Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Notes
The thesis of the Kritik is to expose the states law as a
fraud.
Even if the plan is good and has good advantages it can
solve for it doesnt matter because the plan was built
upon fraudulent law. Which is only going to replicate the
oppressive law of the government.
The Kritik is critiquing the biopower in the state/law that
the affirmative is rooted in and how its biopower is
destructive and spreads its biopolitical control through
things like the affirmative. Not the biopower of the
affirmative case itself.
Neg
1NC Criticism
The reforms of the 1ac function as a mask to hide the
constant surveillance the government engages in,
propping up a system that is designed to invade privacy
and oppress citizens. This both turns the case and makes
oppression inevitable.
Greenwald, Constitutional Lawyer, 14 (Glenn, 11/19/14, The Intercept,
did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously
happened, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and National
Security State operates with no limits and no oversight means
theyd easily co-opt the entire reform process. Thats what happened
after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment
of congressional intelligence committees and a special FISA oversight court
the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme
servants of the intelligence community like Senators Dianne Feinstein and
Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, while
the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges
who operate in total secrecy. Ever since the Snowden reporting
began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began
radically changing, the White Houses strategy has been obvious. Its
vintage Obama: Enact something that is called reformso that he
can give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and
responded to their concernsbut that in actuality changes almost
nothing, thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he
changed. Thats the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported
this bill: Be able to point to something called reform so they can trick
hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into
believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook,
Google, Skype and the rest.
even of "free" peoples, the expectations of inter-State competition may include war and the mass killing of
impotent by Realpolitik, this commitment to so-called power politics is itself an expression of control by the
No matter how cogent the CLSers' expose of traditional legal thought may be, they must still suggest some alternative. To
retain credibility, sustain allegiance, and mobilize support, they must offer their own tangible vision of the "good society."
If their work is not to be consigned to the dustbin of history, they must seek to translate their theories into some
attainable dimensions of human experience: "To nurture the seeds of social progress [there must be] . . . some concrete
n124
is at stake.
We do not mean to
suggest that the extensive CLS critiques of existing law and legal theory are purely negative and without constructive
possibilities more truly expressing reality, possibilities of fashioning a future that might at least partially realize a
substantive notion of justice instead of the abstract, rightsy, traditional, bourgeois notions of justice that generate so
much of the contradictory scholarship. One must start by knowing what is going on, by freeing oneself from the mystified
delusions embedded in our consciousness by the liberal legal world view. I am not defending a form of scholarship that
simply offers another affirmative presentation; rather, I am advocating negative, Critical activity as the only path that
might lead to a liberated future.The
Be careful with this shell when choosing a link. You need to have
a link that is rooted in biopower. Not just a CLS link.
Reforms only push the surveillance further into the
shroud secrecy- Get watered down to point of
Ineffectiveness
Greenwald, Constitutional Lawyer, 14 (Glenn, 11/19/14, The Intercept,
"Congress is irrelevant on mass surveillance. here's what matters instead.",
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congressstopping-nsas-mass-surveillance/,7/1/15,AW)
There is a real question about whether the defeat of this bill is good, bad, or irrelevant. To
begin with, it sought to change only one small sliver of NSA mass
surveillance (domestic bulk collection of phone records under section 215 of the Patriot Act) while
leaving completely unchanged the primary means of NSA mass
surveillance, which takes place under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, based on the lovely and
quintessentially American theory that all that matters are the privacy rights of Americans (and not the 95 percent of the
planet called non-Americans). There were some mildly positive provisions in the USA Freedom Act: the placement of
public advocates at the FISA court to contest the claims of the government; the prohibition on the NSA holding
Americans phone records, requiring instead that they obtain FISA court approval before seeking specific records from the
telecoms (which already hold those records for at least 18 months); and reducing the agencys contact chaining analysis
from three hops to two. One could reasonably argue (as the ACLU and EFF did) that, though woefully inadequate, the bill
was a net-positive as a first step toward real reform, but one could also reasonably argue, as Marcy Wheeler has with
withdraw their support. The Senate bill rejected last night was basically a middle ground between that original, good bill
and the anti-reform bill passed by the House. * * * * * All
after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence committees and
a special FISA oversight courtthe committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the
intelligence community like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and Dutch
reformso that he can give a pretty speech telling the world that
he heard and responded to their concernsbut that in actuality
changes almost nothing, thus strengthening the very system he can
pretend he changed.
Thats the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: Be able
to point to something called reform so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world
into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest.
Nations peacekeeping operations. The potentialities for the care and the manipulation of the biological processes of
life and of the powers of death have never appeared greater than they do today. But how do we consider this problem as a
they lie at a deeper strata?My concern in this paper is to consider issues of life and death as political issues, to locate a
bio-politics, a politics of life, and a thanato-politics, a politics of death, within our ways of thinking about and imagining
politics. I follow two recent theorists, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, who are convinced that not only must we
consider how we exercise powers of life and death in modern politics but how the very notion of politics and political
community are intimately related to such issues. At issue is the power we call sovereign power, and its relation to this
politics of life and death. I shall in turn consider four possible theses that can be derived from the work of these thinkers
and from other twentieth century critical and legal theorists.
Habermass main complaint about Foucault is what Habermas sees as Foucaults relativism. Thus Habermas (1987, 276)
harshly dismisses Foucaults genealogical historiographies as relativistic, cryptonormative illusory science. Such critique
for relativism is correct, if by relativistic we mean unfounded in norms that can be rationally and universally grounded .
Foucaults norms are not foundationalist like Habermass: they are expressed in a desire
to challenge every abuse of power, whoever the author, whoever the
victims (Miller 1993, 316) and in this way to give new impetus, as far and
wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom (Foucault 1984a, 46).
