as a rule, rendered clinically paranoid by the
panoptic power of omnipresent security cameras, motion detectors, and myriad other tracking and
recording devices. But how can an account of the ambivalences of surveillance in our everyday life be articulated? Such an
articulation would involve consideration not only of the subject-forming powers of the
mechanisms of surveillance and dataveillance, but also of the interiority of the corresponding
forms of subjectivity. When Foucault was looking into the role of surveillance and control in the
formation of the subject, he was also in full flight from phenomenology, existentialism, and the general
philosophy of consciousness with which he might have produced an account of the everyday
experience of surveillance. His emphasis instead was on macro-social factors; as a result, the issue of the experien- tial
reality of surveillance is undertheorized in Foucaults writings and in surveillance studies that have followed in his wake. In this
article, we return to the overlooked question of the shaping of modern subjective experience
through surveillance. We are not engaged in the polemics of Fou- caults generation of French
intellectuals for or against phenomenology and existentialism. Instead, we affirm the considerable
heuristic value of phenomenology as a means of studying the subjectivity said to be produced
through social and institutional structures and practices . We first address the issue of surveillance in an individual
context and then consider the implications of our analysis for the institutionalization of surveillance in modern societies.
The affs rejection of all surveillance doesnt understand the fact that surveillance is
reciprocal This means that they get rid of Sousveillance as well
Lyon 94[David. David Lyon is Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre. He is also Queen's Research Chair in Surveillance
Studies and Professor of Sociology and of Law. The Electronic Eye Blackwell Publishers. Pages 219-220]
Rather late in the day, sociology
started to recognize surveillance as a central dimension of modernity,

an institution in its own right, not reducible to capitalism, the nation-state or even bureaucracy. As
such, surveillance shows more than one face. The prominent paradox is that surveillance simultaneously
represents both a means of social control and a means of ensuring that citizens rights are
respected. For example, the state that keeps tabs on the population can be influenced by that
population by means of those tabs. Despite this paradox, the fact remains that the kinds of models
used to try to understand surveillance focus on the darker, negative side of social control. No sooner
had sociology got a clear fix on surveillance, however, than the focus became fuzzy again. Events seem to be overtaking surveillance
analysis in at least two important respects. First, in the later twentieth centure surveillance adopted a new medium, electronic
technologies. Suddenly the talk is of a new surveillance, qualitatively different from that which existed before. Some such
pronouncements are little more than high-tech hype, inflated imagery derived from technological determinism. But, that said, several
changes do seem to follow in the train of new technologies.
The Panopticon offers a lack of understanding in new forms of technological

surveillance, surveillance today is not a simple as Foucault theorizes it to be, a new
target of the basic surveillance collection is the human body.
Ball 5 [Kirstie Ball is Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at The Open University Business School.
Organization, Surveillance and the Body: Towards a Politics of Resistance, Organization. Vol. 12 No. 1]
Recent theorizing about surveillance practices has turned to the centrality of the body, not least in
those at the workplace. Although many acknowledge Foucaults nod towards the rehabilitated
body of the incarcerated subject in the panopticon and the political technologies of the body
identified in The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1976), the theoretical inclination is towards Latourian and Deleuzian ideas.
These approaches highlight the disparate arrays of people, technologies and organizations that
become connected to make surveillance assemblages, in contrast to the static, unidirectional
panopticon metaphor. Indeed, Gandy (1998) asserts that it would be a mistake to assume that surveillance
in practice is as complete and totalizing as the panoptic ideal type would have us believe. Similarly,
Rule (1998: 68) observes that the panopticon alone offers little help in understanding new forms of
electronic surveillance, particularly if the question is whether people are subject to more or more
severe forms of control. Moreover, Boyne (2000) observes that disciplinary power, with its perfection through
technology, and the resultant docile, accepting, self-disciplining population are the exception
rather than the norm. It is, rather, how individuals, organizations, state bodies and the media
connect to these technologies that influences whose data are collected, where they go and what
happens as a result. Ball (2002) begins to address this point. In a paper entitled Elements of Surveillance, she describes four elements in a
surveillance domain. Representation refers to the technological element, acknowledging how
surveillance technologies can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from another
technological medium. Meaning refers to the potential of new surveillance technologies to
enable different interpretations of life to be made, as well as interpretations of surveillance itself.
At least three common meanings are attributed to surveillance practice: surveillance as
knowledge; surveillance as information; and surveillance as protection from threat.
Manipulation refers to the inevitability of power relations under surveillance, not least because
surveillance practices capture and create different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects.
Power relations are evident in the way in which watching institutions or groups are able to
regulate the flow of information and knowledge about the surveilled domain between various
parties; resistance strategies concern breaking or disrupting those flows and creating spatio-
temporal gaps between watcher and watched. Finally, Ball refers to actors within a surveilled domain as
intermediaries where meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where
power/resistance operates, and where networks are bound together. Each party, at each level of
analysis, assumes a role in a surveillance network and becomes inscribed as such through
embodied compliance, the exchange of money, the inscription of text and the use of artefacts
(Michael, 1996). Ball argues that intermediation is an important socio-technical process in the perpetuation of
surveillance practices. Using Deleuze and Guatarris (1987) concept of the assemblage, Haggerty and Ericson (2000) also describe the
convergence and spread of data-gathering systems between different social domains and at multiple levels. Their argument centres on
the notion that the target of the generic surveillance assemblage is the human body, which is
broken into a series of data flows to the end of feeding the information categories on which the
surveillance process is based (Hier, 2003). Thus, it is not the identity or subjectivity of individuals that
is of interest, but rather the data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can
contribute; these are then reapplied to the body as part of the influencing and managing process
to which Lyon refers. Accordingly Haggerty and Ericson argue that surveillance has a rhizomatic character: it has many and diverse instances
connected to an underlying, invisible infrastructure, which concerns interconnected technologies in multiple contexts.
LinkBoarders
Surveillance at the border is inevitable. Counter surveillance and de-bordering are
necessary acts of counter-hegemonic resistance. The plan makes it harder to deploy
counter surveillance along the border.
Walsh 2010 [James, Prof. @ UC Santa Barbara, Form Border Control to Border Care: The Political and Ethical Potential of
Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 8:2]
Although existing
research has illuminated the role of surveillance in monitoring and managing mobile populations, it has
tended to overlook other important activities, including the strategic use of surveillance by activist groups .
As a result, scholarship has generally interpreted watching, locating, and identifying as innately
authoritative and disempowering practices directed toward gatekeeping and exclusion. But what
happens when observational technologies and strategies are turned against the states gatekeepers
and surveillance systems? How should such instances impact scholarly understandings of surveillance as a potential tool of
resistance, empowerment and democratization? In addressing these questions, I assess two interventions employed to address the
human consequences of contemporary immigration control: (1) counter-surveillance
and (2) strategic and symbolic

acts of de- bordering. While both share common interests in rendering perceived injustice visible ,
they can be differentiated based on their tactics and overriding objectives. The first refers to the use of surveillance to
promote transparency and democratic accountability by watching the watchers and turning the
gaze of authority against itself (see Huey et al. 2006). De-bordering, meanwhile, represents broader
transformative approaches that employ surveillance to humanize the border environment. While it
also seeks to alter existing arrangements, unlike counter-surveillance, such actions are more systemic or
counter-hegemonic; rather than implementing a direct response or counter-gaze, they pursue ethical and practical
activities that assist migrants, recast the terms of official discourse, and challenge existing
institutional arrangements.
The same technology that is used to monitor and observe migrants on the border
has been used by border activists as mechanisms of empowerment and resistance.
Many scholars
have already noted how border control and surveillance exceed the exclusive
purview of nation-states and are also carried out by emergent practitioners such as supranational
institutions, municipalities, private security firms, airlines, travel agents, and vigilante patrols
(Guiraudon 2001; Walsh 2008). While emphasizing the distributed and heterogeneous nature of
surveillance, I also intend to reorient analysis by illuminating how private citizens and civilsociety actors have used observational technologies and practices as mechanisms of
empowermenthere defined as a demonstrable improvement in the economic, juridical,
social, or symbolic status of marginalized groups. Paying attention to such dynamicsshould
result in a more nuanced understanding of border control as a complex institutional field
defined by negotiation and struggle among multiple actors, both internal and external to the
state, and help assess the activists use of surveillance in protecting migrants and in
promoting a moral geography of recognition, responsibility and hospitality. This paper is divided as
follows. First, with particular attention to the US-/Mexico border, I summarize received scholarship on globalization, surveillance, and
national boundaries. Second, I apply studies emphasizing surveillances flexibility and ambiguity to the institutional field of the
border. Here I argue that, along
with restricting entry and expelling undesirables, observational

technologies and practices may also be applied to promoting human security and
challenging perceived injustice. Finally, before offering a brief summary and conclusion, I situate this argument
empirically, analyzing the use and framing of surveillance by border activists. This third section also
assesses each groups transformative potential and its relations with state authorities and official border practitioners.
Surveillance on the border is inevitable. Eliminating state based surveillance only

increases the use of unregulated private vigilante surveillance and eliminates the
ability to redeploy surveillance technology for social justice.
The government is not alone in its aggressive efforts, as vigilante organizations have
emerged to provide additional surveillance and policing. Although existing in numerous forms over the past
150 years, border vigilantes, which now include the Minuteman Project, Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, American Border
Patrol, Border Patrol Auxiliary and Cyber-vigilantes, have recently proliferated (Walker 2007). Guided by insular
nationalism and viewing undocumented migration as an affront to national sovereignty and
security, vigilantes have engaged in civilian-led border watches and patrols, the use of unmanned
surveillance drones, and the installation of their own high-tech fencing and surveillance cameras
near the border.4 Heightened securitization efforts have had egregious human consequences. While failing to curb
illicit entries, forward deployment strategies have instead forced migrants into the unforgiving
desert, and mountain terrain of Southern Arizona. As a result, the number of deaths due to dehydration, drowning, and exposure has
drastically increased.5Since 1994 over 5,000 migrants have perished in transit; this is likely a conservative estimate given the vast
desert landscape likely holds hundreds, if not thousands, of more bodies.6 Although often labelledunintended consequences
(Cornelius 2001), given current policies stated intent of escalating the risks, dangers, and physical costs associated with illicit entry,
migrant fatalities are hardly unanticipated. Additionally,
current enforcement efforts rest on an ugly paradox in

which the insecurity of the other is justified to protect and foster the life of the social body (Burke
2007; cf Foucault 1990). In depriving migrants of adequate protections while wilfully exposing them to undue environmental risks and
dangers, current approaches have turned the border into a zone of abjectiona place where immigrants are channelled into danger
and immigrant life is...disavowed to the point of death (Inda 2006, 26, 174).7
By viewing surveillance as a tool of gatekeeping and dehumanization, the Aff

eliminates the ability for activists to use the same techniques against structures of
power.
Despite growing attention to the ambiguous and multivalent nature of surveillance, research on
migration and mobility has continued to assume a framework of border control in which watching
and monitoring are aligned with gatekeeping, regulating access, and excluding and expelling
unwanted populations (see Inda 2006; Salter 2007; Shamir 2005; Torpey 2000; Walters 2006). Consequently, when
studying instances of resistance and empowerment, researchers treat surveillance as a target,
rather than tool, of resistance and analysis centres on if and how it may be eliminated. While the
impact of official practices of territorial and social boundary maintenance can hardly be
overestimated, many of the techniques and tools implicated in the administration of political
borders can also be appropriated by opposing actors. In the following discussion I draw on the work of three
activist organizations to inform and add complexity to extant scholarship, shifting analysis to forms of border care neglected by
scholars interested in surveillance, borders and mobility.
The Affs interpretation of surveillance at the border is inaccurate and

narrowminded. Activists can use the same surveillance practices to advocate for
structural change and redress injustices.
Walsh 2010 (James, Prof. @ UC Santa Barbara, Form Border Control to Border Care: The Political and Ethical Potential of
Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 8:2)
By detailing and analyzing the use of often sophisticated observational practices by border activists, this article has highlighted
interventions and actors left unexplored in extant work on surveillance, borders, and mobility. While
the administration of
territorial borders remains a significant instantiation of state authority central to the exercise and
accumulation of political and symbolic power, treating the state as the exclusive agent of border
surveillance or assuming that surveillance is inherently repressive endorses a narrow and
undersocialized view of observational techniques and practices . Noting there is more to surveillance
than initially meets the eye, this paper has advanced a broader definition, recognizing that observing,
locating, and classifying may be conducted in the interest of protecting rights, redressing
injustices, enabling democratic participation, buttressing moral criticism, and advocating
for alternative practices. Further, this paper calls attention to the need to study surveillance as a dynamic and interactive
process in which the boundaries between watcher and watched are often indeterminate and where, despite inequalities of power,
subordinates are able to contest and challenge gatekeepers, order enforcers, and other formal authorities. Acknowledging
this
duality allows the researcher to venture beyond the empirically obvious, challenge excessively
authoritarian accounts, and, most importantly, advance a publicly engaged brand of scholarship
that explores surveillances empowering potential. Examining the collective actions and cultural
framings of border activists provides a window into the uses of surveillance in constructing
counter-geographies of hope, and promoting a more inclusive and egalitarian social order. Though I
have noted various limitations in these groups strategiesincluding Humane Borders reluctant cooperation with the Border Patrol
and DHS, and the ACLUs neutral monitoring of authority or ideational frameworks based on grammars of privacy and liberal
individualismI do not mean to imply that activists should dispense with their practices. Their efforts are best conceived as
complementary approaches and components of a multi-pronged challenge to the emergent homeland security state. Using
surveillance to assist migrants and monitor authority is unlikely to bring a halt to the tragic border crisis but they are certainly stops in
the right direction. In opposing the criminalization and securitization of migration activists face daunting and seemingly
insurmountable obstacles, but, as Weber (1946, 128) reminded us, All historical experience confirms... that man [sic] would not have
attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.
LinkInternet Freedom
The US is historically hypocritical on issues of internet freedomeven if they
champion it within the states, they wont stop selling cyber programs to other
countries
Johnston and Chichakyan 12
[Cary, writer for online news source RT and director and editor of
the Wikileaks documentary. Gayane, writer for online news source RT. Good freedom, bad freedom: Irony of cybersecurity. RT.
http://www.rt.com/usa/usa-internet-cybersecurity-cispa-299/]
US lawmakers are having another go at regulating the Internet, despite the recent embarrassing climbdown, when public outrage saw
anti-piracy plans shelved. With a new cybersecurity bill, CISPA, activists fear their nightmares may now be realized. The
US
government continues spending millions of dollars to support freedom of the Internet around the
world. But is it freedom for all? The whistleblower website WikiLeaks, which to many has
become the symbol of Internet freedom, has been under fire from US officials and lawmakers .
Because WikiLeaks published documents which embarrassed the American government in many ways, WikiLeaks becomes the
enemy, a former employee of the US State Department, Peter van Buren, told RT. The US has reportedly issued a secret indictment
against Julian Assange, the head of the website which leaked hundreds of thousands of documents, revealing embarrassing details
about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five major US financial institutions VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and the
Until recently, Peter

van Buren, served as a Foreign Service officer at the State Department. He says he was fired over
the book and the blog that he wrote about the failure of US policies in Iraq . The State
Department since 2008 has spent $76 million overseas on Internet freedom, giving tools and
support to bloggers and journalists and online people around the world, particularly in countries
that we have difficulties with, he said. At the same time, the State Department has found
Internet freedom to be inconvenient in the form of WikiLeaks, and has worked just as hard and
probably spent even more money trying to shut down free speech that it opposes, while
supporting free speech that it feels furthers Americas own political goals overseas. We call that
hypocrisy. But it is not just the whistleblowing websites that the US is after, but also their sources. Critics say this administration
Bank of America have tried to economically strangle WikiLeaks by blocking donations to the website.
has embarked on an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers. In this culture, where this administration is going after
whistleblowers in an unprecedented way, we all have an obligation to protect our sources, says Jeremy Scahill, an investigative
journalist. I myself, Im really nervous about the safety of some of the people that Ive talked to. As a national security journalist who
covers national security, Im talking all the time with people who are in the intelligence and the military community. While
trying to stifle inconvenient leaks at home, the US perceives the Internet and social networking
platforms as major tools for spreading democracy, and spends millions of dollars to help people in
the Middle East and China get around Internet-blocking firewalls . At the same time, ironically
enough, American companies provide Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with the technology to
effectively block websites. A lot of the tools of control that are used by the so-called repressive
governments are provided by American companies, Peter van Buren explains. The difference is that
corporations, for better or worse, talk about profit as their motivation. However, the American government talks about freedom and
democracy as its motivation, when in fact in many ways it seems to act in the opposite direction. Some argue that if left
uncontrolled, the export of surveillance and site-blocking tools by American companies could undermine Internet freedom in the same
way as arms exports undermine peace initiatives. And as
far as the US government efforts to secure Internet

freedom go, they seem to discern two different kinds of freedom: the freedom they encourage and
the freedom that they punish
LinkFirst Amendment
The first amendment creates a bubble for socially acceptable activism that is
regulated by the neoliberal state agenda.
Fiss 91[Owen M. Fiss, Sterling Professor at Yale Law School., The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 100, No. 7 (May, 1991), pp.
2087-2106, The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc., http://www.jstor.org/stable/796816]
In recent years we have come to understand that the state does not act just as policeman, but also
as educator, employer, landlord, librarian, broadcaster, banker, and patron of the arts. The
twentieth century has witnessed an enormous growth of state power and , even more, a proliferation
of the ways in which this power has come to be exercised. In speaking of the rise of the activist
state in America, we refer not simply to the quantitative growth of state intervention, but more importantly to the changes in the
ways that the state has intervened: a movement from negative to affirmative modalities. This development
has been of considerable importance politically and socially and, at the same time, has created new
challenges for the First Amendment. Is it an infringement of freedom of speech for a public
library to exclude certain radical books? Or for a public school to offer a course on evolution but
not creationism? Or for a state-owned television station to promote the development of nuclear
power and not provide an opportunity for environmental groups to voice their opposition? In
grappling with these questions the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the First Amendment applies to
the affirmative as well as the negative modes of exercising state power, but it has encountered
great difficulty in specifying exactly how it applies. Stated in the most general terms, the question is
whether the Court should apply a double standard-should the Court be more lax in its review of these affirmative
exercises of power than it is when it reviews the enforcement of the criminal law? This is the question I wish to address, and to
do so I will focus on the constitutional and political controversy concerning Robert Mapplethorpe and the National Endowment for the
Arts (NEA). That controversy was spurred by a number of public statements by Senator Jesse 2. For
a consideration of the
various theories of the First Amendment, and the argument in favor of viewing the First
Amendment more as a protection of collective self-determination than of individual selfexpression, see
Fiss, Why the State?, 100 HARV. L. REV. 781 (1987). For a more recent examination of these issues, see Note, A Pluralistic Reading
of the First Amendment and Its Relation to Public Discourse, 99 YALE L.J. 925 (1990). This content downloaded from
128.83.206.115 on Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:51:52 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 1991] State
Activism
2089 Helms of North Carolina objecting to the use of public funds to support the show. Although
it did not reach the Supreme Court, for more than a year the Mapplethorpe controversy was a
matter of national importance. It was in the newspapers almost on a daily basis, resulted in one
criminal prosecution, the appointment of a presidential commission and several rounds of
legislation, and raised complex issues that every modern democracy must confront in adjusting to
the changes in the way state power is exercised.
LinkEO 12333
All future restrictions on EO 12333 are vulnerable to existing loopholesmovement
to foreign surveillance.
Arnbak and Goldberg, 2014 [Axel, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Cambridge. Sharon,
Computer Science Department, Boston University, Boston. Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution: Warrantless Bulk
Surveillance on Americans by Collecting Network Traffic Abroad, Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review, 317,
p 13]
The legal
loopholes we identified are exploitable, since the vagaries of Internet protocols can sometimes cause traffic sent
between two US endpoints to be routed abroad. Even when this is not the case, core Internet protocols like BGP and DNS
can be deliberately manipulated to ensure that traffic between US endpoints takes an unusual path
through a device located abroad. If the two main criteria are met, these interdependent legal and technical
loopholes enable largely-unrestrained surveillance on Americans communications. For instance, these
techniques can be used to collect, in bulk, all communications sent from an autonomous system like Boston University to a given IP
address block (with a BGP manipulation), or from an autonomous system to a particular domain like www.facebook.com (with a DNS
manipulation). In future work, we will consider additional technical loopholes, as well as legal and technical remedies that can address
the difficulties highlighted by our analysis. We will discuss why technical
solutions like encryption, DNSSEC, and the
RPKI can help combat these risks, but still are no panacea. Even encrypted traffic, for example, exposes \metadata" (including
who is communicating, the length of the communication, etc.); moreover, FISA and USSID 18 minimization procedures permit
retention and analysis of encrypted communications even if two communicants are known to be U.S. persons. Meanwhile, the RPKI
can limit the scope and impact of BGP manipulations, but does not completely eliminate them. Future work will also discuss possible
solutions in the legal and policy space, including a more comprehensive analysis of the USA Freedom Act; 21 on the face of it, the
proposed U.S.A. Freedom Act and 4th Amendment case- law
concentrate on legal safeguards for U.S. persons,