Foucault here is the Nietzschean democrat, for whom any form of government - liberal or
totalitarian - must be subjected to analysis and critique based on a
will not to be dominated, voicing concerns in public and withholding
consent about anything that appears to be unacceptable. Such norms
cannot be given a universal grounding independent of those people
and that context, according to Foucault. Nor would such grounding be
desirable, since it would entail an ethical uniformity with the kind of
utopian-totalitarian implications that Foucault would warn against in
any context, be it that of Marx, Rousseau or Habermas: The search for a
form of morality acceptable by everyone in the sense that everyone
would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic to me
Rabinow 1986, 119). In a Foucauldian interpretation
empower it .
Instead, Foucault focuses on the analysis of evils and shows restraint in matters of commitment to
ideas and systems of thought about what is good for man, given the historical experience that few things have produced
more suffering among humans than strong commitments to implementing utopian visions of the good.
relativism and nihilism, and the best basis for action. Our sociality
and history, according to Foucault, is the only foundation we have,
the only solid ground under our feet. And this socio-historical
foundation is fully adequate.
Foucault, perhaps more than any recent philosopher, reminded us of the crucial importance
of power in the shaping and control of discourses, the production of
knowledge, and the social construction of spaces. His analysis of modern power has often
been read by planning theorists as negative institutionalised oppression, expressed most chillingly in his analysis of the disciplinary regime of
the prison in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979). However, it is
The law,
to be both neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which has always
exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171).
This is
an effective approach to
Habermas approaches regulation from a universalistic theory of discourse, Foucault seeks out a genealogical understanding of actual power
For
Foucault praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or
theories. Freedom is a practice , and its ideal is not a utopian
absence of power. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to consensus,
is for Foucault the most solid basis for the practice of freedom. Whereas
Habermas emphasises procedural macro politics, Foucault stresses substantive micro politics ,
though with the important shared feature that neither Foucault nor Habermas venture to define the actual content of
political action. This is defined by the participants. Thus, both Habermas and Foucault are
relations in specific contexts. Foucault is thus oriented towards phronesis, whereas Habermass orientation is towards episteme.
bottom-up thinkers as concerns the content of politics, but where Habermas thinks in a top-down moralist fashion as regards procedural
rationality having sketched out the procedures to be followed - Foucault is a bottom-up thinker as regards both process and
content. In this interpretation, Habermas would want to tell individuals and groups how to go about their affairs as regards procedure for
Foucault would
prescribe neither process nor outcome; he would only recommend a
focus on conflict and power relations as the most effective point of
departure for the fight against domination. It is because of his double bottom-up thinking that
discourse. He would not want, however, to say anything about the outcome of this procedure.
Foucault has been described as non-action oriented. Foucault (1981) says about such criticism, in a manner that would be pertinent to those
who work in the institutional setting of planning:
Its true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison...are not likely to find advice
or instructions in my books to tell them what is to be done. But my project is precisely to bring it about that they no
longer know what to do, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying
become problematic, difficult, dangerous (Miller 1993, 235). The depiction of Foucault as non-action oriented is correct to the extent
that Foucault hesitates to give directives for action, and he directly distances himself from the kinds of universal What is to be done?
45-7). Thus Foucault was openly pleased when during a revolt in some of the French prisons the prisoners in their cells
read his Discipline and Punish. They shouted the text to other prisoners, Foucault told an interviewer. I know its pretentious to
say, Foucault said, but thats a proof of a trutha political and actual truth--which started after the book was written (Dillon
The establishment of a concrete genealogy opens possibilities for action by describing the genesis of a given situation and
showing that this particular genesis is not connected to absolute historical necessity . Foucaults genealogical studies of prisons,
hospitals and sexuality demonstrate that social practices may always take an alternative form, even where there is no basis for voluntarism or
idealism. Combined with Foucaults focus on domination, it is easy to understand why this insight has been embraced by feminists and
minority groups. Elaborating genealogies of, for instance, gender and race leads to an understanding of how relations of domination between
women and men, and between different peoples, can be changed (McNay 1992, Bordo and Jaggar 1990, Fraser 1989, Benhabib and Cornell
Realrationalitt, and how these might be changed in a specific context. The problem with Foucault is that because understanding and action
have their points of departure in the particular and the local, we may come to overlook more generalised conditions concerning, for example,
institutions, constitutions and structural issues.
In sum, Foucault and Habermas agree that rationalisation and the misuse of power are among the most important problems of our time. They
disagree as to how one can best understand and act in relation to these problems. From the perspective of the history of philosophy and
political theory, the difference between Foucault and Habermas lies in the fact that Foucault works within a particularistic and contextualist
tradition, with roots in Thucydides via Machiavelli to Nietzsche. Foucault is one of the more important twentieth century exponents of this
tradition. Habermas is the most prominent living exponent of a universalistic and theorising tradition derived from Socrates and Plato,
proceeding over Kant. In power terms, we are speaking of strategic versus constitution thinking, about struggle versus control, conflict
versus consensus.
Links
Link: FISC
FISC coopted by agency pressure- doomed to fail
Setty, Faculty at Western New England University School of
Law,15 (Sudah, 2015, Western New England University School of Law,
compliance problems when the government itself brings the problem to the courts attention. 73 As such,
calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law." Talking points issued by the House GOP in
defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only "allows the
Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States." The NSA's media
defenders have similarly stressed that the NSA's eavesdropping and internet
snooping requires warrants when it involves Americans. The Washington Post's Charles
Lane told his readers: "the government needs a court-issued warrant, based
on probable cause, to listen in on phone calls." The Post's David Ignatius told Post readers that
NSA internet surveillance "is overseen by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court" and is "lawful and controlled". Tom Friedman told New York Times readers that before NSA analysts
can invade the content of calls and emails, they "have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at
the content under guidelines set by Congress." This has become the most common theme for those
primary purpose was to ensure that the US government would be barred from ever monitoring the
electronic communications of Americans without first obtaining an individualized warrant from the Fisa
court, which required evidence showing "probable cause" that the person to be surveilled was an agent of
surveillance is a US person or the call is entirely domestic. But even under the law, no individualized
warrant is needed to listen in on the calls or read the emails of Americans when they communicate with a
foreign national whom the NSA has targeted for surveillance. As a result, under the FAA, the NSA
frequently eavesdrops on Americans' calls and reads their emails without any individualized warrants
exactly that which NSA defenders, including Obama, are trying to make Americans believe does not take
place. As Yale Law professor Jack Balkin explained back in 2009: "The FISA Amendments
Act of
2008, effectively gives the President - now President Obama - the
authority to run surveillance programs similar in effect to the
warrantless surveillance program [secretly implemented by George Bush in late 2001].
That is because New Fisa no longer requires individualized targets in all surveillance programs. Some
programs may be 'vacuum cleaner' programs that listen to a great many different calls (and read a great
many e-mails) without any requirement of a warrant directed at a particular person as long as no US
person is directly targeted as the object of the program. . . . "New Fisa authorizes the creation of
surveillance programs directed against foreign persons (or rather, against persons believed to be outside
the United States) which require no individualized suspicion of anyone being a terrorist, or engaging in
any criminal activity. These programs may inevitably include many phone calls involving Americans, who
may have absolutely no connection to terrorism or to Al Qaeda." As the FAA was being enacted in mid2008, Professor Balkin explained that "Congress is now giving the President the authority to do much of
what he was probably doing (illegally) before".
Link: Congress
Congress is ineffective has no real power to stop the
surveillance state- clapper investigation proves
Setty, Faculty at Western New England University School of
Law,15 (Sudah, 2015, Western New England University School of Law,
Surveillance, Secrecy, and the Search for Meaningful Accountability,
http://digitalcommons.law.wne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1305&context=facschol, 7/2/15, AW)
The extent of congressional knowledge regarding the NSA Metadata
Program is not fully known to the public and has been the subject of
significant debate. Nonetheless, even assuming that Congress was
sufficiently informed as to the potential reach of the PATRIOT Act
with regard to surveillance 5 9 and, therefore, that the statutory
authority for the bulk data collection and storage was sound, the
ability of Congress to effect significant and meaningful ex post
oversight appears to be severely limited. Historically, congressional
hearings and investigations have been a powerful tool to rein in
executive branch overreaching. 60 However, it seems that the extreme
secrecy surrounding the NSA surveillance programs undermined the
efficacy of these oversight powers, to the point that they may have been
reduced to an ersatz form of accountability. One prominent example
stems from a Senate oversight hearing on March 12, 2013, in which
Senator Ron Wyden specifically asked Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper if the NSA was systematically gathering information
on the communications of millions of Americans. 61 Clapper denied
this, yet subsequent revelations confirmed that the broad scope of the
data collection included metadata for telephonic communications, as well
as content data for emails, texts, and other such writings. 62 After public
discussion of the discrepancy in his testimony, Clapper commented that
he gave the "least most untruthful" answer possible under the
circumstances. 63 Senator Wyden expressed disappointment and
frustration that even while under oath at an oversight hearing, Clapper
misled the Senate. lack of ability to discuss publicly whatever knowledge is
shared with Congress. 66 In fact, it remains unclear whether senators,
including Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knew
of the lapses in NSA procedure until after such information was leaked to
news sources. 67 Further revelations indicate that administration statements
made to Congress even after the Snowden disclosures were not entirely
accurate. 68 These examples are not determinative, but taken together,
they raise significant doubt to the extent of accurate information
regarding surveillance programs being made available to congressional
oversight committees, and whether the oversight committees can function as
effective accountability measures 69 without the benefit of illegally
leaked information such as the Snowden disclosures.
that let us discover and analyze what is happening in the world become ever more powerful, both
over public and private surveillance, or will we have a government that protects individual dignity and
conforms both public and private surveillance to the rule of law?
Link: Oversight
Oversight fails, just appease the people with no real
change
Greenwald, Constitutional Lawyer, 14 (Glenn, 1/17/14, The Guardian,
"Obama's NSA 'reforms' are little more than a PR attempt to mollify the
public", www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/17/obama-nsareforms-bulk-surveillance-remains, 7/3/15, AW)
In response to political scandal and public outrage , official Washington
repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out
over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals . Predictably, it
is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded
Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National
Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide
controversy. The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders
pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that
there are "serious questions that have been raised". They vow
changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen
again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make
the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty,
cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the
system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to
serious challenge. This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In
the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating
government . Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were
repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne
Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a
December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat senior
intelligence officials like matinee idols". As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an
overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA's in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s
reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any,
thus
Impacts
is not that FISA Court legitimation is phony. In fact, judicial review has real if limited effects on the system.
To sum up, neither the Constitution nor FISA aims to optimally balance security and libertyand wellunderstood difficulties in congressional intelligence oversight mean that new statutes are unlikely to fill
that gap. Likewise the existing foundational Executive Order, 12333, is at the very least out-of-date.
To sum up this Part, neither the Constitution nor FISA aims to optimally balance security and liberty and
frequently analyzed difficulties in congressional intelligence oversight mean that new statutes are unlikely
to fill that gap. Likewise the existing foundational Executive Order, 12,333, is at the very least out - of -
actually both crowds out the consideration of policy and interests (as opposed
to law and rights), and legitimates the surveillance state, making it less
susceptible to policy reform. Are there, then, non - legalistic reforms that could play a productive
part? I turn next to this issue
legalism serves as a moral code for US Intelligence Community (IC) leadership, or only as a smokescreen. I
the evidence shows that since 9/11,the IC, and specifically the NSA has not
followed the rules. Rather, the agency has resorted to legalistic justifications
in pursuit of other goalsnamely whatever might be useful in countering
terrorism. Before 9/11, the agency may have been focused on complying with FISA. But afterthat day,
believe
the NSAs approach was that it could circumvent federal statutes and the Constitution so long as there
was some visceral connection to looking for terrorists. In other words, since 9/11 ,
the moral
center of gravity in the surveillance world has focused on doing
whatever is necessary for hunting terrorists, not following the rules .
Margo also argues that the NSAs legalism equates to, for better or worse, the
empowerment of lawyers. Sign-off by lawyers is, as Margo says, an important part of the process.