and offer little promise in closing the international surveillance loophole we have discussed here. We
reiterate that we do not intend to speculate on whether or not the intelligence community is exploiting the interdependent technical and
legal loopholes that we have described. Instead, our aim is to broaden our understanding of the possibilities and deeper issues at hand.
Indeed, our analysis has highlighted a central problem in law; namely, that law
has an old-fashioned focus on physical

materiality, in the sense that it matters much where surveillance is conducted. The networked
communications environment challenges such conventional laws with a new technical reality, that does not respect the traditional
geopolitical boundaries to which current constitutional and statutory protection are tailored. Therefore, we emphasize that while the
Patriot Act and FISA are overseen by all three branches of Government, EO
12333 remains solely under the
executive branch because the U.S. Constitution grants it wide national security authorities to protect the nation against threats
overseas. The implications for long term reform are real: even if the legislative or judiciary branches of
Government address the loopholes in the Patriot Act and FISA, the U.S. Constitution emerges as a
significant obstacle to the long term reform of EO 12333 . We have argued that consolidation of the loopholes in
EO 12333 within the Executive branch could leave Americans' Internet traffic as vulnerable to surveillance, and as unprotected by
U.S. law, as the traffic of foreigners. Going forward, without a fundamental reconsideration of the lack of privacy and due process
safeguards for non-U.S. persons, U.S.
surveillance legislation leaves the door wide open for unrestrained
surveillance on U.S. persons from abroad.
LinkCell Phones
Camera Phones are a critical site of counter surveillance, which empowers
individuals in significant ways.
Chen 2007 [Judy, PhD University of California Irvine in Information and Computer Sciences. Over and Under Surveillance,
Position paper for the CHI 2007 Workshop Imaging the City, Irvine, CA]
Counter-surveillance is a reaction to the tension between those being watched and those doing the
watching. It is a form of activism that often involves the intentional misuse of surveillance
technologies to publicize the prevalence of surveillance in society [6]. Counter-surveillance can
also be as simple as surveilling the surveillants themselves. Surveilling Ourselves An emerging
technology that is democratizing surveillance is the camera phone. Tiny cameras embedded into
cell phones and wireless infrastructures equip the everyday consumer with a cheap, portable
surveillance device. While camera phones are mostly used for recreational purposes, recent reports have
documented the use of camera phones for technological vigilantism . In 2003, an alleged act of racism by
police was captured by a camera phone. A police car with a stuffed gorilla attached to the front of the car was parked outside a
restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Coincidentally, the population of the restaurant at the time was primarily African American. Several
restaurant-goers saw the vehicle and took photos with their cell phones [3]. There have been other reports of victims using cell phones
to capture the faces and license plates of their attackers. The
with the power of surveillance.
camera phone has commissioned the general public
Internal LinkStatism
State power is barreling towards complete control of everyday life with the
hegemonic use of surveillance. Without challenge, surveillance is used to maintain
power over others.
Ganascia 2010 [Jean-Gabriel, Prof. of Comp. Science @ Paris VI Univ., The Generalized Sousveillance Society, Social
Science Information 49:3]
The spectre of Nineteen eighty-four (Orwell, 1949) still haunts the contemporary world. With webcams,
RFID tags and many other recent information technologies, it now becomes possible to record continuously
anybodys daily activities (Bailey & Kerr, 2007). As soon as it is switched on, the mobile phone makes it easy to identify and
localize its owner. Location- Based Services (Joore, 2008), which have been perceived as an incredible contribution to individual
empowerment, allow for continuous tracking of any movement. With remote-sensing techniques, it is now possible to track people as
they change places, even when they decide to resign from public life to cultivate their garden. In
many developed countries,

personal data concerning health, employment, income, travel and digital communications are
officially traced and stored in powerful databases (Lahlou, 2008b). It is then possible to fuse (Laudy, Ganascia &
Sedogbo, 2007) all those data using modern data-mining techniques. Many people fear the surveillance society that
could result from the generalized use of such techniques. The notion of a surveillance society may
refer to an individual, e.g. a Big Brother, a tribe, a social class, a clan, a militia or any group using the
information gathered through surveillance in order to maintain power over others . It indubitably
makes sense in a legal state, or at least in a state in which the power-holders need informational arguments to justify their actions. In
archaic states, where power was imposed with brute force by a charismatic chief, a king, an emperor or an oligarch, without any other
justification, surveillance was not required, except to prevent conspiracies. From this standpoint, surveillance is relatively modern.
Prisons, aiming to reform an individual, to teach him the law and to remind him of the necessity to obey it, are also quite recent
(Foucault, 1975; Weber, 1969); previously, most of the people convicted were either released or tortured to death. As we shall see, the
notion of the Panopticon is emblematic of this new political form that appeared in Europe and North America in the 18th century.
Nevertheless, the notion of a surveillance society, which many of our contemporaries still dread, does not seem to characterize the
present state of our postmodern societies at least that is what we intend to show in this article. This does not mean that surveillance
has disappeared, but instead that the global organization of the surveillance society has been replaced by a new social organization,
more flexible and fluid, where surveillance and what we can call sousveillance coexist.
State power, capitalism and structural violence are inevitable in a world of

asymmetrical surveillance. Democratizing technology is the only way to challenge
sovereign authority.
Springer 2010 [Simon, et al., Dept of Geography @ Univ. of Victoria, BC Canada, Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and
Transgressions of WikiLeaks, Geopolitics 17:681]
The idea that there are significant intersections between state, capital and violence is by no means new
within the realm of critical geopolitical inquiry. 2 Similarly, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet in general have opened up
transnational networks that remap contemporary geopolitics in potentially emancipating ways. In this regard Wikileaks is but one
component in a larger process of the Internet being used as a tool to destabilise the hegemony of state power and the arrogance of US
power in particular. However, in preceding both the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, the Wikileaks case revealed with
empirical force how the
theorised intersections between states, capital, and violence have become

increasingly overt in the Internet era, signalling what may be considered a shift in sovereign logic .
Wikileaks demonstrated how sovereignty could become opened up to new and intensive forms of critical public scrutiny, meaning
that demands for transparency and accountability became more intensive than they have ever been in the past. States
must now
come to grips with being under the microscope of the public eye, where the ability to deceive the
population can no longer be taken for granted. Yet at the same time , and somewhat paradoxically,
sovereignty has also been closed down, where states attempt to manage increasing information
flows and the probing that comes with such accessibility by amplifying authoritarian responses
such as shutting down websites and cutting off access to revenue in an attempt to curb the flow of
knowledge. It is our contention that the significance of Wikileaks is that it brings emergent geopolitical issues into sharp relief,
which requires some reflection on what this all means in relation to the current geopolitical order and its potential transformation as a
result of the probable emergence of multiple Wikileaks-style operations in the future. Will sovereign authority be able to respond fast
enough to the changing field of power and find new modes of adaptation to maintain its monopoly on legitimacy, or will it ultimately
collapse beneath the its own weight as more and more light is shed on the misdeeds and abuse that seem to come concomitant to
sovereign rule? We do not presume an answer to this question, as the future is not yet written. We also want to be careful not to reify
positions here either, as our interpretation of sovereignty is, following Foucault, circuitous, meaning that it flows from and between
people and states in a protean and reciprocat- ing exchange. 3 So the question is not so much a binary case of the people versus the
state, as it is a taking stock of the role, meaning, and place of sovereignty in an age of increasing digital connectivity. Increasing
knowledge and awareness for the actions of states transforms the way sovereignty is operationalised in any given context. As public
political will begins to shift on the basis of newly acquired information, so too does the orientation of sovereign power. In an effort to
initiate different kinds of interrogations concerning the present and future of geopolitical configurations of power, we propose a series
of five discussion points that we feel are worthy of engagement, debate, and further reflection by human geographers:
ImpactStatism
[1NC Evidence] State power has grown so big that it now uses technology to
maintain a constant state of emergency which justifies endless wars, military
growth, and structural violence. The impact is even more unregulated domestic
surveillance, which turns the case.
Steinmetz 2003 (George, Prof. of Sociology @ Univ. of Michigan, The State of Emergency and the Revival of American
Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism, Public Culture 15:2)
The
current state of emergency, the threat of terrorism, is constructed as a specifically political
crisis, a shaken sense of political sovereignty. This massive campaign to recentralize power began, somewhat
The manifest regulatory changes over the past year have focused primarily on the structure and role of the (U.S.) state.
ironically, just at the moment when globalization theorists (including Hardt and Negri) were reaching a consensus that the state was
being overshad- owed by transnational, regional, and local organizations. The
refocusing of political power on the

level of the American national state has been most evident in the area of U.S. geopolitical
strategy (unilateralism and preemptive military strikes), but much of the new regulatory
activity has focused on the state apparatus itself and the domestic level of politics, with
the creation of a huge new government agency (the Department of Homeland Security), transformations
of the legal system (e.g., secret trials and arrests, indefinite detentions), and intensi- fied domestic
surveillance: first with the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which dramatically relaxed restrictions on search
and seizure; then with the Total Information Awareness Program, which collects and analyzes
vast amounts of data on private communications and commercial transactions ; and most recently with the
proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. At the same time, there has been no significant change
in the strategies for economic production nothing comparable, that is, to the widespread embrace of flexible
specialization by American (and European) industry a generation ago. Even if the new statism is concerned mainly
with what some describe as security issues, and has not seen changes in, say, social provisioning,
it marks a decisive break with the patterns of deregulation and decentralization pursued by both the
Democratic and Republi- can Parties in previous decades. Helmut Schmidt and others thus underestimate the
pronounced acceleration of tendencies toward explicit U.S. hegemony, imperialism, and
domestic authoritarianism in the past year and a half. The Bush administrations recent paper on
national security offers excellent examples in its emphasis on the need to maintain the
unparalleled strength of the United States armed forces, to maintain bases and stations within
and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, to experiment with new approaches to
warfare, and to prevent potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing,
or equaling, the power of the United States (White House 2002: 29 30). The United States kept its putative NATO allies out of the
loop in its decision-making processes in the Afghanistan war, for example, and resisted the deployment there of an integrated
international security force (see Krnig 2001). 7 The Bush administrations opposition to the International Criminal Court and its
threat to block all United Nations peacekeeping missions as they come up for renewal unless American peacekeepers are granted
immunity from prosecution also demonstrate that it is much more willing to embrace the role of lone hegemonic superpowers than
were the previous Bush and Clinton administrations (see Tyler 1992b; Dao 2002). Once
we connect this aggressively

unilateralist and imperialist stance in the international sphere to the strengthening of the state
domestically, it is possible to speak of an overall shift in the mode of political regulation. It has also
become clearer in recent months that the political emergency is paired with an economic crisis. Yet most of the reforming energy so
far has been directed at the political rather than the economic or social components of the regulatory mode. How can we make sense
of this? It would be unsatisfying to rely on the argument that modes of regulation are, after all, the product of multiple wills
intersecting in unpredictable ways. More convincing is the claim that even if there is a crisis for millions of unemployed workers and
small investors, it is not (yet) perceived as such a serious crisis for the leading sectors of capital and their political representatives.
The bridge has already been crossed and we now live in a surveillance state that is
literally ubiquitous. This makes communication impossible and establishes a
framework for complete social control and a mechanism for eliminating those who
resist.
Greenwald 2012 [Glenn, Journalist, lawyer & Author, Surveillance State Evils, Salon.com, April 21]
At the time of the Church Committee, it was the FBI that conducted most domestic surveillance. Since its inception, the NSA was
strictly barred from spying on American citizens or on American soil. That prohibition was centrally ingrained in the mindset of the
agency. Church issued that above-quoted warning out of fear that, one day, the NSAs massive, unparalleled surveillance capabilities
would be directed inward, at the American people. Until the Church Committees investigation, most Americans, including its highest
elected officials, knew almost nothing about the NSA (it was referred to as No Such Agency by its employees). As James Bamford
wrote about Churchs reaction to his own findings about the NSAs capabilities, he came away stunned. At the time, Church also
said: I dont want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the
capacity that is there to make tyranny

total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this
technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that
abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. Of course, that bridge has long ago been crossed,
without even much discussion, let alone controversy. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
George Bush ordered the NSA to spy on the communications of Americans on American
soil, and theyve been doing it ever since, with increasing aggression and fewer and fewer
constraints. That development is but one arm in the creation of an American Surveillance
State that is, literally, ubiquitous one that makes it close to impossible for American citizens
to communicate or act without detection from the U.S. Government a state of affairs
Americans have long been taught since childhood is a hallmark of tyranny. Such are the times in
both America generally and the Democratic Party in particular that those who now echo the warnings issued 35
years ago by Sen. Church (when surveillance was much more restrained, legally and technologically) are scorned by all
Serious People as radical hysterics.
AlternativeCounter Surveillance
[1NC Evidence] Counter surveillance is subversive because it constitutes a countercultural movement intended to challenge economic and political power.
Fitzpatrick 2010 [Tony, Univ. of Nottingham UK, Critical Theory , Information Society and Surveillance Technologies,
Information, Communication and Society 5:3]
Organized acts by individuals are here termed subversive. Hacking
is a good example of information subversion

(Taylor 2000; Thomas 2000) to which we might add those such as crackers, phreakers and cyberpunks, all
of whom use technology to carve out spaces of freedom and autonomy that the same technology
can foreclose in the hands of corporations (Starr 2000: 7380). The downloading of music from the Internet using
MP3 technology, for instance, is popularly subversive, not only because it is widespread but also because it seems to engender no
more popular disapproval than the use of blank cassettes for taping music off the radio. Another
example of subversion
can be found in the kind of counter- surveillance that some individuals pursue against the
surveillance apparatus; this can mean filming the police who film demonstrations or it can mean
using data protection legislation to expose corporate misdemeanours. At its best, then, subversion
can constitute a counter-cultural movement that, like their predecessors in the 1960s, is not anti-capitalist per se but
does represent a form of resistance against powerful corporations and state agencies. To be subversive, then, hacking et al.
must not be done for its own sake (still less for personal gain) but in order to undermine the information
systems of economic and political power. Subversion can occur both outside the law but also
within it, by exploiting ambivalences within the law and/or by encouraging the legal apparatus to catch up with
developments in ICT, a time lag that governments and corporations are often able to exploit for undesirable ends. Organized acts by
groups can be termed rebellious. For instance, many businesses have found their websites subjected to denial of service attacks,
effectively putting much of that company out of operation for signifcant periods of time of course such attacks can also be the result
of individual grudges against the company in question, or even of random and capricious malevolence. How- ever, the
most
famous example of rebellion remains the Zapatista movements successful and continued
mobilization of world opinion against the attempt by the Mexican government to deprive them of
their land rights (Castells 1997: 7283). In addition, we might also consider the kind of opposition, mentioned in the above
discussion of RIPA, to legislation that threatens civil liberties. The USA has been an important source of
opposition to other attempts at over-regulating cyberspace (Jordan 1999). Acts of resistance, therefore,
consist of material and/or discursive actions that disclose social alternatives by attempting to open
what economic and political powers attempt to close: the heterotopic spaces of autonomy that are
the source of alternative visions of individuality and society (Foucault 1986) but which risk being
silenced by informatic capitalism in its attempt to reduce human diversity to digital bytes and data
streams. Resistance is always a strategy that positions itself against the hegemony of the
dominant nodes of money and power that are embedded in sites of work and consumption (see
above). An act of resistance therefore requires sites of resistance: the sites are the sine qua non of
the acts that simultaneously confirm and destabilize the condition of their existence. A site of
resistance is both materially and culturally transformed by the acts of resistance to which it gives
rise. A site makes an act possible and an act is the means by which we become aware of a sites
transformative potential. Therefore, a site must facilitate an ideological orientation , i.e. a critique of
existing power and its alternatives.
AlternativeParrhesiatic Sousveillance
The alternative is sousveillance. Technologies of surveillance can be used to reveal
hidden aspects of the surveillance state and foster resistance. Activists can reverse
the conduits of state power.
Verde Garrido 15 [Miguelangel, Berlin Forum on Global Politics, Germany. Contesting a Biopolitics of Information and
Communications: The Importance of Truth and Sousveillance After Snowden, Surveillance and Society Vol. 13 No. 2]
The previous section explained that global mass surveillance is a state and/or corporate deployment of a biopolitical technology of
power that regulates the biosociological processes of information and communication. It also explained that the contestation of state
and corporate control over the regime of truth is even more important when we consider that their policies and practices extend not
only to ICT infrastructure, networks, and content, but also to entire citizenries and global consumer markets. The notion of
parrhesia, Foucault clarifies, involves courageously speaking the whole truth without reserves, despite
the fact that it may place the speaker at risk of violence at the hands of the authority that is
contested (Foucault 2011: 6; 9; 11). The biopolitics of information and communications of states and corporations employ cuttingedge scientific and technological developments. These mechanisms of control are deployed so ICT data traces can be thoroughly
monitored and examined in order to govern populations more efficiently in accordance to electoral calculations, market imperatives,
and security concerns. In contemporary surveillance societies, parrhesiastic
action has important sociopolitical