Lawyer opinions gave telecommunications firms legal immunity for their cooperation with the government
capabilities and practices that the public and Congress havent yet become aware of, and have not even
begun to regulate. But calling this empowerment is misleading. We see lawyers who object to policies
that may harm civil liberties bypassed in favor of handpicked counsel who give their bosses the answers
they want. Lawyers are ratifying surveillance decisions policy makers have already made.
Thats not
http://harvardlawreview.org/2013/05/the-dangers-of-surveillance/, Accessed
on 2 July 2015, //PK@GDI)
At the level of theory, I will explain why and when surveillance is particularly dangerous and when it is not.
the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched. This disparity creates the risk of a variety of
This article interrogates one critical aspect of complexity and fracture in regulatory power.1 Specifically, it
focuses on surveillance2 as a regulatory mechanism.3 I will explore some of the complexities of this
regulatory mechanism in emerging governance systems in which private entities are engaged in sovereign
functions and public entities participate in the market. The thesis of this article is fairly straightforward:
authority over certain types of information to private enterprises and then hold those enterprises to
account on the basis of the information gathered.8 In its transnational form it can be used to construct a
set of privileged information that can be gathered and distributed voluntarily by private entities on the
basis of systems created and maintained by international public or private organizations as an alternative
Surveillance in
its various forms provides a unifying technique with which governance can be
effectuated across the boundaries of power fractures without challenging
formal regulatory power or its limits. It avoids the barrier between the public
and private spheres; it substantially increases the regulatory palette of states
without the complications of the usual limitations of public formal lawmaking
especially those of accountability and transparency . The consequences of
surveillance, particularly those consequences on the shape of governance, are to a great extent
a function of the character of the surveillance power elaborated.10 The principal effects will tend to
promote a further convergence of public and private regulatory power .11 This
to formal regulation and to provide a means of harmonizing behavior without law.9
convergence arises from a fracturing of traditional divisions of power.12 A sovereign is said to lose
its character as such when it acts, not as regulator of a market, but in the manner of a private player
within it.13 The reciprocal principle has not been accepted de jure; a private actor is not said to lose its
character as a private actor when it acts in the manner of a sovereign. Still, private players now are
required to play the role of regulator and have sought that role for themselves de facto.14 And,
increasingly, public bodies are requiring, or permitting, private entities to monitor and report on the
conduct and activities of a host of actors.15 Surveillance, then, functions as more than a descriptor of
and between assertions of private (market or personal welfare maximizing) and public (regulatory or
stakeholder welfare maximization). Surveillance cuts across bordersit embodies the techniques and
To understand
the complexities and vectors of surveillance is to grasp the shape of
converging public/private governance in this century
sensibilities of an essentially transnational response to problems of governance.17
By surrendering ourselves to
States and to traditional views of self-determination, we encourage not immortality but
premature and predictable extinction. It is a relationship that can, and must, be more widely
understood. There are great ironies involved. Although the corrosive calculus of
geopolitics has now made possible the deliberate killing of all life, populations
all over the planet turn increasingly to States for security. It is the dreadful
ingenuity of States that makes possible death in the billions, but it is in the
expressions of that ingenuity that people seek safety . Indeed, as the threat of nuclear
incontestable relationship between death and geopolitics.
annihilation looms even after the Cold War, 71 the citizens of conflicting States reaffirm their segmented
loyalties, moved by the persistent unreason that is, after all, the most indelible badge of modern
humankind. As a result, increasing human uncertainty brought about by an unprecedented vulnerability to
disappearance is likely to undermine rather than support the education required. Curiously, therefore,
before we can implement such education, we will need to reduce the perceived threat of nuclear war 72
and enlarge the belief that the short-term goal of nuclear stability is within our grasp. To make this possible
we must continue to make progress on the usual and mainstream arms control measures and on the
associated strategies of international cooperation and reconciliation. In this connection, arms control [*25]
obligations must fall not only on nuclear weapon States, but also upon non-nuclear States that threaten
others with war or even genocide. "Death," says Norbert Elias, "is the absolute end of the person. So the
greater resistance to its demythologization perhaps corresponds to the greater magnitude of danger
experienced." 73 Let us, then, reduce the magnitude of danger, both experienced and anticipated. But let
us also be wary of nurturing new mythologies, of planting false hopes that offer illusions of survival in a
post-apocalypse world. Always desperate to grasp at promises that allay the fears of personal transience,
10
these claims contradict the idea of global oneness and cosmopolis. From identification as Moslem
affairs? If it is authentic peace and an end to war crimes 11 and crimes against humanity, 12 then the
expectation of self-determination must be balanced against the needs of planetization, of a new world
order 13 in which the commonality and community of the entire human species takes precedence over the
lethal calls of separatism, ethnic rivalry, and militaristic nationalism. Poised to consider that national
the strength of a new kind of loyalty, one that recognizes the contrived character of national, religious, and
ethnic differences and the primacy of human solidarity. Although this kind of loyalty is certainly difficult to
imagine, especially when one considers that organization into and belonging within competitive herds still
offers most people a desperately needed sense of self-worth, there seems to be no alternative .