implications because it contests the regime of truth that attempts to ensure the political,
economic, and social regulation and compliance of civil society inasmuch as citizens and
consumers. 1 Recent Snowden revelations evidence that GCHQ deploys covert tools over the internet to spread false information,
manipulate the results of online polls, divert traffic to or away from websites and videos that are of their interest, and even
permanently disable internet users accounts by infiltrating their computers (The Intercept 14th July 2014). This is particularly
worrying because most conceptions of democracy, explain Bauman et al., rest on some sense that people are able to think and
make judgments for themselves (Bauman et al. 2014: 137). Fortunately, the escalating development of ICT and their inventive use by
civil society has also led to the emergence of numerous modalities of resistance that can contest the mechanisms of control of
contemporary biopolitics of information and communication. Civil
societies continue to develop their political

agency and are learning to strengthen a nascent digital agency, both of which enable them to contest
state and corporate regimes of truth as parrhesiastes that search for the resemantization of their
social, economic, and political processes. In consequence, there are various important individual and collaborative
actions of parrhesia in contemporary society that did not exist only a few decades ago. In general terms, we find alternative media
organizations and citizen journalism that employ internet websites and blogs as well as social media networks to post and distribute
their reporting. More specifically, there are whistleblowing organizations such as WikiLeaks have that globalized, online and offline,
the revelations substantiated by carefully vetted materials sent anonymously to them by individuals and/or groups concerned by state
and corporate wrongdoings and abuses. Quite recently, hacktivists and hacktivism collectives as well as collaborative networks
that crowdsource open data analysiswhich journalist Barrett Brown calls pursuances (Brown 2012) have
shed light upon

the strategies by which the state-corporate nexus deploys espionage and persona management (i.e.,
using online identities for purposes of astroturfing or disinformation) to infiltrate or hinder the activities of non-profit organizations
and sociopolitical activism groups (Masnick 25th November 2013). Lastly, there are numerous national and international non-profit
(NPO) and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) committed to establishing radical transparency of the state, corporations, and the
media. These organizations investigate, report, and publicize their findings on a broad scope of topics, that cover state and corporate
corruption, free and fair elections, environmental impact, consumer rights, freedom of information and of the press, corporate
lobbying, and digital rights but to name a few. Parrhesiastic
contestation of the regime of truth is also

embedded within the social, economic, and political processes of contemporary surveillance
society. Because of its commitment to detaching the truth from the economic and political
hegemonies that control it, we cannot consider an ICT-enabled parrhesiastic action to embody the very biopolitics of
information and communications it contests. However, the commitment of parrhesia to transparency appears
to require that it share the interest of surveillance in monitoring and collecting data on certain
individuals and populations. In order to clarify whether this is the case, it is fundamental to consider whether what
appears as surveillance is not in fact something altogether different . Murakami Wood has questioned whether
we should not begin to talk about multiple and multiplying veillances, rather than simply
surveillance, in order to understand the reception, reaction, and resistance to global surveillance
(Murakami Wood 2013: 324). Steve Mann conceptualizes and theorizes from the intersection of Surveillance Studies and his technical
trailblazing in the development of wearable computing, especially those devices that involve computational photography. From the
standpoint of this technico-conceptual crossroad, Mann posits an understanding of surveillance that, although commonly used to refer
literally to visual signals, also covers other sensory signals and observational data in general (Mann and Ali 2013: 243).
Surveillance, for Mann, frequently exhibits the following traits: it is usually deployed from a fixed viewpoint, commonly architecturecentered, and attached to property; it establishes an oversight perspective, which watches from above; and, it is commonly initiated
by property owners and/or its custodians, such as governments (Mann 2004: 626-627). Contemporary developments in wearable
computing and ICT, such as social networking, distributed cloud-based computing, self-sensing, body-worn vision systems, wearable
cameras, and ego-centric vision (Mann 2014: 605), lead Mann to propose an alternative or counterpart to surveillance, which he
terms sousveillance. Sousveillance, for Mann, exhibits the following traits: it is usually deployed from a mobile viewpoint,
commonly human-centered, and worn by a person; it establishes
an undersight perspective, which watches

from below; and, it is commonly less hierarchical and more rhizomic than its counterpart, surveillance
(Mann 2004: 626-627). In this sense, sousveillance seems to explain parrhesia more correctly and more in
detail than surveillance does. To be clear, it is not necessary to consider every instance of parrhesia an instance of
sousveillance and vice-versa, but we can argue that they may coincide quite often. Mann and Ferenbok intuit the potential for
parrhesia of sousveillance when they argue that in contemporary society people can and will
not only look back, but in
doing so [can and will] potentially drive social and political change (Mann and Ferenbok 2013: 24). The notion of
veillance that Murakami Wood considers could be helpful for certain Surveillance Studies research is the result of Manns
considerations on surveillance and sousveillance as counterparts. For Mann, these similar, but different, alternatives indicate that there
is a politically neutral watching or sensing that does not necessarily involve social hierarchy (Mann 2014: 605). For this reason, this
article shares the opinion that both of these conceptual understandings about the manners in which we monitor and store sensory
signals and observational data are vital to the study of privacy, security, and trust. They serve to illustrate that in contemporary society,
we seek to measure, sense, display, and visualize veillance, regardless of whether it is surveillance or sousveillance (ibid.). Mann
and Adnan Ali posit that veillance is a purposeful action that produces an artifact. Such
an artifact can be employed in

socioeconomic contextsfor example, to enable greater trust in transactions, because it reduces the
information asymmetry that exists between contracting parties (Mann and Ali 2013: 244). In this sense, this
article posits that when veillance commits itself to political actions that contest the authority of a regime of truth it can also be
understood as parrhesiastic. Mann and Ali argue that while surveillance
monopolizes transactions for the party in

a position of authority, sousveillance breaks down that same monopoly, since the distributed
nature of sousveillance provides the contracting parties with multiple points-of-view and, hence,
multiple perspectives that contest the authoritys control over the transaction (idem: 245-246). The notion of
veillance for Mann and Ali is a constant reminder that information asymmetries provide an authority with power, a conclusion that
they share with Foucault and Tufecki, as we have explained above. Mann and Alis understanding of power, to be clear, comes from
Hannah Arendts definition: the ability to voluntarily regulate, control, and make decisions in a social context (idem: 249). Because
of this, they argue, it should not come as a surprise that authority reacts to a diminishing of information asymmetry, and hence to a
diminishing of power, with violence, which they understand to be a kind of simulacrum of genuine power (ibid.). There are a
number of instances of violence evident in the manners in which states and corporations react to the contestation of their authority
over information and communications. Journalists, whistleblowers,
sociopolitical activists, opposition

representatives and dissidents, non-governmental organizations, and even ordinary citizens, are
submitted to a number of abuses as a result of surveillance (United Nations Human Rights Council 30th June
2014: 5-7): intimidation, discrimination, and incarceration; espionage and smear campaigns; chilling
effects; information blackouts; legislation approved in conditions of emergency or secrecy; and,
brutal repression, torture, andlastlymurder. For evident reasons, individual and collaborative actions of
parrhesiastic sousveillance require strict countersurveillance strategies as well. Civil societies use of
encryption for their information and communications has expand considerably in the past year (Wired 16th May 2014), NGOs are
pushing for very specific freedom of information requests and carefully argued lawsuits against governments are being filed in courts,
and international organizations such as the UN are contesting policies and practices of mass surveillance on the grounds that it does
not comply with international human rights law (GigaOM 16th July 2014). Civil
societies across the world, thus,

continue to contest the policies and practices of biopolitics of information and communications
with which states and corporations attempt to ensure not only their economic and political power,
but also their control over the access to and communication of information that can evidence and
confront instances of abuses, unconstitutionalities, and corruption . The debate about states discourses that
dishonestly claim an either/or policy scenario for security and civil liberties as well as about corporate narratives that shroud the
monetization of internet users private data as a beneficial service is imperative for contemporary society. In a July 2014 interview,
Snowden argues that the single most important factor that explains the failures of oversight that we have contemplated in most states
should be thought about in terms of a lack of technical literacy. Every technology, he explains, is a new system of communication, a
new set of symbols, that people have to intuitively understand. In our contemporary societies, laments Snowden, technical literacy is
a rare and precious resource (Snowden 17th July 2014). The
parrhesiastic and sousveillant contestation of

global mass surveillance is based on the truthful fact that invasive and unlawful surveillance and
collection of personal data from digital communications may not only infringe on the right to
privacy, but also on a range of other vital human rights (Pillay 16th July 2014). These sociopolitical efforts are
already providing contemporary societies with a more solid grasp on technical literacy, furthering their demand for the rule of law and
democratic oversight, and strengthening their political agency along with a nascent digital agency. These threats and these
achievements are the reasons why contemporary societies must remain seized on the debate, resolute in their legal questionings,
steadfast in their socio-economo-political actions. As they continue to do so, they may prove Snowden right when he avows:
Technology can actually increase privacy, but not if we sleepwalk into new applications of it
without considering the implications of these new technologies . (Snowden 17th July 2014)
Alternative SolvencySocial Justice

Sousveillance is essential to energizing social justice efforts
Norlander 12 [Rebecca Joy, of New Knowledge Organization, Human Rights Education Network. A Digital Approach to
Human Rights, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice Vol. 24 Is 1.]
The term sousveillancethe inverse of surveillancehas
gained traction as describing the phenomenon

of observing from below, of watching the watcher. Once utilized by various publics, sousveillance
activities can serve as catalysts around which social movements ignite. An example of this involved the
tragic viral videos of Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian woman killed on camera in post-election demonstrations, whose death has now
been witnessed millions of times by people throughout the world. Viewers even included President Obama, whose public comments
demonstrated the power of sousveillance activities to reach highly influential political figures. The Facebook page entitled We are all
Khaled Said was another example of an effective user-generated human rights campaign. Dedicated to stopping torture in Egypt, the
page began after 28-year-old Said's brutal beating and subsequent death. As with Neda Agha-Soltan, significant international support
convened around a single amateur-documented event, triggering sizable crowds to mobilize. HRE determines the way that
information, training, and advocacy come together to promote democratic initiatives.

One reason that new technologies represent such potency is their unprecedented ability to reach previously marginalized, largely rural
areas. For
the success of any social justice movement, mobilizing a critical mass is key. New digital
tools facilitate solidarity by transcending previous boundaries and eliminating the need for
geographic proximity. Social movements have evolved according to the speed with which
information can be now communicated and converted into action. Education is an indispensable component
of activism. The more fully the two converge, the more advantageous for each. The integration of information, training, and action
enables engaged, transformative learning.
Moving forward with caution is imperative, and questions remain. Who are the educators and who is the audience? Informal HRE
often eliminates traditional differentiation between the role of instructor and learner. As definitions of the respective participants, and
other elements of the process, become more difficult to establish, so do evaluation processes. This raises the question: How should
successful education for human rights, and human rights activism, be defined? The breadth of work in this field necessitates flexible
evaluation standards. Clearly, human rights violations abound and the world is far from being free of abuse. Digital tools can play a
vital role in changing this prognosis. While working within formal education structures is important, achieving the objectives of the
WPHRE will require a much broader approach that extends the use of informal education methods. Education for human rights is, at
its core, all about human agency, and the belief that enough
people working together will eventually bring about

the world we desire, where the rights of each individual are sacred and fervently guarded.
Counter surveillance is an act of micropolitics that represent moments of agency

that converge to long term subversive impacts. This takes technology out of the
hands of the state and democratizes it as a public resource.
Feenberg (2002) argues that the existing society
contains the suppressed potentiality for a radical

reconstruction of the technological heritage. Actors engaged with technology at the level of
design can realize this potentiality for an alternative modernity. Critical theory of technology
thus uncovers the political implications of user agency, showing how new technology can be used
to subvert existing social relations, or to create new ones. It does so on the basis of
micropolitics, a situational politics based on local knowledge and action (p. 105). This contrasts with
the world-historic revolutionary visions imagined by the counterculture of the 1960s. During those contentious times, the technocratic
tendency of modern societies was a focal point for political activism. While
the hopes of revolution have arguably

been dashed, important themes, including racial and gender equality, economic justice, and
environmental sustainability, have emerged as central to the global justice movement . According to
Feenberg (2002), the new activism is characterized by small interventions in social life that are
numerous and diverse. Despite their humbler scale, these interventions represent moments of
agency that could converge to produce long-term subversive impacts. The tensions in the industrial system
can be grasped on a local basis from within, by individuals immediately engaged in technically mediated activities and able to
actualize ambivalent potentialities suppressed by the prevailing technological rationality (p. 105). This
promises the
possibility of rationalizing technology, and hence society, in ways that enhance democracy rather
than social control. Democratic rationalization proposes a new sort of agency, wherein members
of social groups engage reflexively and dialectically with the technical framework that helps
define and organize them (Heidegger, 1977), recognizing themselvesthe passive objects of
technologyas active subjects capable of redefining the technical order. In starting at the end
with the consequences of technologyit is possible to envision a new beginning.
Counter surveillance supports a global democratized movement for social justice

and redefines technology so that it can better resist structures of power.
Activists in the global justice movement (GJM) have embraced digital communication technologies
in their struggle against the ramifications of global capitalism . Indeed, the Internet has played an unprecedented
role in the way this movement has organized, mobilized, and disseminated information, enabling it to emerge as a globally networked
force for progressive social change1 Distinct
from the hierarchical, labor-based social movements of the

early 20th century, or the new social movements that emerged from the countercultural
revolution of the 1960s, the newest social movements (Day, 2005) are nodal, networked and
leaderless. Described as a movement of movements , (Klein, 2004) the newest social movements
organize across social and geographical bounds, based on affinity and a general critique of the ill
effects of neoliberalism. They organize daily against ongoing injustice in their local communities,
and come together temporarily and occasionally for large manifestations against globalized
capital, mobilizing via digital and mobile communication networks. In the late 1990s and early 2000s,
combination of interactive digital technology and activism was novel. It was facilitated by tech activistsprogrammers, coders, and
hackers who subscribe to the philosophy of the free software movement and are committed to the pursuit of social justice. They are
responsible for the design of the digital infrastructure used by activist groups to advance movement goals. But these self-described
geeks do more than building and maintaining websites, wikis, email accounts and mailing lists, and providing technical support. They
also customize software to meet the needs of activists engaged in the GJM. This
new brand of activism goes beyond

simply using technology toward particular ends to include the modification and transformation of
technology itself. In developing and deploying software that supports the realization of a virtual
public sphere in cyberspace, tech activists are enhancing the democratic potential of the Internet.
Their work, therefore, is altering not only the way people do activism, as many scholars have noted; it is
also changing the face of the Internet itself. The novelty of tech activism lies in the way tech
activists incorporate the democratic goals of the global justice movement into the very technology
used to pursue those goals. Tech activists recode software in a way that anticipates the
progressive social change its users pursue; in this way, their theory of social change begins
in practice. Thus tech activists produce both an alternative version of the technology that is
accessible, participatory, cooperative and non-hierarchical, and an alternative vision of
society based on those same ideals. In turn, their democratic interventions into technological
development enable communicative practices oriented toward freedom and equality offline.
Surveillance with the purpose of pursuing social, economic and environmental

justice supercharges the global justice movement into a super movement sphere of
organization and resistance.
Similar benefits may also inspire tech activists in their design and development of the global justice movements digital infrastructure.
But there is no question as to their overarching motivation: technical
means are directed toward political ends

political ends include the pursuit of social, economic and environmental
justice on a global scale. Activists like Alster, a longtime Indymedia geek, identify with the GJMs social justice goals: I
(Coleman 2004). These
belong to a movement which strives for equal rights (not the written but the real ones) and conditions for all humans (and partially
other beings, too) on this planet.5 In turn, this
motivates them to (technical) action. This shift in focus

from developing code for its own sake, for glory, or for money, to hacking for social justice signals a return to the radical tradition of the free software movement and the repoliticization of
computer technology. Indeed, the reclamation of computer technology as a political frontier is a
hallmark of the global justice movement, which seized the worlds attention at the Battle of
Seattle, 1999s massive street protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO). It was here that activists first realized the
potential and power of the Internet. While the GJM is part of a continuum of progressive social movements with a long history, the
union of such diverse groups and agendas into super movement spheres that organize, mobilize
and share information and resources via global, computer-mediated networks marks a shift in
radical collective action (Morris & Langman 2002). Thus the GJM is made unique by its truly global scope, enabled largely
by the Internet. Tech activists have been central to this movement, facilitating the novel combination
of interactive digital technology and social justice activism, and bridging the divide between geek
and activist communities. They are responsible for the implementation and continued maintenance of the Independent Media
Centre (IMC), perhaps the most prominent example of tech activism.
Alternative SolvencyPublics
Counter Surveillance changes the nature of political interventions and allows the
public to redefine social realities.
Feenberg 2012 [Andrew, Chair/Prof in Phil. Of Tech. @ Simon Fraser Univ. in Vancouver, Toward a Critical Theory of the
Internet, (Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies, Feenberg & Frieson, Sense Publishers ISBN 978-94-6091-734-9]
In her chapter, Milberry discusses this problem as it has been addressed by the new tech activism. The
emergence of a
cohort of self-taught radical experts on the technology of the Internet opens up new possibilities .
Milberry examines how and why these tech activists appropriated wiki technology, using it as a space and
tool for democratic communication in cyberspace. In turn, this has enabled the realization of new
communicative practices offline, establishing a dialectical relation between technological experts
and the social world they serve. Democratic practice online prefigures a more just society in
which democratic interventions into the development and use of technology are consciously
organized. The chapters of this book show how online communities have begun to use the Internet to coordinate their demands for
a fuller representation of participant interests. Despite discouraging developments in other domains, agency in the technical sphere is
on the rise. New
forms of online politics cannot replace traditional geographically based

representation, but their existence does mean that activity in the public sphere can now extend to
embrace technical issues formerly considered neutral and given over to experts to decide without
consultation. This creates a social and technical environment in which agency in the traditional
domains of politics has also begun to recover from the passivity induced by a steady diet of broadcasting. The
research challenges presented by this new situation are daunting. Politics is no longer the exclusive affair of
traditionally constituted political groups debating the traditional issues . The range of issues and groups is
constantly widening in the most unpredictable ways. New groups emerge through struggles to constitute an
identity as they simultaneously work to redescribe and reinvent the world in which they live
(Callon, et al., 2009). Internet researchers must be alert to similar phenomena in the technically mediated environment they study. The
examples described in the chapters of this book suggest a significant change in our world. The
return of agency may

appear non-political but what is democracy if not the activity of individuals in determining their
own collective life? And to the extent that so much of life is now mediated by technology, more
and more of it becomes available for these new forms of community control . That is, if the community
model is able to sustain itself. This is the ultimate challenge for online community: to preserve the conditions of community on the
Internet. A democratic Internet? That depends on the capacity of ordinary users to defend its democratic potential in the coming years.
Counter Surveillance tools promote public debate about the ethical dimensions of
surveillance and allow individuals to avoid monitoring.
Monahan 2006 [Torin, Prof. @ UNC Chapel Hill, Counter Surveillance as Political Intervention? Social Semiotics 16:4]
Such iSee applications are now available for the cities of New York in the USA, Amsterdam in The Netherlands, and Ljubljana in
Slovenia. The
aim of these websites is neither to directly interfere with the surveillance apparatus in these
cities, nor is it to allow individuals to effectively circumvent monitoring, although that is the
immediate and practical outcome. Instead, the goal is to raise public awareness and foster public
debate over the prevalence of surveillance cameras and their effects on public life. Because
technological infrastructures become invisible when they are functional (Bowker and Star 1999), and the
political effects of technologies, more generally, are off the radar screen of most people (Winner
1986), the intervention of iSee renders visible the larger pattern of surveillance proliferation and calls
into question its purpose, agenda, and effects. The iSee intervention jolts viewers and users into
awareness; it invites inquiry into surveillance devices distributed throughout our lives; it opens up
a space for discussion about what kinds of surveillance are acceptable and what kinds are not.
Sate Power may be inevitable, but counter surveillance provides tactics for
resistance against larger institutions of power to create new meanings and
possibilities.
When viewed from a distance, surveillance
and counter-surveillance appear to be engaged in a

complicated dance, with the larger, cumbersome partner pushing and pulling while the smaller,
defter dancer negotiates herself or himself*/and others*/out of harms way. The oafish leader is , of
course, the state and corporate apparatus surveilling the public, and the partner is the collective of
activist adversaries circumventing or destabilizing surveillance systems. Drawing upon Michel Foucaults
insights about the disciplinary potential of modern bureaucratic regimes, one could read this as a disciplinary or panoptic relationship
(Foucault 1977). But Foucault was also insistent upon the productive capacity of power to generate and sustain social relations apart
from any property of control that might be possessed by individuals. As Gilles Deleuze wonderfully explicates: Power
has no
essence; it is simply operational. It is not an attribute but a relation: the power-relation is the set
of possible relations between forces, which passes through the dominated forces no less than
through the dominating . . . (Deleuze 1988, 27). Therefore, the metaphor of the panopticon (or all-seeing prison)
is not a static or transcendent statement of disciplinary power, but is instead a contingent and
situated articulation of modernity in a fluid field of production regimes (Foucault 1980; Deleuze 1992). In
explicit response to Foucaults work, Michel de Certeaus book The Practice of Everyday Life provides a point of departure for
thinking about the agency of individuals and groups within disciplinary power structures. For de Certeau (1984), the
practices of
the dominant dancer clearly would be strategic ones of building control structures to regulate the
activities of those in the field of power, whereas the practices of the defter dancer would be much
more tactical, poaching-off the existing structures to create new meanings and possibilities. The
two dancers may be in opposition, but that does not change the fact that they are engaged in a
reciprocal relationship and collective activity but*/importantly*/without comparable degrees of
power. It is this tense connection that is worth probing, even if there is never an embrace or a union, because after all the exchanges
of strategic structuring and tactical appropria- tion the dance has moved somewhere across the floor and created a pattern, or a logic,
or a world that was not there before.
Even if counter surveillance cant solve state power it creates a new democratic
discourse about privacy which leads to successful resistance movements.
Even if this second conclusion is persuasive, however, it
should not imply that activists and counter-surveillance

practitioners should dispense with their interventionist projects, but instead that they should
diligently avoid reproducing the exclusionary logics and reactionary stances of those whom they
critique. For instance, high-tech interventions may attract public attention because of their innovative use of technologies, but they
can defy replication by others without comparable technical capabilities or resources. Furthermore, focusing on individual
agents of surveillance (such as store clerks, security guards, camera operators, or police) artificially reduces the
complexity of the problem: many of these individuals are underpaid yet completely dependent upon their jobs, so they might
be easy targets, but not necessarily the best ones. The strength of social movements lies in their inclusiveness
and in their participatory structures (Breyman 2001; Juris 2004). So while these attributes might signify
areas of vulnerability for activists, they remain the magnets that draw people into movements and
mobilize them behind causes*/they are the qualities that need to be nourished for less
individualistic and more effective activism to take root.
Public access to information gathered through surveillance diffuses the power of the
state and eliminates bureaucratic control. The Zapatistas prove that digital counter
measures can shift power relations.
Samuel 2001 (Alexandra, PhD Cand. @ Harvard, Digital Disobedience: Hacktivism in Political Context, Paper for delivery
on the panel Internet as Agent of Change: Bridging Barriers to Cultural, Political and Activist Discourse, Annual Meeting of the
America Political Science Assn, SF, CA)
For some hackers, hacking has always had a political subtext . Steven Levy identified elements of a hacker ethic
among those early computer users who believed that essential lessons can be learned about [computer] systems about the world
from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. (Levy
1984, p. 40) The
correlates of this world view were that all information should be free and that
the best way to promote this free exchange of information is to have an open system....the last
thing you want is bureaucracy. (Levy 1984, p. 41) The hacker slogan information wants to be free ,
coined by Steward Brand (Sirius 2000), expresses a philosophical position that can justify invading any
secure web site in order to liberate information. But it was not until 1998 that hacking emerged
as a full-blown form of political action. Following the 1987 massacre of indigenous Mexicans in
Chiapas, a US-based group calling itself the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) decided to take
action in support of the Zapatistas. The EDT developed a software program it called FloodNet, whose technical purpose
was to flood Mexican government web sites until the overload crashed the servers. Its larger purpose was to effect a
simulated threat, (Wray 1999, p. 5) drawing attention to the Zapatista cause. The FloodNet incident has since
been enshrined as the first instance of what is now known as hacktivism.
Alternative SolvencyPolicing
Discourses of counter surveillance break down distinctions regarding authority and
power while the technology itself provides a framework for resistance and
empowerment.
Wilson & Serisier 2010 (Dean and Tanya, Prof. @ Monash Univ. Australia & Prof. @ U. of Sydney, Video Activism and
the Ambiguities of Counter Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 8:2)
Clear distinctions between the watcher and watched are therefore increasingly undermined by the
rhizomatic intertwining and intersecting of networks of observation . As Koskela (2009) notes,
unambiguous distinctions between good and bad are breaking down making divisions between
the authorities and public, outsiders and insiders and the controlled and controlling less apparent .
Additionally, as Marx observes, there is greater equality in access to and use of surveillance technologies
today than in much of recorded history (2003, 384) and this access opens up possibilities not only
for resistance but also for more active empowerment. Moreover, with the widespread availability of mobilephone cameras and internet distribution platforms policing, traditionally a low-visibility activity, has never
been more transparent (Manning 2008, 227; Goldsmith 2010). The democratization and diffusion of imaging
technologies, and the scrutiny of official conduct they enable, has been enough in Koskelas view to
make the old story about the good police officers chasing evil criminals sound like a nave
fairy tale (2009, 151). The potential of counter-surveillance to create a transparent utopia of official accountability does however
need to be tempered against empirical study of particular contexts. Scholars need to be wary of merely mirroring the technophilia of
more powerful agents of surveillance in their assessments of utilizations of imaging technology from below, no matter how laudable
their aims. Any
surveillance activity enters a dynamic environment and will inevitably impact upon
that environment (Marx 2007a), sometimes in ways considered positive but also in other ways that are unforseen, ambiguous or
negative. In this study we utilize data drawn from seventeen semi-structured interviews, most with individuals involved in video
activism, but some also with citizen journalists and community lawyers with experience in using visual images of official
misconduct. Interview participants were recruited via a combination of direct contact through public websites, advertisements placed
on independent media electronic lists and snowball sampling. Semi-structured interviews were chosen as they permitted participants
considerable opportunity to elaborate and expand on issues they considered of importance within the context of thematic questions
devised by the researchers (cf. May 2001, 123-124). All participants were offered the option of anonymity, however all chose to be
indentified and consequently have been named throughout this paper.2 While the views and observations of participants have been
faithfully recorded, the final conclusions drawn are solely those of the authors.
Alternative SolvencyProcess Resistance

Sousveillance is diffuse, disorganized and effective.
Martin 2009 (Aaron & Rosamunde van Brakel & Daniel Bernhard, London School of Econ. Understanding Resistance to
Digital Surveillance: Towards a Multi-Disciplinary, Multi-Actor Framework, Surveillance and Society 6:3)
Newer theories of resistance to surveillance imply an awareness of the inter-relational nature of resistance and the agency of the lessdominant actor while remaining comfortably situated in the two-actor paradigm. Building on work by organisational theorists such as
Prasad and Prasad (2001), Ball (2005) focuses on biometric surveillance in the workplace. Ball locates resistance at the nexus where
the body and technology intersect. She offers strategies of resistance to bodily surveillance, including disrupting flows of information
from the body to the information system, disrupting the time it takes to encode the body, coding the body in an alternative way, and
moving the interface/boundary between the body and surveillance system (2005, 104). With her suggestions, Ball reveals two
inherent assumptions: (a) the
subordinate actor is an autonomous agent capable of interacting with both

technologies and observers, and (b) resistance emerges because surveillance is recognised and
rejected as abnormal and unnatural. Still, the surveyor-surveilled relationship is her prime concern. Mann, Nolan and
Wellman (2003) perpetuate this binary focus, proposing sousveillance as a counter to surveillance. Sousveillance uses
technology to confront bureaucratic organisations by mimicking the behaviour of the surveillance
authority, holding a mirror to surveyors and asking: Do you like what you see? Sousveillance
resonates with Marxs (2003) proposal to resist surveillance through non-compliance and
interference; blocking, distorting, masking, refusing, and counter-surveilling . As Ball and Mann et al have
shown, resisting surveillance need not be an organised affair. In his work on welfare surveillance, Gilliom (2001)
argues that poor and underprivileged people often lack the resources to organise formal protests and
resistance campaigns. Instead, they resort to ad-hoc resistance techniques , including food stamp fraud and
withholding information from the welfare administration. Gilliom draws on Scotts (1987) work on peasant resistance to describe the
phenomenon. What emerges is a widespread pattern of complaint, evasion and resistance , as welfare
mothers struggle with the system that defines their condition (2001, 112). By Gillioms account, even these powerless actors can
successfully undermine the surveillance mission. Moving away from the surveyor-surveilled fixation, Gilliom identifies resistors other
than the subjects of surveillance. In some instances, morally conflicted welfare administrators resist authorities by coaching recipients
on ways to game the system. Gillioms broader conceptualisation of the actors and processes involved in resisting surveillance expose
a vast and largely unexplored theoretical space that we seek to develop here. His contributions go beyond the general portrayal of
resistance by the bulk of surveillance studies scholarship reviewed above.
Resistance to Surveillance is a PROCESS whereby different actors utilize their

resources to symbolically disrupt asymmetrical power relations at different times.
The Aff eliminates surveyors even though they are well positioned to act as agents of
resistance.
Surveyors, too, through their power to disrupt the system and their knowledge of its practice and use, are uniquely
equipped to resist in cases where the combined effects of their relationship with the surveillance
authority and the target population motivate them. They can bypass systems and educate the public to bypass
systems. Again, the desire to resist and the means available are not simply a function of their
subordinate station. Certain roles connote certain resistance pathways. These pathways are many
and thus the cast in any given production of resisting surveillance is broad and dynamic. These roles
are also level- dependent. Actors exist on a bounded level of analysis that allows them to mediate relations between other actors at
surrounding levels. For example, surveyors, who operate between individual and state levels, acquire likely resistance directions from
the level of analysis on which they reside. Surveillance
developments are not an on or off thing they are

long processes with many developmental stages. Where this has been appreciated by surveillance studies, it has
been to describe which resistance methods surveilled groups can use to disrupt a surveillance plan at each stage of its development.
Emanating from the position that roles condition means , we find instead that different actors are more
likely to resist at certain stages than others, using their unique role based means to do so. The
surveilled population, since their resistance options are limited by that role, do not and cannot resist surveillance in its earliest stages.
Corporate actors, who work with government to build and implement technologies, for example, can resist earlier. At this point,
technologies, too, can begin to resist. They do so primarily by being ill-equipped to fulfil a desired function or by being too expensive
for mass implementation. Non-compliance and sabotage by surveilled peoples, Balls methods of resisting or confusing encoding
technologies, these can only happen at a certain stage of the surveillance development because these actors are either uninvolved or
are unequipped to resist at other stages.
Alternative SolvencyCapitalism
Counter surveillance operates in opposition to global capital
Monahan 6 [Torin, Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, SOCIAL
SEMIOTICS No. 4 Vol. 16]
Counter-surveillance operates within and in reaction to ongoing global transformations of public

spaces and resources. According to social theorists (for example, Harvey 1990; Castells 1996), a crisis in capital
accumulation in the mid-1970s precipitated a shift from mass-production to flexible production
regimes, catalyzing organizational decentralization, labor outsourcing, computerized automation,
just-in-time production, and, increasingly, the privatization of that which has historically been
considered public. These structural transformations aggravated conditions of social inequality,
leading to the development of new mechanisms of social control to regulate bodies in this
unstable terrain. Some of the most effective forms of social control are those that naturalize the
exclusion of economically or culturally marginalized groups through architecture or
infrastructure. Mass incarceration of over two million individuals in the United States alone is one extreme
measure of such postindustrial exclusion (Kupchik and Monahan 2006). Less dramatically, but perhaps more pervasively,
fortified enclaves such as gated communities, shopping malls, and business centers have
multiplied exponentially over the past decade and seem to be as prevalent in developing
countries as in developed countries (Davis 1990; Caldeira 2000; Low 2003; Monahan 2006a). Additionally,
privatized streets, parks, and security services effectively sacrifice civic accountability and civil
rights while increasing affordances for the monitoring of public life (Zukin 1995). Finally,
telecommunications and other infrastructures unevenly distribute access to the goods and services
necessary for modern life while facilitating data collection on and control of the public (Reiman
1995; Graham and Marvin 2001; Monahan 2005). Against this backdrop, the embedding of technological surveillance
into spaces and infrastructures serves not only to augment existing social control functions, but
also capital accumulation imperatives, which are readily seen with the sharing of surveillance
operations and data between public and private sectors (Gandy 2003; ACLU 2004; OHarrow 2005; Monahan
2006c). Through a range of tactical interventions into the logic and institutions of global capitalism,
counter-surveillance tacticians seek to disrupt these trends in the privatization, sanitation, and
elimination of that which is public. While the ideologies and intentions of those engaging in
counter-surveillance are manifold and disparate, they are unified in the mission of
safeguarding*/or creating*/the necessary spaces for meaningful participation in determining the
social, environmental, and economic conditions of life. Because of this orientation, the term countersurveillance will be used here to indicate intentional, tactical uses, or disruptions of surveillance
technologies to challenge institutional power asymmetries. This article reviews several counter-surveillance
practices and analyzes the power relations simultaneously revealed and produced by resistance to institutionalized surveillance.
Importantly, the emphasis here is upon the framing of surveillance problems and responses by activists, or on points of symbolic
conflict rather than physical confrontation. Thus, it is assumed that while counter-surveillance
practitioners may have

immediate practical goals, such as circumventing or destroying video cameras, that they are
foremost engaged in acts of symbolic resistance with the intention of raising public awareness
about modern surveillance regimes.1 The body of this paper will analyze two types of counter-surveillance efforts
(interventions into the technical and the social faces of public surveillance) and then theorize the efficacy and implications of countersurveillance more generally. The data are drawn primarily from websites, video productions, and publications, but several interviews
were conducted with activists in the United States to corroborate the critical readings offered here. The main argument is that activists
tend to individualize both surveillance problems and methods of resistance, leaving the
institutions, policies, and cultural assumptions that support public surveillance relatively insulated
from attack. Furthermore, while the oppositional framing presented by activists (i.e. countersurveillance versus surveillance) may challenge the status quo and raise public awareness, it also
introduces the danger of unintentionally reinforcing the systems of social control that activists
seek to undermine.
Counter Surveillance disrupts institutions of global capitalism by acting as a symbol

of resistance that raises public awareness and debate.
Monahan 2006 (Torin, Prof. @ UNC Chapel Hill, Counter Surveillance as Political Intervention? Social Semiotics 16:4)
Through a range of tactical interventions into the logic and institutions of global capitalism, countersurveillance tacticians seek to disrupt these trends in the privatization, sanitation, and elimination of
that which is public. While the ideologies and intentions of those engaging in countersurveillance are manifold and disparate, they are unified in the mission of safeguarding*/or
creating*/the necessary spaces for meaningful participation in determining the social,
environmental, and economic conditions of life. Because of this orientation, the term counter-surveillance will be
used here to indicate intentional, tactical uses, or disruptions of surveillance technologies to challenge institutional power
asymmetries. This article reviews several counter-surveillance practices and analyzes the power relations simultaneously revealed and
produced by resistance to institutionalized surveillance. Importantly, the
emphasis here is upon the framing of

surveillance problems and responses by activists, or on points of symbolic conflict rather than
physical confrontation. Thus, it is assumed that while counter-surveillance practitioners may have
immediate practical goals, such as circumventing or destroying video cameras, that they are
foremost engaged in acts of symbolic resistance with the intention of raising public awareness
about modern surveillance regimes.1 The body of this paper will analyze two types of counter-surveillance efforts
(interventions into the technical and the social faces of public surveillance) and then theorize the efficacy and implications of countersurveillance more generally. The data are drawn primarily from websites, video productions, and publications, but several interviews
were conducted with activists in the United States to corroborate the critical readings offered here. The main argument is that activists
tend to individualize both surveillance problems and methods of resistance, leaving the institutions, policies, and cultural assumptions
that support public surveillance relatively insulated from attack. Furthermore, while the oppositional framing presented by activists
(i.e. counter-surveillance versus surveillance) may challenge the status quo and raise public awareness, it also introduces the danger of
unintentionally reinforcing the systems of social control that activists seek to undermine.
Decentralizing information is the only way to promote a revolution from within

capitalism we can never get outside the system and must use the informatic field
between state power and capitalism to resist.
Fitzpatrick 2010 (Tony, Univ. of Nottingham UK, Critical Theory , Information Society and Surveillance Technologies,
Information, Communication and Society 5:3)
Therefore, cyber criticalism agrees with Castells that information networks are significant but is less ambiguous than Castells appears
to be about the political economy of this shift. In short, the
information revolution is a revolution within

capitalism and not a revolution of capitalism (May 1998), so that flows of power form networks of
decentralized concentration that are characterized by switches or dominant nodes of
surveillance. One way to conceive of such networks is as follows. Imagine a large canopy being fastened across
two tall poles spaced some way apart. The fastening is fairly loose so that the canopy sags in the
space between the poles and also sags concavely as the material reaches the ground. What you are
imagining is a badly constructed tent. Now imagine that the canopy is in fact a net, though one
that is less patterned than most nets and, indeed, whose lattice is constantly subject to change.
The poles are the dominant nodes of corporate oligopolies on the one hand and the state on the
other; the net is the informatic field that, although in a constant state of flux, has a bounded
regularity to its territory. Like all analogies, this one over-simplifes what it is trying to describe but it does capture an
important premise of cyber-criticalism.
Capitalist rhetoric prevents biometrics from becoming a site of resistance in the