Whether we seek an accommodation of Palestinians 15 and Israelis 16 in the Middle East, of Catholics and
Protestants in Northern Ireland, or of different nationalities in Eastern Europe, in the former USSR, or in the
even of "free" peoples, the expectations of inter-State competition may include war and the mass killing of
impotent by Realpolitik, this commitment to so-called power politics is itself an expression of control by the
Impact: Rights
Mass surveillance violates human rights and is constantly
justified under the current system of legalism
Guild, professor at Queen Mary University of London, 12 May
2014 (Elspeth, What does mass surveillance do to Human Rights, Open
Democracy, https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/elspethguild/what-does-mass-surveillance-do-to-human-rights, Accessed on 2 July
2015, //PK@GDI)
Two interconnected but separate human rights issues arise as regards mass
surveillance. The first, which is the most fundamental but the most frequently
ignored, is the right of every person to respect for his or her private and
family life. The second, which is generally the subject of more substantial
political and media noise is the duty of states to protect personal data. Those
political actors who have an interest in promoting the legality of mass
surveillance usually put forward two arguments. The first is that national and
international security is always an exception to both the duty of every state
to respect peoples privacy and the duty to protect personal data. This is the
most trenchantly defended of arguments as when this one falls away, those
actors seeking to justify mass surveillance find themselves on very weak
legal ground indeed. The second is that states obligations to protect personal
data are subject to very different rules and requirements according to the
political preferences of different states. Thus as there is no harmonization of
the specific rules as to what is acceptable data protection internationally,
states which are exercising their national and international security
prerogatives only need to fulfil their own national data protection rules.
on public resources, why not identify them in advance and exclude them from public programs and other
opportunities? The more powerful and effective our technologies of surveil- lance and analysis become, the
general intellect: the internet. Such acts of courage bring with them the truth
that our world is enmeshed in an invisible layer of technology and technics
that seek to trace every aspect of our affective (body) and intellectual (mind)
existence, to codify it in the ghost worlds of military-corporate shadowsystems that can be used as inscriptions to control not our actual lives but
our inscribed life as situated in the virtual. Our virtual life becomes a
potential tool that can then be activated by power as it sees fit: as a military,
commercial, or exclusionary tool of law.
Impact: Panopticon
The surveillance state transcends panoptic governance to
create links between the traces of every person
Balkin, professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School, 1
January 2008 (Jack M., The Constitution in the National Surveillance
State, Yale Law School,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1224&context=fss_papers, Accessed on 2 July 2015, //PK@GDI)
Decades ago Michel Foucault argued that modern societies had become
increasingly focused on watching and measuring people in order to control
them, to normalize their behavior and to make them docile and obedient . 5 1
His famous example was Jeremy Bentham's idea of a Panopticon-a prison designed so that the prisoners
By making surveillance
ubiquitous, governments and private organizations could discourage behavior
they deemed unusual or abnormal. Today's National Surveillance State goes
beyond Foucault's Panoptic model. Government's most important technique
of control is no longer watching or threatening to watch. It is analyzing and
drawing connections between data. Much public and private surveillance occurs
without any knowledge that one is watched . More to the point, data mining
technologies allow the state and business enterprises to record perfectly
innocent behavior that no one is particularly ashamed of and draw
surprisingly powerful inferences about people's behavior, beliefs, and
attitudes. 5 3 Over time, these tools will only become more effective. We leave
traces of ourselves continually, including our location, our communications
contacts, our consumption choices-even our DNA.
could always be watched but would not know exactly when. 5 2
to violence in that it recognises the other as an agent, but if the strength of modern power is such that the
other uses his agency only to normalize himself, then perhaps we should prefer an honest violence to a
deceitful power. It is this possibility that gives urgency to the question of what constitutes a worthwhile
We need forms of agency that resist not only the overt violence so
often associated with the state, but, at least as importantly, the normalizing
effects of a pastoral-power taken over by the modern state . As Foucault insisted,
"the political, social, philosophical 16 problem of our days is not to try to
liberate the individual from the state, and from the state's institutions, but to
liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is
linked to the state."35 His work on an ethic of care for the self provides us with suggestions as to
form of agency.
Impact: Race
The surveillance state is inherently racist and cultivates
racism to legitimize itself to the public
Kudnani and Kumar 15 (Arun, professor at NYU, Deepa, associate
lead to a kind of radical condemnation of many instances of bio-politics, such as the attempt to develop humane
processing procedures for asylum seekers, the idea of mapping zones of indistinction would seem to locate arenas of
(of women, the disabled, prisoners, the insane, the poor, the indigene, the refugee, etc). Note that Contretemps 5,
December 2004 28 bio-power today holds the promise of extraordinary solutions to disability, criminality and insanity. The
inclusion of women through their state of exclusion, also, would appear to raise interesting questions concerning
sovereign violence given womens historic biological relationship to the reproduction and care of human life. This
relationship, itself excepted under the universality of law, is thus produced as bare life; and women are required to take
Kusina 6 (Professor of Philosophy @ Bowling Green State University (Jeanne, The Wolf at the Door: Agamben's
State of Exception, http://iph.fsu.edu/interculture/pdfs/kusina%20lost.pdf, October 22, 2006, DOA 7/3/15, AMB@GDI)
In Schmitts formulation of the state of exception,
the state of exception is created no movement is made to return it to an allegedly normal order. Having arrived at the
position of the homo sacer, the inhabitants of such zones seemingly exist in something of a timeless state of suspended
animation. Attention shifts as one crisis is inevitably followed by a new crisis close on its heels. Gradually, the exception
has become the rule; moreover, Agamben alleges,
As the severity
of the situation escalated so did the violence; and, amidst the
swelling floodwaters, New Orleans became a lawless zone of
exception within which anyone, it seemed, could be killed at any time.
governments declaration of martial law initially prioritized protecting businesses from looters.
Millions of people watched the human drama unfold on television for several long, painful days, utterly dismayed by what
appeared to be the governments total lack of response to the horrific events that were unfolding. Contrary to the myths
of sovereign protection that so often motivate an acceptance of biopolitic regulation ,
Hurricane Katrina
exposed the paradigmatic structure of the camp by unmasking the
law as being little more than a technicality, a force that is felt only in
its withdrawal and, ultimately, its total abandonment. This permits
us to once again speculate on the temporal rhetoric of urgency that
always seems so insistent on carving out an isolated space of
exception. The temporal element that was so fleeting prior to the exception appears to metaphorically change
speed again. For it seems as though often, once the state of exception is achieved, the call of future history that was so
desperately in need of action seems noticeably less pressing, perhaps even a distant possibility. For example, by having
gone through with the invasion of Iraq but in not being able to establish lasting order there, the nation of Iraq came to
mark a territory of exception. Curiously, the rhetoric of time employed by the Bush administration also appeared to slow
down considerably in concurrence with these events. Moving away from continuing to call upon the American people to
become the pre-emptive authors of their own history, within the next few years the President would frequently make
remarks that expressed longevity, perhaps even complacency, rather than urgency: Imagine a world in which they were
able to control governments, a world awash with oil and they would use oil resources to punish industrialized nations If
we allow them to do this, if we retreat from Iraq, if we don't uphold our duty to support those who are desirous to live in
liberty, 50 years from now history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity, and demand to know why we did not
act.