status quo but reinterpreting them as nodes of counter surveillance produces social
alternatives.
Therefore, advocates of civil liberties are often on the defensive because at
the heart of informatic capitalisms

triumph its victory over communism, its affluence, its technological advances lies a profound insecurity. If
everything is so wonderful then why arent people happier? If we are so affluent, then why is
there so much squalor? If we are so advanced then why do we appear to be constantly surrounded by risks? The answer
is because no system can fulfil the expectations that have been loaded onto free market capitalism
since the 1970s by the radical Right, by the anti-communist movement and, more recently, by post-Keynesian social democrats.
The difference is that whereas capitalism could once represent itself as the best alternative to the
impracticalities of communism it now has to utopian other with which to favourably contrast
itself. Capitalisms defenders have no one left to blame but themselves . Yet, how do you try to avoid such
conclusions? You do so by blaming the residuum, the excluded, for what Sennett (1998) calls the corrosion of character. Things are
insecure because too many people are neither moral nor hard-working enough. The
other of capitalism has migrated

into its centre. Better, then, to apply tehnological, actuarial and managerialist fixes to social
problems rather than admit that the source of squalor might be the inequalities that the blind
pursuit of affluence has produced. Better to stress the responsibilities of the least well-off rather
than demand anything of the wealthier. Better to panic about crimes against the law-abiding
rather than to focus upon the totality of social harms that circulate within and between all social groups. In short,
information systems and surveillance technologies are undeveloped as actual sites of resistance
because what has triumphed is a form of capitalism that is as culturally insecure as it is
economically successful. They are representable as benign to a population that can no longer
easily locate the enemies that it requires for its sense of identity. Yet perhaps the hegemony of
informatic capitalism can be challenged by exploiting this disjunction between culture and
economy; for instance, by arguing that ever-higher levels of GDP growth do not automatically produce happiness and that only
more ecological forms of social organization can fulfil our expectations of ourselves and of others (Fitzpatrick and Cahill 2002). As
Right and Right-leaning governments attack civil rights as much as social ones, then perhaps arguments for civil liberties or for social
justice need a much closer association than they have hitherto received where the tendency has been to regard the two as compatible
but politically distinct. Perhaps radicalism and reformism need to be conjoined as never before (FitzpatrickwithCaldwell2001). The
role of critical theory and of its cousin, cyber criticalism, is therefore twofold. Firstly, to carve out theoretical
spaces that, for too long, have been occupied by post-ideological schools of thought . This article
demonstrated how this can be, and has been, done with respect to information society debates. Secondly, to identify actions
and practices that offer resistance to the new economic, social, political and technological
orthodoxies, refusing to characterize them in pathological terms as in any way related to crime.
This can imply any number of things, as we saw earlier when discussing acts of resistance: encouraging the non-use
or misuse of surveillance technologies, rejecting the gee whiz determinism of technophiles,
questioning the integration of databases, assisting those protest movements who imagine social
alternatives, decriminalizing the body through non-compliance with biometric innovation and
legislation. It means doing what we are not supposed to do. It means becoming information
vandals, rioters, subversives and rebels, albeit ones who seek the sites of resistance which , I have
argued, lie always around us.
Capitalist values only make it seem like technology is a tool of the rich and
powerful. In reality, user interventions in technical code can change the meaning of
surveillance technology to resist and destroy capitalist ideology.
In western neoliberalism, the dominant norms and values are those of capitalism : exclusivity, profit,
competition, scarcity, individualism and inequality comprise an array of unexamined cultural assumptions that directly reflect
the dominant social order. Because such values - products of the prevailing economic and social interests - are
literally designed into the technology itself (p. 87), they appear as a technical requirement. This,
however, is nothing but ideological sleight of hand; when the technological design process is
historicized, the social origins of the technical code are made apparent. Technology, on this account, can
never be neutral; rather it tends to reinforce and reproduce prevailing socio-economic power structures. The concept of the
technical code is important as an alternative to the notion of technological imperatives . This latter
holds that technological development is evolutionary and inevitable, and that it must, in teleological fashion, be accepted as a desirable
social advance, albeit one out of human control. In sharp contrast, conceiving
of technological development in
terms of the technical code brings to light both technologys contingent nature and the
concomitant potential for human agency. This contingency reveals an opening in the design
process for what Feenberg (2002) calls democratic rationalization of technology. Democratic
rationalizations challenge harmful consequences, undemocratic power structures, and barriers to
communication rooted in technological design (p. 16). In other words, democratic rationalization is the
means by those most affected by technology usersgain some agency in its creation. User
interventions at the levels of use and design can alter technical codes, and reinterpret the social
meaning of technologies. Since a variety of technical solutions could potentially fulfill various social objectives, a
progressive process of technical change that is responsive to a broad range of human concerns is a possible outcome.
AT: FrameworkEducation
Resistance is key to education, which in turn strengthens resistance
Martin et al 9 [Aaron, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Rosamunde E. van Brakel,
University of Sheffield, UK. Daniel J. Bernhard, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Understanding resistance to digital surveillance, Surveillance & Society]
From the 1960s onwards, education studies, led by Paolo Freire, has produced an abundance of resistance literature, known as the
pedagogy of freedom. In addition to a discussion of Freires pedagogy of freedom, we look at some more recent publications on
resistance pedagogy, where Foucaults influence can be discerned. Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) has heavily influenced
the conception of resistance in education studies. Reproductive accounts of schooling underlined that schools could not derail the
reproduction of the oppressive social class relations inherent to capitalism (McFadden 1995, 295). For Freire, no
form of
education is neutral. He proposes that student-centred pedagogy can create a critical
consciousness capable of facilitating action in pursuit of equality and democracy. Resistance is
therefore integral to the educational process, as all pedagogy is a call to action. Educational
theorists depict resistance through nuanced theoretical tools for intervening within structures of power in diverse contexts across a
range of institutional and ideological conditions. Beyond describing models of oppression, they point to the possibility of
intervening productively in educational settings that are continually subject to manipulation by
external authorities (Giroux 2003, 9). Education has the power to progressively transform the
environment by attempting to undermine the reproduction of oppressive social structures and
social relations" (Walker 1985, 65). Freires proposition and contributions by Walker and Giroux raise some very interesting
levels of analysis questions. How is it that a tightly-controlled relationship can cultivate a critical consciousness with regards to
macro-societal levels of organisation that do not apply at the smaller unit level? That the referent object of resistance can change
across levels of analysis authority at one level is acceptable while control at higher levels of organisation is not requires further
attention. Resistance can be understood as a multi-layered phenomenon that not only takes diverse and complex forms among
students and teachers within schools but registers differently across contexts and levels of political struggle (Giroux 2003, 9). The
contexts include resistance to authority/oppression and resistance to change, but also Foucauldian self-(re)constitution, which provides
an effective form of resistance to normalization processes (Hyde 2007). That this resistance consciousness and the pedagogy of
freedom are themselves developed in a controlled environment speaks volumes about the validity of Freires claim. Though the
classroom provides a clear authority structure, if the authority is legitimate and just, it is resisted less.
AT: Permutation
Counter Surveillance must be accompanied by tactics and narratives to avoid
commodification the permutation fails because it supports counter surveillance as
a tactic but not an ideology of democratic deliberation and resistance.
Our assessment of video activism may appear bleak, but this has not been the intention. Rather, as Michael Crang cautioned over a
decade ago, simply cheering over empowerment and self-representation through video seems a little nave (1996, 2102). As a
practice, video activism is shot through at every juncture with ambiguities, contradictions and ironies. There
can be no doubt
that video counter- surveillance in protest situations can be empowering. It can secure safety,
modify the behaviour of control agents, generate broader discussion through the dissemination of
footage and provide a powerful bargaining tool in a variety of contexts. Nevertheless it is important to acknowledge
the multiple ambiguities. Counter-surveillance might also risk incriminating the less powerful. Moreover it might stimulate ever more
extreme counter-moves from those seeking to disarm counter-surveillance. Significantly counter-surveillance
exists in an
increasingly dispersed media landscape. Instead of the synopticon advanced by Mathiesen (1997) in which the many
watch the few, surveillance and counter- surveillance indicate a proliferation of watching in which the many watch the many, or
perhaps, more accurately, in which the few watch the few. While
this trend has been noted more darkly in relation

to lateral surveillance and cultures of suspicion (Andrejevic 2005; Chan 2008) the emergence and
proliferation of counter-surveillance via the democratization of surveillance technologies
suggests sousveillance in which images of corruption, abuse and misconduct can be rapidly
circulated. In relation to video activism, some remain optimistic about the opportunities, and celebratory about the democratic and
inclusive potentials of new technology. Video activists such as Harding remain faithful to a narrative of inclusion and countersurveillance politics in which video technology, accessible by most activist groups, being used to provide a global broadcast available
to millions of people, conveying messages that are both radical and inspiring (2001, xvii). Nevertheless, optimistic accounts that view
such developments in utopian terms should be treated with some caution. Counter-surveillance
initiatives such as
those of video activists are still positioned within substantial asymmetries of power, even if such
initiatives contain the capacity to destabilize the status-quo within certain contexts (Monahan 2010,
143). The production of images from video counter-surveillance is also increasingly absorbed within the rapid information flows of
new information technologies integral to the perpetuation of what Dean terms communicative capitalism (Dean 2008). There is the
possibility that the proliferation of outlets and of visual images erodes the very power counter-surveillance intends to have, nullifying
itself through the sheer volume of content. The problem is acute in relation to YouTube footage of police brutality, which rather than
contextualized images within broader debates about police power, reduces instances to micro- spectacles of individualized violence.
As Dean noted of anti-war messages circulating widely before the Iraq War, messages potentially morph into so much circulating
content, just like all the other cultural effluvia wafting through cyberia (2008, 102). The
sheer ubiquity of distribution

platforms and imaging devices does not in itself automatically equate to enhanced accountability
of the powerful, nor does it inevitably lead to increased public condemnation of police brutality.
The proliferating army of videographers thus needs to remain cognizant that counter-surveillance
images require tactics and narratives to give them political force, and to avoid them simply
merging into an endless sea of circulating content. Surveillance scholars, too, need to be cognizant of the
complexity and ambiguity that can attend counter-surveillance practices. Our examination of video activism suggests that far from a
reversal of a unidirectional gaze, counter-surveillance practices are mediated through individual, legal and informational contexts
where their outcomes are unpredictable, contradictory and continually reconfigured within a rapidly changing informational
landscape.
Digital activism and counter surveillance are defined by their position outside
institutional politics. The perm allows institutional ideology into the alternative,
which destroys its revolutionary potential.
Samuel 2001 (Alexandra, PhD Cand. @ Harvard, Digital Disobedience: Hacktivism in Political Context, Paper for delivery
on the panel Internet as Agent of Change: Bridging Barriers to Cultural, Political and Activist Discourse, Annual Meeting of the
America Political Science Assn, SF, CA)
Second, hacktivists
are outside the world of institutionalized politics. This is crucial to the definition
of hacktivism as a social movement, since social movement theory has emerged out of studies of
revolutions, protests, and other non- institutionalized events...in contrast to more routine political
activities (Lo 1992, p. 225). Hacktivism conforms to the definition of social movements as unconventional collective behavior,
(Lo 1992, p. 225) i.e. behavior outside the routine political channels of voting, lobbying, campaigning,
and so on. Hacktivists are themselves very committed to the idea that hacktivism is outside of conventional politics, and is in fact a
challenge to conventional political practice. Hacktivists make a point of describing themselves as outside the system: there are
almost always proper outlets for any school of thought you may have, but chances are, no one who doesn't all ready agree with you
will ever see it[...] hence, politically motivated hacking (Me Uh K. 16 November 1999) Indeed, hacktivists
actively avoid
getting too close to the world of conventional politics: I'm also worried that when if we rub
shoulders too much with these government/industry ""infowarriors"", we start to
incorporate their ideology and agenda into our lives. If we focus our energies on creating
our alternative vision, eventually the folks at RAND and the Pentagon will become
irrelevant. The decentralized DIY nature of the Internet has already demonstrated for many people
that an alternative can exist. (Chuck0 1 October 1999) Since most hacktivism is not only outside the political system, but
also outside the legal system, hacktivism certainly shares the key social movement characteristic of being
an unconventional, uninstitutionalized form of political behavior.
AT: Link Turn

Surveillance is inevitable we must learn methods of counter surveillance rather
than trying to eliminate surveillance.
In many respects surveillance is constitutive of modern society. While this is especially the case in todays
information society (Lyon 1995) in which our data doubles grow increasingly large and surveillable surveillance and resistance
thereto have long been common. For example, many 17th century Parisians resisted the installation of fixed street lighting in their city,
viewing it as an unacceptable form of visibility and surveillance (Schivelbusch 1987). Further, Gilliom (2001) links fin de sicle
American welfare programmes to state surveillance of the poor. While
new information technologies change

surveillance in significant ways, the basic motivations for and practices of surveillance are
anything but new. Just as surveillance has become a normalised part of everyday life, resistance
to surveillance is equally normal (De Certeau 2002). Yet resistance is not merely an epiphenomenon
of surveillance it is a basic and necessary co-development of surveillance, existing in many
forms that often go unrecognised. Interpretations of the Panopticon often assume inmates without
agency. Foucaults subjects are seen as limited agents overwhelmed by surrounding structural pressures (Butin 2001). In this
Panoptic setting it is expected that the deviants condition themselves into normal individuals. For Foucault (1977), individuals only
accept surveillance as normal whilst it remains hidden. But it can never be hidden completely; the Panopticon can only be a
conditioning force when inmates are aware of the guards perhaps invisible - existence. Though this is an attempt at absolute control
by the surveyor, the inmates consciousness of omnipresent surveillance engenders resistance to both the surveillance and its selfnormalising objectives (Krueger 2005, 441). These power relations are thus mobile, reversible, and unstable (Foucault 1997, 292).
Giddenss dialectic of control elaborates this inter-relational conception of power, emphasising the roles of both dominant and
subjected actors to the normalisation of control. For Giddens, all forms of dependence offer some resources whereby those who are
subordinate can influence the activities of their superiors (Giddens 1984, 16). Surveillance
is not just a matter of the

gaze of the powerful, anymore than it is technologically determined. Data subjects interact with
surveillance systems.
AT: Cede The Political

Counter-surveillance is crucial to pre-requisite to reframing public and institutional
deliberation about surveillance.
Monahan 6 (Torin, Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, SOCIAL
SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2006), p 16-18, PDF)
Are counter-surveillance activities political interventions? Yes, they are clearly political. The central
question remains, however, as to which counter-surveillance configurations provide productive critiques
and interventions. Because counter-surveillance movements, in my definition of them, seek to correct unequal
distributions of power, they do destabilize status quo politics on a case- by-case basis*/on the ground, at
specific, temporally bounded sites of contestation. If our vantage point is once removed , however, then
individualized counter-surveillance efforts appear to provide the necessary provocations for those
with institutional power to diagnose and correct inefficiencies in their mechanisms of control . Even
if this second conclusion is persuasive, however, it should not imply that activists and counter-surveillance
practitioners should dispense with their interventionist projects, but instead that they should
diligently avoid reproducing the exclusionary logics and reactionary stances of those whom they
critique. For instance, high-tech interventions may attract public attention because of their innovative
use of technologies, but they can defy replication by others without comparable technical
capabilities or resources. Furthermore, focusing on individual agents of surveillance (such as store
clerks, security guards, camera operators, or police) artificially reduces the complexity of the
problem: many of these individuals are underpaid yet completely dependent upon their jobs, so
they might be easy targets, but not necessarily the best ones. The strength of social movements
lies in their inclusiveness and in their participatory structures (Breyman 2001; Juris 2004). So while these
attributes might signify areas of vulnerability for activists, they remain the magnets that draw
people into movements and mobilize them behind causes*/they are the qualities that need to be nourished for less
individualistic and more effective activism to take root.
AT: Backlash
Even if counter surveillance can be used by the state in some instances, the value of
covert observation and research outweighs because it makes it harder to lie to
corrupt tribunals.
Kemple & Huey 2005(Thomas and Laura, Dept. of Sociology @ UBC Vancouver & Dept. of Criminology @ Kwantlen
Univ. College, Observing the Observers: Researching Surveillance and Counter Surveillance on Skid Row, Surveillance and Society
3:2)
One answer to this question is that in
contested urban spaces, especially those characterized by high levels

of crime, poverty, and insecurity and which are subject to unusually high levels of social control and regulation, it is
not only addicts, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers and deviant others who may wish to keep certain activities
hidden from public scrutiny. For example, the private security study was initiated at the request of a local community group
who wished to examine the use of security agents as a mechanism for pushing the areas poor out of the neighborhood. Community
residents advised that overt conspicuous forms of surveillance were being employed by guards as a means of harassing panhandlers
and other disadvantaged residents (including homeless, unemployed, physically disabled and mentally ill people), and thus to induce
them to abandon their use of public space. To the
extent that these activities infringe upon the rights of some

of the most vulnerable or oppressed urban inhabitants, the use of covert observation can be
justified as necessary to expose activities which harm or oppress disadvantaged groups (Bok, 1978;
Warwick, 1973). Such scrutiny reduces the likelihood that those being observed would alter their
activities and gets around the tendency for people to deny such behavior in interviews (Turnock and
Gibson, 2001). Thus, in instances where dense networks of control and multiple techniques of
monitoring envelop virtually anyone who enters the field of observation, covert research may be
the only way to develop accurate descriptions that are not affected by deliberate distortions,
biased recollections, or outright denial (Reynolds, 1982: 185). It may also help develop new
perspectives on repressive relations and power structures.
AT: Hacktivist = Cyberterrorist