Nations peacekeeping operations. The potentialities for the care and the manipulation of the biological processes of
life and of the powers of death have never appeared greater than they do today. But how do we consider this problem as a
they lie at a deeper strata?My concern in this paper is to consider issues of life and death as political issues, to locate a
bio-politics, a politics of life, and a thanato-politics, a politics of death, within our ways of thinking about and imagining
politics. I follow two recent theorists, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, who are convinced that not only must we
consider how we exercise powers of life and death in modern politics but how the very notion of politics and political
community are intimately related to such issues. At issue is the power we call sovereign power, and its relation to this
politics of life and death. I shall in turn consider four possible theses that can be derived from the work of these thinkers
and from other twentieth century critical and legal theorists.
century with the concerns for the health, housing, habitation, welfare and living conditions of the population. Such an
observation leads him to place his concerns with health, discipline, the body, and sexuality within a more general horizon.
Again the notion of bio-politics is quite complex. The idea of the population as a kind of species body subject to biopolitical knowledge and power operating in concert with the individual body subject to disciplinary powers would appear
central.11 No matter how bloody things were under the exercise of sovereign power with its atrocious crimes and
it is only with the advent of this modern form of the politics of life
that the same logic and technology applied to the care and
development of human life is applied to the destruction of entire
populations. The link between social welfare and mass slaughters
can at times appear to be a fairly direct one. Of one of its first manifestations in German
retributions,
police science, Foucault argues, it wields its power over living beings as living beings, and its politics,
therefore has to be a bio-politics .
there is a hesitation, a point of indeterminacy, in this relation between bio-politics and thanato-politics. Foucault seems to
identify a puzzle or an aporia of contemporary politics, which he cannot resolve or which may itself be irresolvable. The
coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented to the care of individual life is
something puzzling, he states.13 But he immediately adds I dont mean that mass slaughters are the effect, the result,
the logical consequence of our rationality, nor do I mean that
individuals since it has the right to kill millions of people. After proceeding through this set
of inconclusive negatives he avers, as if trying to defer the answer to the questions he poses: It is this rationality, and the
death and life game which takes place in it, that Id like to investigate from a historical point of view. One aspect of this
historical investigation occurred in Foucaults 1976 lectures. These lectures cover such concerns as the seventeenthcentury historical-political narrative of the war of the races, and the biological and social class re-inscriptions of racial
discourse in the nineteenth century.14 He concludes with the development of the biological state racisms and the
genocidal politics of the twentieth century, including a radical analysis of the Nazi state and of socialism. From this
perspective, there is a certain potentiality within the human sciences which, when alloyed to notions such as race, can
help make Contretemps 5, December 2004 20 intelligible the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Such lectures seem to
make the totalitarian rule of the twentieth century a capstone on the histories of confinement, internment and
punishment that had made up his genealogical work. This thesis is perhaps close to the work of the first generation of the
latter presents the Holocaust as something that must be understood as endogenous to Western civilization
and its processes of rationalization rather than as an aberrant psychological, social or political pathology.
Alternative
Criticism
Constant criticism and trashing of the legal system
exposes true legal thought the liberation and fate of
humanity is at stake
Hutchinson and Monahan in 84
n124
is at stake.
We do not mean to
suggest that the extensive CLS critiques of existing law and legal theory are purely negative and without constructive
expressing reality, possibilities of fashioning a future that might at least partially realize a substantive notion of justice
instead of the abstract, rightsy, traditional, bourgeois notions of justice that generate so much of the contradictory
scholarship. One must start by knowing what is going on, by freeing oneself from the mystified delusions embedded in our
consciousness by the liberal legal world view. I am not defending a form of scholarship that simply offers another
affirmative presentation; rather, I am advocating negative, Critical activity as the only path that might lead to a liberated
future.The
Criticism Solvency
Alt solves Criticism is key to challenging the surveillance
system
Setty, 15 (Sudha, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Development & Intellectual Life, Western New England University
School of Law, SYMPOSIUM: Surveillance, Secrecy, and the Search for Meaningful Accountability, Winter, Stanford Journal of International Law,
51 Stan. J Int'l L. 69, DOA 7/02/15, AMB@GDI)
The surveillance and data collection that are part of the NSA
Metadata Program have been largely validated by two forms of
relatively weak judicial review: Article III courts have, until recently, largely refused to hear the
merits of cases challenging the government surveillance, instead finding that plaintiffs are unable to satisfy the standing
requirement,
n29
The
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), tasked with determining the legality of many of the government's
surveillance requests, has largely acquiesced to the government's requests over the years .
Cases litigated
after the Snowden revelations of June 2013 suggest, however, that
the judicial deference offered to the government in many previous
counterterrorism cases may be curtailed in light of public attention
and critique of the NSA Metadata Program, as well as
a [*76] reinvigorated judicial embrace of the privacy protections
embodied in the Fourth Amendment. n31
n30
n192
stage merely to have the spotlight focused on themselves.Instead, they want to revolutionize the whole theory and
performance of the American legal drama. They do not simply wish to exchange the scripts and the sentiments of
Shakespeare for those of Brecht or Fugard. The message and the medium must change
The focus of attention must shift from the artifacts of the juristic stage to the reality of the citizen audience. The ultimate
goal must be to [*244] promote "street theater," the spontaneous involvement of people in everyday situations. n193
worlds, the CLS project is to identify the role played by law and legal reasoning in the process through which social
Realists exposed indeterminacy in legal doctrine, the Critical scholars abstract from legal materials the underlying
using elemental beliefs and assumptions that "ma[kes] a particular version of society stand in place of the indefinite
possibilities of human connection." n79 The potency of belief-structures or ideologies lies in their tendency to establish a
dynamic of their own and to confer on legal doctrine a false air of naturalness. For the Critical scholars, legal
consciousness is a cerebral tool for the suppression of time: It is a device to hide or deny the fundamental truth that
everything is in a process of changing or becoming. n80
Rejection
The alt is to vote negative in favor of critique before
actionwe accept power is inevitable, yet understand it
can be productive or destructive but only powerful
analysis of domination can challenge discourse we are
faced with and work as a pre-requisite to action
Flyvbjerg and Richardson 2
Habermass main complaint about Foucault is what Habermas sees as Foucaults relativism. Thus Habermas (1987, 276)
harshly dismisses Foucaults genealogical historiographies as relativistic, cryptonormative illusory science. Such critique
for relativism is correct, if by relativistic we mean unfounded in norms that can be rationally and universally grounded .