Hacktivists are not cyberterrorist and do not constitute the same threat
Adams 13 [Joshua, National Security and U.S. Foreign Relations Law LL.M. Candidate at The George Washington
University Law School. Decriminalizing Hacktivism: Finding Space for Free Speech Protests on the Internet
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2392945]
One of the biggest challenges national governments must face in the 21st Century is how to deal with the ever growing number of
cyber attacks. Cyber attacks started out as merely an occasional nuisance in the early days of the internet, but have increased
dramatically over the last decade in both number and severity of harm caused and will continue this trend for some time to come.
Many of these attacks are caused by cyber criminals and cyber terrorists who are out to cause harm for personal gain. However,
hacktivists have emerged as a distinct subset of all hackers and are likely to become a permanent
fixture of cyberspace. Policymakers must recognize hacktivists as a distinct subgroup with
different goals and tactics than other hackers if they are to effectively craft rules that address the
harms caused by cyber attacks while still preserving the internets democratizing influence . A recent
report has concluded that hacking activities cost the U.S. economy $100 billion dollars in economic damages and 500,000 lost jobs
every year.1 U.S. policymakers often use these big figures to scare the public into supporting comprehensive cybersecurity legislation.
However as many hacktivist activities are currently criminalized the smaller number of political
protest oriented cyber attacks are not distinguished in any way from the larger and more serious
cyber espionage and terrorism threats in these reports and are instead all lumped together as if they
all represent the same level of threat to cyber infrastructure. National policymakers need to understand that not all
cyber attacks are the same and need to be treated differently by the law. There are potentially as many
motivations for cyber attacks as attackers. Some attacks are classified as cyber crimes and are generally motivated by greed and the
profit motive. These attackers are primarily looking to make easy money and are not generally interested in causing damage to the
targeted site or making political statements. Another motivation for cyber attacks is espionage. For these attackers the primary purpose
is stealing information, whether it is national security secrets or corporate intellectual property. These attackers are not interested in
causing damage or making a public statement either. Their primary goal is to sneak into protected systems and conceal their
unauthorized access as much as possible in order to avoid detection and maximize the theft. And another category of cyber attackers
are those commonly known as hacktivists.. Hackers are unlike any of the other categories of cyber actors. Their motivations
are almost exclusively political and social change. They are not motivated by financial gain and
are not generally interested in wanton cyber destruction for its own sake. Their primary goal is to send as
public and symbolic message as possible in order to further their primary policy goals of free and open access to information and
opposition to Internet censorship. Therefore the law should treat them differently than the other types of cyber attackers. The
right
of a citizen to protest public policies that he disagrees with and advocate for political and social
change is part of the freedom of speech guaranteed to the American people as a fundamental
component of ordered liberty. American law has had to find space for traditional free speech protests that are
uncomfortable and socially disruptive. The United States, as a country dedicated to the concept of personal liberty, needs to expand its
free speech protections once again to encompass cyber actors.
AT: Individual Privacy or Activism

Individualist understandings of counter surveillance are generally ineffective and
miss the point counter surveillance should be used to promote collective resistance
movements.
Fernandez & Huey 2009 (Luis and Laura, Northern Arizona Univ. & Univ. of Western Ontario, Is Resistance Futile?
Thoughts on Resisting Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 6:3)
Yet the magazine demonstrates three important trends. First, that the
notion of surveillance as a threat is firmly

entrenched in the public imagination. Not only does the public experience surveillance in their
daily lives, but they also consume it as entertainment (as demonstrated by a myriad of movies and television
shows with this theme). Second, that social discourse on surveillance is shallow and uncritical at best,
merging important but different types of surveillance as if they formed a universal project. These
representations of surveillance tend to reinforce the Big Brother stereotype, neglecting a more
nuanced understanding of the subject. Third, that resistance to surveillance is mostly about personal protection measures
that makes the individual feel better, but are likely not much more secure. More important, protection from the
surveillance threat is often understood as a series of measures undertaken by individuals, hiding
the collective possibility for resistance. There is, of course, a wealth of recent literature on surveillance and its various
configurations. However, surveillance scholars have paid relatively little attention to the issues of resistance to these technologies.
This special issue addresses this deficit by collecting papers that foreground the interplay between surveillance and resistance, asking
if surveillance can be successfully resisted, and, if so, how might this resistance look. We see this volume as an opening of a needed
dialogue. We encourage other scholars to help us shore up the theoretical understanding of resistance by taking these ideas seriously,
criticizing them, and pushing them forward.
AT: Distancing/Interpassivity
Information systems does not eliminate our subjectivity. We can use distancing to
interact with others at critical sites of resistance.
Yet, the body and the office are not merely sites of domination but sites, pace Foucault, of creative becoming. Workplace surveillance
reminds us that capital not only wants our labour it wants our souls, our ever-demonstrable commitment to the corporate ethic; bodily
surveillance at the level of consumption, or in what formally remain public spaces, reminds us that there are consequences (of social
exclusion and stigma) for those who do not conform to the persona of the law- abiding shopper. These reminders are also ways of
retrieving the desire for social alternatives: even
as we are reduced to information, we can desire to become

something more. If information systems reduce us to database files and categories then
information is also a means of mobilization. Agency has not vanished into a destructured residue
of the modern self, and to be human is to be more than a feedback loop of information. But if
information undoubtedly constitutes the formation of identity as never before (Lyon 1998: 100) then
the information that constitutes the self can be used by the self, through interaction with others in
potential sites of resistance, to carve out the spaces of hope that allow us to imagine social
alternatives. The self in any capitalist society is a struggle for self- determination in conflict with
the nautonomous forces of state and capital.
AT: Technological Determinism

Technology is politicized and opens emancipatory possibilities when used against the
state.
Against determinism, Feenberg (1991) casts
technology not a reified thing but as an ambivalent process

of development (Introduction), one pregnant with both liberating and oppressive possibilities. If technology is a
process, and not a series of finished products, the chance for intervention, and hence change,
exists. The theory of ambivalence cuts through the neutrality claim in attributing social values to
the design, and not merely the use, of technical devices and systems. Technology appears not as a
destiny, but as a scene of struggle...a battlefield... in which civilizational alternatives contend (p.
15). In short, technology has become political and opens new emancipatory potentialities .
AT: Sousveillance
PermutationInstitutions Necessary
Combining legal reform and critical surveillance studies is necessary to make
meaningful political change.
Cohen 15 [Julie, professor at Georgetown University. Studying Law Studying Surveillance, Surveillance and Society. Vol. 13
Is. 1]
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 digitallyenhanced 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 attention to detail. 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.
PermutationIntersectionality
For counter surveillance to be effective, it must include a flexible pedagogy that
evaluates contextual, relational and ethical dimensions of power.
Fernandez & Huey 2009 (Luis and Laura, Northern Arizona Univ. & Univ. of Western Ontario, Is Resistance Futile?
Thoughts on Resisting Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 6:3)
It is also important to understand the different types of actors who may engage in surveillance,
since the social and power location of the actor will inevitably impact the type of dynamic that
unfolds. We know from numerous studies that surveillance, as defined above, can originate from different locations. Rather
than categorize the different types of surveillance techniques , then, it is more useful to enumerate
the different types of actors who may engage in surveilling a subject . Surveillance can originate at several
different levels, as has been pointed out before. Some of the possible actors include the state, employers in various institutions (private
and public), corporations (collecting data on clients), or individual and interpersonal actors (such as spouses, lovers, neighbours, and
so on). Key to this crude typology is the implicit understanding that power
dynamics will likely vary depending on

the location of origination, thus producing different dialectics . In some instances, we may document conflicts
between corporations and their clients, resulting in a power dynamic different from the surveillance by a state actor of political
protestors. In other words, our analysis of surveillance should be predicated on the origins and actors involved. If the above logic is
correct, then it follows that studying
surveillance (and resistance) is going to be situational, contextual,

and historically specific. Lets now turn to a quick examination of resistance. As a central theme in the surveillance literature,
it is sticking that resistance, as a concept, remains under theorized. In part, this may be due to the generalized nature of the concept,
which can cover vast territories of divergent human action. Thus, like surveillance, it is probably useful to start not with allencompassing definition, but with an understanding that resistance
too will be contextual, relational, and

dependent on the power dynamics of a given situation. Possible actors engaged in the resistance
of surveillance, then, could include individuals, groups, institutions, networks, and the state itself
(e.g., states versus states). But the nature of resistance tactics, technologies, and techniques will evolve in a direct response to a power
struggles.
PermutationMiddle Ground
Understanding transparency and secrecy as antipodes is to reductive, rather we
should have a blending of the two.
Birchall 11 [Clare, professor of cultural studies at the University of Kent. Introduction to Secrecy and Transparency: The
Politics of Opacity and Openness, Theory, Culture & Socieity. Is. 7-8 Vol. 28]
To take this last area, Jacques Derridas work on the secret can help us think through the problems of a democracy committed to an
idea of total transparency. Transparency
cannot easily accommodate those who want to be exempt from its project,
those who want to remain not merely private, but singular (which Derrida equates with the secret when discussing the
limits of democracy [Derrida with Ferraris, 2001]). Because of this intolerance for singularity, transparency risks looking less like an
If a right to the secret is not

maintained, we are in a totalitarian space (Derrida with Ferraris, 2001: 59). From this perspective, secrecy
functions as a constitutive element of transparency, while transparency defines itself as a reaction
against secrecy. A regime that embraces transparency will only ever be able to go so far before it tips
over into totalitarianism because of its parallels with surveillance, particularly when extended to citizens.
Resisting the call to be transparent to the state is, then, automatically registered as a sign of guilt. But if the
agent of democracy and freedom and more like a tool of totalitarianism. Derrida writes:
regime doesnt go far enough, if it shrinks back from applying transparency to its own actions, the regime meets the charge of
totalitarianism coming the other way (for acting covertly, autono- mously and without an explicit mandate).4 Hence an infinite
hesitation, a radical undecidability, within any democracy that counts transparency among its operating principles. Hence too the
prospect of a
debate between transparency and secrecy that will never be concluded, because far from
being inimical to each other, they are symbiotic.
This is why the stakes of that debate are so routinely misunderstood. Its not a question of reframing the supposed opposition between
transparency and secrecy in ever wider perspectives, because such reframing assumes that the terms can be made to yield to
interpretive mastery. (This introduction and the context it provides might not be immune to this charge.) Nor should we give in to the
fantasy that there is a beyond of transparency, a beyond of secrecy, or a beyond of their mutual dependence. The undecidability
might be unbearable, might tempt us to come down on the side of secrecy or on the side of transparency, yet the
more
intelligent response is not to seek to resolve the tension so much as to inhabit it strategically. Just as
Derrida has analysed the Nietzschean and Freudian Jenseits, and the intractable logic of the pas au-dela' , so we need to find different ways of staying with the aporia of transparency-as-secrecy.
The same goes for secrecy-as-transparency. The aporia becomes clear if we restate the condition of the democratic subject outlined
above. Without
a right to secrecy, the subject in a democracy ^ a liberal democracy committed to transparency ^
will find herself deprived of that which confers her singularity upon her, where the singularity of the subject
constitutes democracys primary unit. And yet the subject who, in her singularity, regards her right to secrecy as absolute ^ as she
should, as she must ^ will thereby jeopardize her right to belong to the social bond construed now as the democracy of individual
subjects rather than the democracy of individual subjects. The right to be counted among democracys subjects involves a minimal
coming into the transparent light of that social bond, even as every step towards it marks a step away from the singularity, the singular
possession of the singular secret, that licensed that very movement. The
singular, democratic subject is charged

with maintaining an absolute secret that is incorruptible, while holding it out for it to be
corrupted, to have its secrecy dissolved in the light of the common forum, this being the price to pay for
belonging to the democracy that recognized her singularity in the first place. The subject of democracy is
fated to vacillate endlessly between the shadows and the light.
Cede the Political

Their method cant create institutional change- the AFF is DA and the perm solvesAFF is a better strategy
SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2006), p 13, PDF)
While each of the four counter-surveillance interventions covered so far seeks
to raise public awareness and to

mobilize for social change, none of them are completely successful at moving their critique from
the individual to the institutional plane. The SCP come closest to doing this, but so far their plays remain
too isolated and discrete to effect long-term change. This deficiency may be in part because
activists construct surveillance problems in individualized and abstracted terms in order to make
them somewhat tractable and receptive to intervention. The challenge lies in ratcheting-up the
unit of analysis to the institutional level so that lasting change can be effected. The desired
outcomes might take the form of better regulation and oversight of surveillance and/or
meaningful democratic participation in the process of setting surveillance policies, for instance. In the
long run, as the next section will argue, the oppositional framing of surveillance versus counter-surveillance
may be counterproductive for achieving these goals.
No Alternative Solvency
Counter Surveillance does not remove individuals from the gaze of the state and
ultimately expands state power.
While each of the four counter-surveillance interventions covered so far seeks to raise public awareness and to
mobilize for social change, none of them are completely successful at moving their critique from
the individual to the institutional plane. The SCP come closest to doing this, but so far their plays remain too isolated
and discrete to effect long-term change. This deficiency may be in part because activists construct
surveillance problems in individualized and abstracted terms in order to make them somewhat
tractable and receptive to intervention. The challenge lies in ratcheting-up the unit of analysis to
the institutional level so that lasting change can be effected. The desired outcomes might take the form of better
regulation and oversight of surveillance and/or meaningful democratic participation in the process of setting surveillance policies, for
instance. In
the long run, as the next section will argue, the oppositional framing of surveillance versus
counter-surveillance may be counterproductive for achieving these goals.
We can never be sure that counter surveillance will actually stop larger structures of
power or global capitalism.
I would build upon these observations to say that the conflicts
between surveillance and counter-surveillance

practices today represent a larger struggle over the control of spaces and bodies. It is doubtful that
police or security forces are intentionally manipulating spaces and bodies with surveillance and
other strategies because they explicitly wish to neutralize democratic opportunities ; in fact, they
most likely believe that their actions of social control are preserving democracy by safeguarding
the status quo (Monahan 2006b). Be that as it may, such activities advance neoliberal agendas by
eliminating spaces for political action and debate, spaces where effective alternatives to economic
globalization could emerge and gain legitimacy if they were not disciplined by police and
corporate actions. Therefore, it should not be seen as a coincidence that the demise of public spaces
is occurring at the same time that spatial and temporal boundaries are being erased to facilitate the
expansion of global capital. The two go hand in hand. Whereas one can readily critique Hardt and Negri for their attribution
of agency to capitalism or to the amorphous force of Empire, their systemic viewpoint is worth preserving in what has become a
contemporary landscape of social fragmentation, polarization, and privatization. Dominant and subordinate groups
serve as asymmetrical refractions of each other in emerging global regimes. Surveillance and
counter-surveillance are two sets of overlapping practices selectively mobilized by many parties
in this conflict, but the overall effect is unknown.
Counter measures can spiral into a surveillance arms race which overwhelms action
or discussion on any issue neutralizing political effectiveness.
The
constant interplay of move and counter-move between police and video activists activates
ascending spirals of surveillance and counter-surveillance , what Marx has termed a surveillance arms
race (2007b, 299). Thus while the safety of protestors and the witnessing and documenting of misconduct remain powerful drivers
of video activism, an increasingly frequent rationale of video activism is to counter the escalating visual surveillance of protest events
undertaken by police. One video activist remarked: I think it is [video] important as well to counter the incredible levels of
surveillance that police put on protests. They have really sophisticated surveillance on protests, like camera positioned in key strategic
areas and telephoto lenses with small digital cameras right on hot spots. So we need to have our cameras there as well because you see
in cases which have happened in the past evidence the police collect, somehow all of the footage of events which incriminate the
police go missing while all the evidence that might incriminate protestors of certain things comes to light (McEwan interview). This
transformation also appears to accompany a diminishing of the power of the image in relation to protests. As one video activist with
fifteen years experience videoing protests remarked at one point it was very powerful to have even just a portable camera there, that
was the new thing...eventually they realised it was better to just have their own cameras there, so I gradually saw the collaboration of
more and more police cameras (Jacobs interview). Situations
where police are armed with cameras facing

protestors armed with cameras can reach heights of absurdity, as the same videographer suggested
so you video them videoing you and it just gets sillier and sillier. We know youre looking at us
and its that sort of projection of power through the process of surveillance and sort of static
(Jacobs interview). Such counter moves on the part of police potentially lead to a Kafkaesque situation
where counter counter- surveillance promotes a spiral of surveillance enmeshed within layers of
neutralization. The surveillance spiral ends in a cancelling out, a form of surveillance gridlock,
where the act of monitoring has eclipsed both action and control.
Counter-surveillance will fail to hold the state accountable within the current social
order legislative instruments only restrict dissent and images are recontextualized
in favor of the state
Wilson and Serisier, 10 [Dean, Monash University. Tanya, University of Sydney. Video Activism and the Ambiguities
of Counter-Surveillance, Surveillance & Society 8(2). P 171-172]
In protest situations the law becomes an instrument mobilized by all parties to execute moves and countermoves. Peter Manning has
suggested that the law serves as a mystification device or canopy to cover selectively, legitimate, and rationalize police conduct
(1997, 94). In protest situations police regularly invoke the power of legal statute to rationalize blocking moves aimed at video activists.
Video activists have been threatened with several pieces of legislation that have been mobilized to curtail filming and threaten video
activists with the prospect of criminal proceedings. Dale Mills gives the following example: In New South Wales at least its an offence under
some circumstances to audio record a conversation without the other persons permission, and of course most video has audio on it, and so that has raised
the question as to whether for example if were recording a conversation between a protestor and a police officer, and neither of them know that theyre
being recorded has raised the question as to whether thats legal. On more than one occasion weve had police officers come up to us and say you need to
turn the video off now, because youre breaching the Surveillance Devices Act, thats a recording deviceand weve said but were not recording
anyone, and the police officer said well Im speaking to you and youre recording me (Mills interview). Another videographer was threatened with
prosecution under recent counterterrorism laws, and was informed that the facility he was videoing (a large power station) was categorized as key
infrastructure (McEwan interview). Such inventive redeployments of law equate with the soft-line social control outlined by Fernandez,
where a wide range of legislative instruments often diverted a significant distance from their intended purpose - are marshalled to
restrict dissent (2009, 90-91). Video activists also strategically engage the law, and the surveillance of police has significant evidentiary validation,
particularly as it may be utilized to file complaints against police misconduct. For Dale Mills, founder of Sydney Copwatch, the purpose of monitoring
police at protest actions is: essentially to do the job that the superior officers should be doing, and that is to make a complaint about police misbehaviour,
to highlight the question with police misbehaviour, and to offer the video as solid evidence. People can easily challenge oral evidence, a bit more difficult
to challenge photographic evidence but video is very good (Mills interview). However, there was a consensus amongst all participants that, at
least in the current regulatory system, complaints against police behaviour at protests were highly unlikely to succeed irrespective of
the presence of video footage. It was suggested that there is a lack of accountability because the police investigate themselves, and
the Ombudsmans Office endorse whatever the police do (Mills interview). The possibility of seeking official redress is limited in a
number of ways. Masking moves (Marx 2003) may foreclose the usefulness of footage for official exposure of police misconduct. Complaints to the
New South Wales Ombudsman, for example, have been returned on the basis that without a name or number it is impossible to ascertain the police
involved. As police frequently refuse to give their name on request and just as frequently fail to wear identifying badges in protest situations they are
capable of neutralizing the official visibility of the activists camera.4 Moreover, such images are inserted and recontextualized in official
contexts within which police interpretations occupy a privileged, though not unassailable, position. Surveillance images are always
subject to interpretation, and in the domain of official inquiry and legal proceedings police are positioned to supply the official
definition of the situation (Doyle 2006, 211). The structural space of those undertaking surveillance is therefore of considerable
consequence, as it is not inevitably coupled with the power of interpretation. This perhaps explains the pervasive cynicism based on
experience expressed by all participants regarding the capacity of counter-surveillance to render police officially accountable.
Sousveillances dependence on accessing mainstream media empties countersurveillance of its radical political content
of Counter-Surveillance, Surveillance & Society 8(2). P 174]
Nevertheless if accessing the mainstream media remains a holy grail of video activism, those interviewed were acutely aware that there was
always the potential for it to become a poisoned chalice. Attitudes towards the mainstream media thus remain deeply ambivalent. One
videographer, for example, questioned the continued salience of the Rodney King video as a foundational motif of video activism, suggesting it was a
mistake totake the Rodney King example, of like this spectacular video equals this social outcome. I think those really spectacular videos are definitely
the exception (Lowenthal interview). Such comments indicate the limitations of feeding footage into mainstream media . As Lawrence (2000)
suggests such media penetration requires a particular constellation of dynamics. Moreover while witness video may be of interest to mainstream media,
particularly where it is seen to coalesce with newsworthy priorities of policing organizational deviance (Ericson, Baranek and Chan 1987), the images
are constrained within mainstream media framing. The demands of newsworthiness can decontextualize footage or lead to it being
freighted with meanings that distort the original intentions of those filming. Videographer Andrew Lowenthal suggested footage of police
violence could accumulate diverse meanings, dependent upon media framing and audience positions. He noted that obviously some people would be like
Oh give that hippie a good whacking, thats what they need and then other people might be thats beyond the bounds of what police powers should be,
and it should be limited(Lowenthal interview). Additionally, the broadcast of police violence can also stimulate internal disorganization in
protest movements. Lowenthal also recollected one incident where footage was broadcast of police brutality that far from solidifying the organization
of protest, had a chilling effect leading some within the protest movement to conclude oh my god these people [police] are really, really violent and Im
afraid of them. I dont want to go out and protest, and in some ways thats actually what the police were saying as well (Lowenthal interview). The
intense interest of the mainstream media in conflict and violence in covering protest events has been well documented (Waddington
1992). Earlier studies of media coverage of protest emphasized ideological framing in which the police are assumed to be in the right, capable only of
restrained reaction to provocation (Waddington 1992, 178). While contemporary media ecology renders coverage considerably more
multifaceted and conditional (Cottle 2008), our interview participants nevertheless felt substantial pressure to offer up visual images of
violence if they wanted to access major media outlets. As a videographer involved in an environmental protest action reported they [the media]
were only really interested in the footage which involved conflicts and specifically conflict with the police thats all they were asking for. And that
wasnt something we really wanted to highlight (McEwan interview). Such pressure can create internal contradictions for videographers,
where they find themselves concurrently trying to prevent violence through observation while also aspiring to capture it. As one video
activist remarked so youre there as a camera person to try and prevent biffo but you really want biffo to get it on telly (Davi interview). The hazard of
the mainstream medias preoccupation with violence was clearly articulated: there are two issues. Theres the issue around which the
protest and the activism is happening and then theres the issue of police accountability and often we capture stuff which shows police
behaving badly and the issue were trying to get attention for gets ignored for the police stuff (McEwan interview). Protest movements
have on occasion successfully articulated wider political issues through media strategies such as theatrical spectacle (Craig 2002;
Scalmer 2002), but such strategies are potentially undermined by a visual archive of violence that activates the time-worn media frame
of violent protest a media frame in which the substantive issue of protest is, in Murdocks phrase, emptied of its radical political
content (1981, 210).
The proliferation of content diminishes the power of counter-surveillance