Foucaults norms are not foundationalist like Habermass: they are expressed in a desire
to challenge every abuse of power, whoever the author, whoever the
victims (Miller 1993, 316) and in this way to give new impetus, as far and
wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom (Foucault 1984a, 46).
Foucault here is the Nietzschean democrat, for whom any form of government - liberal or
totalitarian - must be subjected to analysis and critique based on a
will not to be dominated, voicing concerns in public and withholding
consent about anything that appears to be unacceptable. Such norms
cannot be given a universal grounding independent of those people
and that context, according to Foucault. Nor would such grounding be
desirable, since it would entail an ethical uniformity with the kind of
utopian-totalitarian implications that Foucault would warn against in
any context, be it that of Marx, Rousseau or Habermas: The search for a
form of morality acceptable by everyone in the sense that everyone
would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic to me
Rabinow 1986, 119). In a Foucauldian interpretation
empower it .
Instead, Foucault focuses on the analysis of evils and shows restraint in matters of commitment to
ideas and systems of thought about what is good for man, given the historical experience that few things have produced
more suffering among humans than strong commitments to implementing utopian visions of the good.
been read by planning theorists as negative institutionalised oppression, expressed most chillingly in his analysis of the disciplinary regime of
the prison in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979). However, it is
The law,
to be both neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which has always
exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171).
This is
an effective approach to
For
Foucault praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or
theories. Freedom is a practice , and its ideal is not a utopian
absence of power. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to consensus,
is for Foucault the most solid basis for the practice of freedom. Whereas
Habermas emphasises procedural macro politics, Foucault stresses substantive micro politics ,
though with the important shared feature that neither Foucault nor Habermas venture to define the actual content of
political action. This is defined by the participants. Thus, both Habermas and Foucault are
relations in specific contexts. Foucault is thus oriented towards phronesis, whereas Habermass orientation is towards episteme.
bottom-up thinkers as concerns the content of politics, but where Habermas thinks in a top-down moralist fashion as regards procedural
rationality having sketched out the procedures to be followed - Foucault is a bottom-up thinker as regards both process and
content. In this interpretation, Habermas would want to tell individuals and groups how to go about their affairs as regards procedure for
Foucault would
prescribe neither process nor outcome; he would only recommend a
focus on conflict and power relations as the most effective point of
departure for the fight against domination. It is because of his double bottom-up thinking that
discourse. He would not want, however, to say anything about the outcome of this procedure.
Foucault has been described as non-action oriented. Foucault (1981) says about such criticism, in a manner that would be pertinent to those
who work in the institutional setting of planning:
Its true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison...are not likely to find advice
or instructions in my books to tell them what is to be done. But my project is precisely to bring it about that they no
longer know what to do, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying
become problematic, difficult, dangerous (Miller 1993, 235). The depiction of Foucault as non-action oriented is correct to the extent
that Foucault hesitates to give directives for action, and he directly distances himself from the kinds of universal What is to be done?
45-7). Thus Foucault was openly pleased when during a revolt in some of the French prisons the prisoners in their cells
read his Discipline and Punish. They shouted the text to other prisoners, Foucault told an interviewer. I know its pretentious to
say, Foucault said, but thats a proof of a trutha political and actual truth--which started after the book was written (Dillon
The establishment of a concrete genealogy opens possibilities for action by describing the genesis of a given situation and
showing that this particular genesis is not connected to absolute historical necessity . Foucaults genealogical studies of prisons,
hospitals and sexuality demonstrate that social practices may always take an alternative form, even where there is no basis for voluntarism or
idealism. Combined with Foucaults focus on domination, it is easy to understand why this insight has been embraced by feminists and
minority groups. Elaborating genealogies of, for instance, gender and race leads to an understanding of how relations of domination between
women and men, and between different peoples, can be changed (McNay 1992, Bordo and Jaggar 1990, Fraser 1989, Benhabib and Cornell
Realrationalitt, and how these might be changed in a specific context. The problem with Foucault is that because understanding and action
have their points of departure in the particular and the local, we may come to overlook more generalised conditions concerning, for example,
institutions, constitutions and structural issues.
In sum, Foucault and Habermas agree that rationalisation and the misuse of power are among the most important problems of our time. They
disagree as to how one can best understand and act in relation to these problems. From the perspective of the history of philosophy and
political theory, the difference between Foucault and Habermas lies in the fact that Foucault works within a particularistic and contextualist
tradition, with roots in Thucydides via Machiavelli to Nietzsche. Foucault is one of the more important twentieth century exponents of this
tradition. Habermas is the most prominent living exponent of a universalistic and theorising tradition derived from Socrates and Plato,
proceeding over Kant. In power terms, we are speaking of strategic versus constitution thinking, about struggle versus control, conflict
versus consensus.