of Counter-Surveillance, Surveillance & Society 8(2). P 176-177]
The move from dedicated video activist to a situation where everyone is a video activist was neatly summarized by one participant who suggested that
the way were moving is towards raising the idea that everyone is a Copwatcher, certainly everyone with a pair of eyes, everyone with a camera or
video (Mills interview). Nevertheless, despite such optimism about the future of the technology there are clearly drawbacks involved in the
circulation of such a plethora of images. Video activist Louise Morris revealed her ambivalence to this phenomenon: now all the activists are taking
videos everyone now has a camera and theyre not doing the activismwere so mediated now that we like to film everything its proof we were
there, proof we did it and then everyones got access to the YouTubes of the world and Engage Media and that mob are actually facilitating anyone with a
camera, a computer with an editing software to throw it up there. I think its less specialized which is great Its just also those moments you turn
up to actions and you realize that 50 percent of the people are actually there to film it, and then youve got this massively reducing
pool of people who are actually on the doing side of things. As Morriss comments make clear, the increasing access to portable video
technology such as mobile phones and digital cameras must be understood in relation to the corresponding increase in internet-related technology. In
particular the rise of YouTube has significantly impacted upon the practice of video activism. Launched in June 2005, YouTube offered a simple platform
for the uploading of video using standard browser software and providing URLs and HTML code that facilitated the embedding of links into other
websites (Burgess and Green 2009). For some activists the proliferation of user generated content has diminished the power of the image,
as one proposed the proliferation of media cheapens it, it means images are not so powerful or they have to be more full-on to grab
anyone (Davi interview). Such observations indeed recall Baudrillards argument that the explosion of information in a media-immersed
society presaged the erasure of meaning as he suggested information devours its own contentsinstead of causing communication,
it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication (1983, 97-98). The availability of open publishing has led some activists to question the
ongoing relevance of dedicated alternative media sites. For some the very idea of activist media seemed somewhat remote and even anachronistic in the
new media environment. Cameras are everywhere and everyone can post a video onlineI dont really see the need like I used to (Davi interview).
Also, because of the availability of technology and the capacity of anyone who has got a home computer (Davi interview) to do editing there is little
necessity for the kind of distinct organization that was present at G20 protests. Others who had been involved in video activism since the 1990s revealed
similar sentiments: I think that technology has changed a bit and I think that back then Indymedia was probably the only website that would allow for
open publishing, so open publishing was quite rare ten years ago, and Indymedia was actually a pioneer in that. Now with open publishing being
everywhere, I dont know that that model really works anymoreI think it feels a bit more disjointed and maybe theres something about power in
numbers. I dont know I feel that that video activist movement has waned a little bit (Prickett interview). As in the case of Morris, the inclination to
generate endless content without context was sharply criticized by some. For those wishing to move beyond witness video in order to
produce compelling narrative documentaries that contextualize events, the consequence has been an overwhelming cascade of low
quality soundbite footage that says little about the overall objectives and issues with which social movements aspire to engage. The
generation of profligate images is evident not only on YouTube but seeps into dedicated alternative media sites. As Marian Prickett, an independent
filmmaker and video activist, suggested and its not actually about telling a narrative or theres not a lot of thought given to artistry, its just Ive got to
capture this event now, but just an observation really, and its a shame because I think that those narratives can be really powerful (Prickett interview).
Robbie McEwan, a veteran videographer of numerous protests since the late 1990s, remarked the tendency, not just in the activists world but across
society now, is to produce video, publish it on the web and expect people to watch it and its a complete fantasy. So we actually need to make video that
presents our ideas and is good and engaging and satisfying to watchrather than just generating tons and tons and tons of stuff and having people
constantly reinventing the wheel and working in isolation (McEwan interview).
Alternative Causes Backlash

Resistance is futilethe surveillance apparatus anticipates countermeasures and
will prevent the alternative.
Lee 14 [Ashlin, School of Social Science at University of Tasmania. A Question of Momentum: Critical Reflections on Individual
Options for Surveillance Resistance, Revista Teknokultura, 11 (2), 425-440. ]
However, in suggesting these surveillance neutralisation devices, Marx (2009) also notes the potential for methods of resistance to be
overcome or nullified through appropriate countermeasures taken by the surveillance system or authority. These
countermeasures are a function of the momentum of the surveillance system , as momentum dictates the
available resources a system has towards its interests. It is for this reason that any individual act of resistance is likely
to be easily countered by global surveillance systems individuals simply lack the ability to
confront and neutralise this momentum. Now consider Marxs typology in this light. His first method of resistance,
discovering and raising awareness, is irrelevant as the details of such surveillance systems are
already available, and public awareness is at an all time high. These programs still continue.
Methods such as refusing surveillance, explaining and contesting surveillance, and co-operating with surveillance do not actively
seek to change the circumstances or vulnerabilities of the individual to data collection and are not of interest here. This leaves a set of
neutralisation techniques that focus on making changes to the individual's circumstances, including avoiding or breaking surveillance
devices, blocking access to personal data, distorting data capture, switching the captured data, and piggy backing onto ac - cepted or
unwatched objects or measures. These behaviours represent confrontational forms of resistance in that they directly challenge the
socio-material forms of order that allow surveillance to occur. All of these methods are possible for individuals. Personal data may be
encrypted to prevent access, and the Internet may be accessed through secure private networks, or routed through services such as
TOR that disrupt monitoring (See TOR 2014). This achieves forms of blocking or masking. An individual may choose to enter false
data voluntarily, acting as a means of distorting. A user might access the Internet on someone else's computer or use a friends phone,
switching the data collected. Individuals
are therefore not without options.
But these options are easily countered by global surveillance systems . The technological momentum, and
therefore prior investment and development in global surveillance, means that many of the measures suggested have already been
countered by those conducting surveillance. For example, many
standard encryption measures, network

equipments, and digital devices have vulnerabilities which state authorities are often aware of and
exploit at will (Menn, 2013; Riley, 2014; Der Spiegel, 2013). When these approaches do not suffice, state authorities have
designed and constructed network infrastructure and hardware to allow direct access to the fibre optic or copper lines themselves
(Aron, 2013). Privacy
services like TOR have been penetrated by state security services and their encryption
protocols broken (Goodin, 2013). Distortion and switching as a form of resistance are also misleading,
as they ignore how services like PRISM rely on databases of previously entered information in
addition to real time data collection. Entire datasets of personal information are already in the possession of governments
and private corporations already (Lyon, 2001). A sudden change in behaviour or shift in the data collected in real time doesn't change
prior knowledge, and the analytical and comparative potential of these datasets persists. Data collected and circulated within these
databases is notoriously difficult to remove, and is often outside the awareness and means of individuals themselves (Lyon, 2002).
Finally in many cases those conducting surveillance have enormous ranges of extra techniques for collecting personal information.
Security organisations in the service of nation states and private companies have a range of covert and exotic measures for data
collection (Der Spiegel, 2013), and consumer level surveillance is often built into the many digital infrastructure, networks, and
standards that consumers use (Prid- more, 2012). Companies and authorities have also been extraordinarily successful in "seducing"
users away from resistance to complicity (Lyon, 2007, p. 102). What this suggests is that for individuals confrontational measures of
resistance are limited, and that any meaningful shift in the material realities of data collection is difficult.
The Rodney King beatings show that police and other state actors become even
more violent when counter surveillance is used against them.
Examples of this problematic, if not dialectical, relationship between surveillance and counter-surveillance practitioners abound.
After the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles was captured on videotape in 1991, this did not
necessarily catalyze correctives to actions of police brutality, nor did it motivate greater police
engagement with urban communities. Instead, police have seemingly used this event to distance
themselves further from and maintain antagonistic relationships with communities (Klein 1997;
Monahan 2002) while learning from the blow-up that they must exert greater control over the
conditions where brutality occurs. This enhanced and learned control can be seen in the torture
case of Haitian worker Abner Louima by the New York City Police in 1997 . Louima was beaten in a
vehicle on the way to the 70th Precinct station house and was then sodomized with the stick from a toilet plunger in the police
restrooms (Mazelis 1997; Jeffries 2002). Regardless of the fact that the story did finally emerge, the police officers obviously
exercised extreme caution in regulating the places of abuse (i.e. in a police vehicle and in a police restroom), and one
can
speculate that this level of control was a response to their fear of being under surveillance, and
thus held accountable, for their actions.
Counter Surveillance only makes the police more violent and capitalism more
secretive.
Another example of the dance of surveillance and counter-surveillance can be witnessed in the confrontations occurring at
globalization protests throughout the world. Activists
have been quite savvy in videotaping and

photographing police and security forces as a technique not only for deterring abuse, but also for
documenting and disseminating any instances of excessive force. According to accounts by World Trade
Organization protesters, the police, in turn, now zero-in on individuals with video recorders and arrest
them (or confiscate their equipment) as a first line of defense in what has become a war over the
control of media representations (Fernandez 2005). Similarly, vibrant Independent Media Centers are now
routinely set up at protest locations, allowing activists to produce and edit video, audio,
photographic, and textual news stories and then disseminate them over the Internet, serving as an
outlet for alternative interpretations of the issues under protest (Breyman 2003). As was witnessed in the
beating of independent media personnel and destruction of an Indymedia center by police during the 2001 G8 protests in Genoa, Italy
(Independent Media Center Network 2001; Juris 2005), those
with institutional interests and power are learning

to infiltrate subversive counter-surveillance collectives and vitiate their potential for
destabilizing the dominant system. A final telling example of the learning potential of institutions was the subsequent
2002 G8 meeting held in Kananaskis, which is a remote and difficult to access mountain resort in Alberta, Canada. Rather than
contend with widespread public protests and a potential repeat of the police violence in Genoa
(marked by the close-range shooting and death of a protester), the mountain meeting exerted the most extreme control over the limited
avenues available for public participation: both
reporters and members of the public were excluded, and a

no-fly-zone was enforced around the resort.
Counter Surveillance subjects activists to more intense violence from the state.
Hardt and Negri (2004) have suggested that innovative
tactics of resistance spur state agents to implement

new modes of control to neutralize challenges to state power . This is evident in the ironic situation of video
activists, whose efforts to secure safety through imaging renders them exceptionally visible to
police. The monitoring of police in turn kindles counter-neutralization tactics , in particular strategic
incapacitation (Gillham & Noakes 2007) that aims to neutralize visual monitoring either through direct
physical force or through spatial strategies of containment. Getting beaten up was one of the
foremost hazards of video activism, and those interviewed reported that individuals armed with video and digital cameras
were commonly targeted by police at protest actions. One activist suggested po lice do target people like that at
protests, Ive seen it. People with megaphones, people with cameras they get taken down pretty
quickly (Jacobs interview), while another recollected that quite a few people have ended up with a black eye and a bruised head
(Morris interview). Yes we saw this during APEC in particular, it wasnt again just not Copwatchers but members of the commercial
media, there was that infamous video Paula Bronstein for example who was thrown to the ground during APEC, but again other
members of the commercial media who either had police officers block their filming, or told to turn around and not to film, several of
us were threatened with arrest, there was one undercover police officer who tried to snatch a camera from my hand, and so it definitely
brings attention to yourself yeah (Mills interview). Spatial
strategies of isolation and containment are an

additional counter-neutralization move engaged by police. Fernandez, drawing upon Foucaults notion of
disciplinary diagrams, argues that police deploy two disciplinary diagrams: the leprosy model and the plague model (2009, 170). In
the plague model, space is divided into a grid and subjected to surveillance and regular inspection. In the leprosy model, lepers are
expelled from communal space so that sickness is excluded (Elden 2003, 242). Video
activists are clearly perceived as

lepers, and are subject to processes of containment and ejection from spaces of protest . Morris
identifies a definite strategy of make sure youve identified who the camera people in the protest group are, sideline them, dont give
them any good footage and dont give them anything that will turn up in court (Morris interview). While another video activist
suggested some police will act against you for being the teller of the truth so you can get targeted, camera can get trashed and your
tapes ripped out or personally removed from a protest because you are documenting it (Jacobs interview).
Alternative Excludes Women and People of Color

Counter Surveillance technology can be used for cyber stalking, gender violence and
racial exclusion.
Gates and Magnet 2007 (Kelly & Shoshana, Dept. of Comm @ SDSU & Univ. of Illinois @ Urbana, Communication
Research and the study of Surveillance, Communication Review 10:277)
As the case of cyberstalking suggests, supervisory
strategies and their attendant technologies encode

systemic forms of inequality, including violence against women. The ease with which new
communications technologies may be used for cyberstalking underscores the close relationship
between new technologies and their social context . Another major contribution of communications scholarship to
surveillance studies is the attention critical scholars have paid to this relationship, including connections between new information
technologies and the reproduction of social inequalities.10 For example, Suren Lalvani (1996) has theorized the ways in which new
technologies codify discriminatory practices of looking. Through his analysis of the production of photographic
typesincluding the bour- geois subject, the criminal object, the primitive other, and the ideal workerLalvani documents the
importance of photography to the growth of surveillance infrastructure. In particular, Lalvanis examination of the role of photography
in the production of the laboring body demonstrates that the technology was essential to the development of Taylorism and the
scientific management of workers. Photography
made it possible to capture movement and simulate

realism in ways that allowed for the production of a highly regulated, surveillant apparatus of
employee control. Lalvani shows how the photographic medium built on existing inequalities to provide the conditions for the
surveillance of working class subjects. The development of photography as a new communications
technology was aided by its adoption to surveillance practices in the service of capitalism . While
desirable patrons are targeted by marketing techniques that privilege good consumers, other surveillance techniques render marginalized communities disproportionately vulnerable to policing practices. New
surveillance technologies are regularly

tested on marginalized communities that are unable to resist their intrusion . A new form of surveillance
technology known as a one-way voice intercom system recently made its U.S. debut in Faircliff, a low-income housing complex in
Washington, DC. Planners hope that the securitization of this low- income community will encourage wealthy condominium owners
to purchase property on the neighboring streets. Staffed by security personnel sitting behind surveillance cameras, the system allows
monitors to speak to tenants but does not permit tenants to reply. The anonymous system has already been abused. In one case, a
new
communications technology is again used to police bodies deemed out of place, even as those
bodies are held static by income disparities and the difficulty of finding afford- able housing . As the
Faircliff case suggests, more research needs to be done on how surveillance practices encode and help
reproduce existing forms of structural inequality.
teenage girl who refused to move fast enough when ordered was told Get [her] fat ass off the corner (Jamieson, 2006). This
Counter surveillance assumes equal economic and political footing that is

inaccessible to the poor turns their method
SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2006), p 11, PDF)
Manns rather unforgiving
denouncement of individuals working in stores, however, reveals certain

assumptions about the problems of modern surveillance . First, by criticizing employees as being
puppets who blindly accept their companies explanations for surveillance and comply with
company policies, Mann implies that all individuals are rational actors with equal social and
economic footing. Thus, if low-income employees elect not to fight the system like he does, then
they must be either ignorant or weak-willed, or both. Second, by calling store clerks and security
guards representatives of totalitarian surveillance regimes, Mann conflates individuals with the
institutions of which they are a part, effectively sidestepping the important but more difficult
problem of changing institutional relations, structures, or logics . Both these assumptions lead to the
conclusion that one can contend with the problem of rampant surveillance by intervening on the
level of the individual and by educating people about their complicity with the systems.
Unfortunately, the fact that people have very real dependencies upon their jobs or that vast
asymmetrical power differentials separate workers from the systems they work within (and
perhaps from the activists as well) become unimportant issues once the critique of surveillance is
abstracted and individualized in this way.
Opacity
The affirmatives strategy of transparency in the public sphere is a commitment to

epistemic violenceonly embracing opacity can refuse the violence of
Enlightenment statecraft
Stanescu 13 [James Stanescu. Lecturere in Communication Studies and Philosophy at Mercer University. September 26 2013.
The Right of Obscurity Must Be Respected. Critical Animal. http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-right-of-obscuritymust-be-respected.html.]
Perhaps ground zero for such thinking is Edouard Glissant's amazing book, The Poetics of Relation. In that book, Glissant develops the theoretical
concept that you can find throughout his work, namely, the right of opacity. The
right of opacity is more foundational than

the right to difference (because, indeed, the right of opacity is foundational for the right of
difference). As Glissant makes clear, the right of opacity is first a right against the slave master's push of transparency against
the enslaved people. It is also a right of the dominated not to replicate the colonial people's displays of ostentation . But the right
of opacity goes further. It becomes a right of language and culture, and it goes further still. The right of opacity becomes the right not the be
understood, not to be reduced to epistemic violence of comprehension and judgement. Or, colloquially, "You don't know me; don't
pretend that you know me". As Saidiya Hartman furthers this analysis, and provides the title of this blog post, in Scenes of Subjection: Rather than
consider black song as an index or mirror of the slave condition, this examination emphasizes the significance of opacity as
precisely that which enables something in excess of the orchestrated amusements of the enslaved and which similarly troubles
distinctions between joy and sorrow and toil and leisure. For this opacity, the subterranean and veiled character of slave song must be
considered in relation to the dominative imposition of transparency and the degrading hypervisibility of the enslaved , and
therefore, by the same token, such concealment should be considered a form of resistance. Furthermore, as Glissant advises, "the attempt
to approach a reality so hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications. " The right to obscurity
must be respected, for the "accumulated hurt," the "rasping whispers deep in the throat," the wild notes, and the screams
lodged deep within confound simple expression and, likewise, withstand the prevailing ascriptions of black enjoyment. (p. 36)
Fred Moten, in an interview published in his B. Jenkins, riffs on Hartman's analysis: In the end, however, as Saidiya Hartman says, the right to obscurity
must be respected. This is a political imperative that infuses the unfinished project of emancipation as well as any number of
other transitions or crossings in progress. It corresponds to the need for the fugitive, the immigrant and the new (and newly
constrained) citizen to hold something in reserve, to keep a secret. The history of Afro-diasporic art, especially music, is, it seems to me, the
history of the keeping of this secret even in the midst of its intensely public and highly commodified dissemination. These
secrets are relayed and miscommunicated, misheard, and overheard, often all at once, in words and in the bending of words, in
whispers and screams, in broken sentences, in the names of people youll never know . (p. 105). The issues that we presently face
ourselves with, surveillance in the age of the internet of things, NSA spying and the secret holders that believe only they have a
right to secrets, are not fundamentally new issues, but rather new manifestations of very old issues. The right to opacity is, without a
doubt, a right to see a stranger as a stranger, and the right to have secrets (the right to all be Geheimnistrger). Thus, Hartman quotes Paul Gilroy, from his
The Black Atlantic, there exists "politics ... on a lower frequency." This politics exists because words will never be enough to
"communicate its unsayable claims to truth" (p. 37). Therefore, as James C. Scott and Robin D. G. Kelley have shown, there exists an
infra-politics of hidden transcripts. As Maria Lugones has argued, these infra-politics should be understood in opposition to the
Habermasian notion of the counter-public. The politics and ethics of these unsayable claims to truth cannot be understood
through more transparency, publicity, and comprehension. Rather, we have to conceive of a networked world of relations that
take seriously the right of opacity.
The affirmation of visibility and public dialogue submits radical politics to the
power of the oppressoronly subterranean political strategies can achieve
liberation
Lugones 00 Maria Lugones. Professor of Womens Studies at Binghamton University. 2000. Multiculturalism and Publicity.
Hypatia 15.3. http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/journals/hypatia/v015/15.3lugones.html.
Ellison's Invisible Man (1995), Lorde's Sister Outsider (1984), and Gloria Anzalda's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
(1987) are interesting and influential texts from the point of view of the infrapolitical and help us look at Lara's project critically.
Though each one of these texts is conceptually complex, more complex than my present discussion of them can begin to countenance,
each author contributes concepts, central to their narratives of self, that are important to the issues raised by Lara's proposal. Ellison
focuses on invisibility, Anzalda on border-dwelling, Lorde on the interdependence of mutual non-dominant differences. Each of them
uses a
discourse that is not just outside "the master's tools," but also outside the master's perceptual
field and the master's perceptual possibilities if the perceiver maintains a loyalty to an oppressive
sociality. Each of them invokes a sociality to be fashioned out of what is valuable in the hidden
transcript and in the intersection between the hidden and the public transcripts --that space that is Scott's,
Kelley's, and my own focus. Before answering my questions, I want to attempt to bring out briefly my understanding of what in Lara
is relevant to the answers. In Moral Textures, Lara replaces the abstract Kantian sense of autonomy with a concrete one by [End Page
178] linking self-determination and self-realization. Self-realization requires expansion of subjectivity. Differentiation among subjects,
far from being understood as a barrier to this expansion, is seen as its foundation. This expansion
is performed through
the introduction of life narratives in the public sphere. Life narratives make it possible for
subalterns to envision the need for political discourses (1999, 59). The literary public thus becomes the arena for
the "performative illocutionary forces" displayed in those new texts and for creating new ways of living. That is for Lara how the
historical transformation of women's self-conception first entered the public sphere (1999, 59). Dialogue between author and public is
necessary for recognition. Engaging the other in an understanding of the ego is crucial here; disclosure is crucial to identity formation.
Self-realization, then, involves both responsibility and self-reflexive consciousness. Here lies the
link with self-determination, with autonomy, in Lara's concrete understanding of autonomy: "One cannot be selfdetermining unless one is capable of envisioning a self-realizing project" (86). Autonomy, thus, requires public recognition (87).
Recognition is complete only when "acceptance of the public has taken place " (82). If differences are
necessary for subjective expansion, their value must be "asserted in front of others" and the dialogue must not only show what makes
one different but also that those differences are "part of what should be considered worthy" (156, 157). Groups
needing to be
heard must "conquer channels of communication to call attention to the way they have been
treated"; recognition is thus a struggle (151, 157). It is their descriptions of what is missing in their lives that make their
claims meaningful and understandable to others (151). But the achievement of solidarity must "form a bridge to the other's
understanding of what are considered to be worthy features and needs of human beings." (157) As she fashions an
understanding of recognition, Lara proposes a universalist model. She attempts to theorize what she
understands as women's achievements in the public sphere. She sees the immediate goal of
achieving systematic and free communication in public spaces, but she interprets the aim not only
as "denouncing the exclusion of women from public spaces, but as recovering those spaces in
light of the revolution required to transform concepts and practices in social, political, and
democratic life" (1999, 149). That is, it isn't just about inclusion but about an extension of subjectivities that constitutes a
transformed "we." Lara's universalism lies precisely in this expansion of the "we" produced
intersubjectively, a "we" which is thus, necessarily, not homogenous. This is a normative "we"
understood by Lara as in permanent tension with the declarative "we," a tension that allows us to
"thematize what is heterogenous, other, different, incongruent, unfamiliar" (154). Universalism is thus an
open-ended ideal. It is this complex sense of universality through recognition that creates "moral textures." [End Page 179] Let me say
that one of Lara's important contributions, from where I stand, is her careful dialogical, performative construction of autonomous and
self-determining subjectivities. Though she does employ a normative ideal, her emphasis is on process. She
does not perform

a leap to the policy maker position; she does not recommend either a politics of difference nor a
universalism that affirms what Fraser calls "cultural variations" (1996). Thus she does not commit
herself to an equality of atomic equal cultures multiculturalism at the ideal, end state level. Because
her ideal is processual, it can take in differences more concretely, critically, and heartily than either Young's (1990) or Fraser's (1996).
Having said that, I
don't think that Lara's project can appreciate the complexities and importance of the
hidden transcript as a dissident political culture in resistance to oppression . It does not really have
conceptual room for the varieties of hidden transcripts. The project needs to elude the public transcript/hidden
transcript distinction. Obviously, it cannot side with the public transcript. But it cannot side with the hidden
transcript either, because as hidden in any of its senses, it cannot be addressed to the oppressor : either it is purposefully
outside the oppressor's perceptual field, or it is "on stage" but disguised, or it is hidden by the public transcript. The key terms:
"address the other," "dialogue between author and public," "claim recognition," "subject one's
point of view to the analysis and consideration of others in the public arena," or even "form a
bridge to the other's understanding of what are considered to be worthy features and needs of
human beings" are all inconsistent with the infrapolitical since they require a publicist direction,
an addressing the public, including one's oppressors. One could think of a restricted "public," but I don't see Lara
recommending this as a political direction. She thinks that "enclaves" and monads are bad because they dichotomize the relation
between oppressor and oppressed. Yet, though
the relations between oppressors and oppressed are

enormously complex, they are real. Lara issues no injunction or methodology for the oppressor to
journey to the world of the oppressed, so as to expand his or her subjectivity. This would be
compatible with the hidden/public transcript distinction in the midst of oppression .
Legal restrictions merely retain the fantasy of Enlightenment rationality to contain

the violent kernel of sovereigntypositioning the judge as a sovereign subject
makes colonialist
violence inevitable
Gorelick 8 Nathan Gorelick. Professor of English at Utah Valley University. 2008. Imagining Extraordinary Renditions:
Terror, Torture and the Possibility of an Excessive Ethics in Literature. Theory & Event 11:2.
Aim Csaire noted this phenomenon in his articulation of the full brutality of colonialism, and in his equation, "colonization =
thingification"; as extraordinary rendition demonstrates, the total securitization of everyday life, like colonization, conceptually
transforms people into objects through (and against) which to define state authority.33 This radical objectification manifests as "force,
brutality, cruelty, sadism... forced labor, intimidation, pressure... contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness,
brainless elites, degraded masses."34 Yet, as Csaire demonstrates, this "thingification" of life is not an accidental byproduct of
European liberal humanism. Instead, the worst forms of violence are, in a very real sense, necessitated by the Enlightenment
and the western metaphysical tradition of which it is a product. In Csaire's words, "through the mouths of the Sarrauts and the
Bardes, the Mullers and the Renans, through the mouths of all those who considered -- and consider -- it lawful to apply to nonEuropean peoples 'a kind of expropriation for public purposes' for the benefit of nations that were stronger and better equipped, it was
already Hitler speaking!"35 Moreover, as Csaire and many other colonial and post-colonial thinkers suggest, the cultivation of the
fundamental unit of political and moral account -- the sovereign subject -necessitates an other against which to define
legitimate subjectivity. The other is constituted in opposition to everything that the sovereign, rational, autonomous self
supposedly is not. The irrational other, thus devalued, can be abused, erased or exterminated with impunity.
Extraordinary rendition contains all of these relations of domination -- the rational, calculating subject, in the interests of "national
security" and under the auspices of a benevolent liberal humanism, attempts to forcibly extract information from the "subject supposed
to know," but only by proxy; accountability for terror and for torture are thus excised from the state's own behavior. All of this, of
course, takes place in the shadows of state secrecy. "This is info-war," notes Paul Gilroy, "and these terrorists will not be given the
platform of a public trial. Their dubious struggle will not be sustained by 'the oxygen of publicity.'"36 So, what is at stake in the
struggle to render visible the dark chambers of extraordinary rendition is not simply the legality or illegality of this particular
practice; rather, this struggle is an attempt to disrupt the exclusive authority over the powers and limits of representation
currently enjoyed by the agents of the war on terror, and by history's victors, the champions of the Enlightenment, in whose
shadow this war is now being fought. If the violence contained within the dark chamber, as Coetzee suggests, is a metaphor "for
relations between authoritarianism and its victims," then it ought to also stand as a metaphor for the dark, terrifying failure of the
Enlightenment, for the violence which inevitably results from the grand project of world ordering that will never be rid of its
disordered and dangerous others, despite increasingly paranoid and frenetic attempts to totally rigidify and control all things Other.
Maurice Blanchot calls this failure the night, the other night, the void from which the light of the will to knowledge desperately
attempts to escape. This other night is not a recognizable object; it is not the totalitarian communist or the uncontrollable
terrorist -- the Manichean double, or dialectical antithesis, of liberal democracy -- who reacts to the violence of empire with
empire's own obscene methods. Rather, it is the 'no-thing' of Being, the absence at the center of rationality, the irrationality
and disorder against which knowledge and order are opposed and which their systems nevertheless and necessarily contain; it
is the unknowable, unintelligible pebble of darkness which cannot be lighted by the force of reason; "it is what one never joins; it
is repetition that will not leave off, satiety that has nothing, the sparkle of something baseless and without depth."37 It is the
interminable insecurity at the heart of every systematic securitization. The United States' recent efforts -- following European
colonialism's lead -- to constitute the globe as an impenetrable burrow, impervious to the other night and its "always more
threatening threat," are ultimately efforts to hem liberal democracy into a coffin with this threat; security against the untamed
outside, radical intimacy, draws the terror ever closer.38
Blanchot elaborates through Kafka's "The Burrow," a tale about a different kind of dark chamber inhabited by a creature in search of
total intimacy, total safety. Kafka writes, "it is not only by external enemies that I am threatened. There are also enemies in the
bowels of the earth. I have never seen them, but legend tells of them and I firmly believe in them. They are creatures of the inner
earth; not even legend can describe them."39 Here, the horror does not respond to the actual nature of the unseen creatures, but rather
to their invisibility, their unknowability, the narrator's own inability to describe them, an effort which amounts to containment. "Their
very victims can scarcely have seen them; they come, you hear the scratching of their claws just under you in the ground, which is
their element, and already you are lost. Here it is of no avail to console yourself with the thought that you are in your own house; far
rather are you in theirs."40 Kafka's creature knows the impossibility of self-containment, of tranquil and interminable security,
because it knows that there is something which it does not and cannot know. Its ceaseless efforts to permanently secure its burrow, to
surveil its dark territory, are infected by this kernel of terror. "No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined" the creature says,
"rather it is I who sleep, while the destroyer watches."41 Analogously, the war on terror, even in its very name, displaces the terror
of the other night, attempts to contain it within the terror of the "enemy combatant," and, through this new knowing subject,
frantically gropes for the knowledge that promises complete security. This is the purpose of extraordinary rendition: to
exercise total domination over the body of the enemy -- the artificial signifier of this unsignifiable darkness at the core of
liberal humanism -- and in so doing to render it knowable, to destroy it, to become the destroyer who watches.42
It is no accident that the body of the suspected terrorist is the object against which this violent will to knowledge is directed; in
Discipline and Punish , Michel Foucault suggests that state-sanctioned brutality and the commitment to calculative reason codified by
the Enlightenment intersect here, in the systematization of torture. The codification of torture as a disciplinary technique exhibits a
"whole quantitative art of pain" which is "calculated according to detailed rules" designed to inflict a punishment proportionate to the
crime and to exhibit the authority of the state through the scarred body of the prisoner.43 Of course, Foucault's analysis concerns the
spectacle of public torture, which obviously differs from the secretive politics of extraordinary rendition. However, this difference
primarily concerns torture's punitive function in the 17th century, as opposed to its biopolitical function today, in the context of
globalized security. The science of torture has only grown far more sophisticated; the calculated application of cruelty to the suspect's
body is, after all, a matter of national security. The role of the terrorist suspect is no longer simply to express the painful reality of
sovereign vengeance to a paralyzed citizenry, but rather to speak, to proffer a knowledge that promises to maintain the integrity of the
innocent, vulnerable population. Foucault thus reveals that the technologies of control exercised, on the one hand, against individual
bodies and, on the other, against whole populations are not isolated phenomena. They are the products of a historically contingent
system of thought.44 They are founded upon the obsessive rationality of Enlightened liberal humanism, and their intersection in the
shadows of the dark chamber give expression to the aggressive anxiety of that rationality's confrontation with the other night.
The Bush Administration cannot, therefore, be understood as acting somehow irrationally, or against the philosophical and
political tradition of the Enlightenment ideals through which it insists upon the war on terror's moral legitimacy. The
President's stated mission of infinitely expanding "civilized" democratic idealism operates from the very ideological foundation of
Europe's earlier Civilizing Mission; colonialism and the war on terror both find moral justification in the supposedly universal
necessity of human rights, fixed within the presupposition of a rational, autonomous, sovereign subject. Extraordinary
rendition and interrogation through torture must remain secretive, then, because to expose humanism's own hideous
underside is to rob it of its moral and intellectual legitimacy, even if its legal legitimacy might remain open to normative
debate. This is particularly true in the case of rendition because the rhetoric of internationalized democratic reform is here secretly
doubled by its opposite; the world's beacon of liberty encourages torture and brutality.

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Sousveillance

burgeoning governmental privacy bureaucracies, not

legislation, initially figured as a form of resistance, tends to crowd out the

legislation is not obviously a form of resistance ,

idea, then, that there is a one-to-one correspondence

[Insert Specific Link]

refocusing of political power on the

we connect this aggressively

Counter surveillance is subversive because it constitutes a counter-cultural

Organized acts by individuals are here termed subversive. Hacking

is a good example of information subversion

burgeoning governmental privacy bureaucracies, not

legislation, initially figured as a form of resistance, tends to crowd out the

legislation is not obviously a form of resistance ,

idea, then, that there is a one-to-one correspondence

Digital technology is radically incomplete, which allows it to be repurposed to create

material infrastructure of the Internet and related technologies is , as Feenberg says,

ability of Internet infrastructure to support and extend group

escape regimes of identification standardization and control, like

articulation epitomizes the logic

Facelessness is no different than a conservative right to privacy and cedes the

popularity of these artistic efforts may be that they mobilize

of the right to hide are weak variations of the right to privacy,

through filming and documenting cases of police

Institutional attempts to stop facial recognition not only leave surveillance

by means of video cameras transforms the public space of the

needed here is the

crucial point is that the source codewhether in proprietary or free softwarealways

issue is the ethics

free software movement offers a working example of an

is one of the main institutional components of late

ideas come close to Lefebvres

analysing the parallelisms and differences with the Panopticon and

Viewing state surveillance as a panopticon destroys any possibility for ethical

online teaching, like effective face-to-face instruction, is

and Smith call for a

Surveillance is inevitable but Foucaults analogy of the panopticon fails to empower

started to recognize surveillance as a central dimension of modernity,

The Panopticon offers a lack of understanding in new forms of technological

and (2) strategic and symbolic

with restricting entry and expelling undesirables, observational

Surveillance on the border is inevitable. Eliminating state based surveillance only

current enforcement efforts rest on an ugly paradox in

By viewing surveillance as a tool of gatekeeping and dehumanization, the Aff

The Affs interpretation of surveillance at the border is inaccurate and

Johnston and Chichakyan 12

Until recently, Peter

far as the US government efforts to secure Internet

solutions like encryption, DNSSEC, and the

concentrate on legal safeguards for U.S. persons,

has an old-fashioned focus on physical

12333 remains solely under the

surveillance legislation leaves the door wide open for unrestrained

surveillance on U.S. persons from abroad.

with the power of surveillance.

camera phone has commissioned the general public

many developed countries,

State power, capitalism and structural violence are inevitable in a world of

theorised intersections between states, capital, and violence have become

refocusing of polit- ical power on the

we connect this aggressively

capacity that is there to make tyranny

is a good example of information subversion

action has important sociopolitical