Generic
The alternative is keystatus quo is oppressed by
oppressive modernities
Flyvbjerg and Richardson 2Aalborg University, Department of Development and Planning AND
Department of Town and Regional Planning (Bent Flyvbjerg and Tim Richardson, Planning and Foucault In Search of the
Dark Side of Planning Theory http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/DarkSide2.pdf, DOA 7/3/15, AMB@GDI)
the majority of
planning theorists: they know where they would like to go but not how
to get there. The focus of modernity and of planning theory is on
what should be done. We suggest a reorientation toward what is
actually done - towards verita effettuale. In this way we may gain a better grasp - less idealistic, more grounded - of what
planning is and what the strategies and tactics that may help change it for the better. Foucauldian analysis, unlike Habermasian
needed for moving toward to the ideal. This, in our analysis, is the quandary of normative idealists, including
normativism, offers a type of planning theory which is more useful in understanding how planning is actually done, and
offers better prospects for those interested in bringing about democratic social change through planning. Habermas, among
others, views conflict in society as dangerous, corrosive and potentially destructive of social order, and therefore in need of being contained
and resolved. In a Foucauldian interpretation, conversely
existence of conflict. A strong understanding of democracy, and of the role of planning within it, must therefore be based
on thought that places conflict and power at its centre, as Foucault does and Habermas does not. We
suggest that
an understanding of planning that is practical, committed and ready
for conflict provides a superior paradigm to planning theory than an
understanding that is discursive, detached and consensusdependent. Exploring the dark side of planning theory offers more
than a negative, oppressive confirmation of our inability to make a
difference. It suggests that we can do planning in a constructive
ATs
AT Perm
Perm failsthe aff would just be inserting power into their
already biopolitical methadologypure alt framing is
critical
Flyvbjerg and Richardson 02 (Aalborg University, Department of Development and Planning AND
Department of Town and Regional Planning (Bent Flyvbjerg and Tim Richardson, Planning and Foucault In Search of the
Dark Side of Planning Theory http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/DarkSide2.pdf, 2002, DOA 7/3/15, AMB@GDI)
Abstract
In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jrgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an
those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning
In this paper we take a few short steps of this long trek, and find our
progress blocked by an unresolved difficulty with one such emerging body of theory. We encounter an emerging paradigm which asserts a
new, Habermasian communicative rationality for planning (e.g. Innes 1995), which is just beginning to be subjected to sustained critique on its
treatment of power (e.g. Huxley 1998, Huxley and Yiftachel 1998).
Some planning theorists may feel they have already explored this route, and that the obstacles to a Habermasian paradigm have been
productive interpretation of Foucaults work appears to have been missed, or dismissed, which has facilitated the rejection
change. Because of these weaknesses, we believe that this approach to theory building is
highly problematic for planning.
Some theorists might contend that using Foucault, they have
repaired the weaknesses in communicative theory which are
exposed by juxtaposition with Foucaults work. We believe, however, that this cannot be done
convincingly. More importantly we are concerned that, in spite of regular reference to Foucault in planning theory literature, there has not
so far been a cogent exploration of the full import of his work for planning. In turning to Foucaults work, we argue that
AT No Link
The justifications of the affirmative plan are normalizing
the current state of bad biopower, where the surveillance
state makes reforms to be better able to hide their
abuses of power. This turns the case meaning that their
apparent solvency is just another ploy to subdue the
populace into complacency meaning that they arent able
to solve for the harms presented in the 1ac.
Education:
1) Depth is more prevalent with floating PIKs vs. debating only what is
presented in the 1NC
Real World:
1) In real world policies and plans always change to lead to better
development
Defensive Answers-
1) The pik is in the 1NC meaning it is just as predictable anyother off case
argument.
Fairness:
1) Piks do not change the advocacy of the neg. It supports its claims on
the K with the correct methodology revealed through the round.
2) Piks can be answered with many of the same answers as any other CP
or kritik. To be what the affirmative calls fair that means we dont get
CPs or Ks which kills core negative ground
PIK Interpretation:
There are nothing wrong with floating piks if they solve the methodology we
are critiquing.
Aff
Perm
Perm: do the plan while endorsing criticism exigencies
demand action in the face of criticism
Campbell 98 (David Campbell, Intl Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and
Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, DOA 7/3/15, AMB@GDI)
to
itself, the incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is always
very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most
perverse calculation. The necessity of calculating the incalculable
thus responds to a duty that inhabits the instant of madness
and compels the decision to avoid the bad, the perverse
calculation, even the worst. This is the duty that also
dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting
point, the at least necessary condition, for the
organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms.
And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns
when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the
perverse, and the worst as those violences we recognize all
too well without yet having thought them through, the
crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or
nationalist fanaticism.
Reforms Work/Perm
Distinguishing between authoritarian and democratic
information states solves privacy, freedom, and
democratic participation
Balkin, professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School,
1 January 2008 (Jack M., The Constitution in the National Surveillance
State, Yale Law School,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1224&context=fss_papers, Accessed on 2 July 2015, //PK@GDI)
If some form of the National Surveillance State is inevitable, how do
we continue to protect individual rights and constitutional
government? Today's challenge is similar to that faced during the first half of the twentieth century,
when government transitioned into the Welfare State and the National Security State. Americans had to
figure out how to tame these new forms of governance within constitutional boundaries. It is no accident
that this period spawned both the New Deal-with its vast increase in government power-and the Civil
misers. Like gluttons they grab as much information as possible because this helps maximize their power.
state secrets, and they multiply secret rules and regulations, which lets them claim to obey the law without
having to account for what they do. In this way they avoid accountability for violating people's rights and
for their own policy failures. Thus, information gluttony and information miserliness are two sides of the
same coin: both secure governments' power by using information to control their populations, to prevent
inquiry into their own operations, to limit avenues of political accountability, and to facilitate self-serving
Democratic
states recognize that access and disclosure help prevent
governments from manipulating their citizens. They protect
individual privacy because surveillance encourages abuses of power
and inhibits freedom and democratic participation. Thus being an
information gourmet and an information philanthropist are also
Theory
PIKs Bad
A. Interpretation: Floating PIKS arent legitimate
B. Standards
Ground
1) Floating PIKS steal Aff ground. They cant advocate against the K if it
encompasses their entire case. This destroys the aff ground for
offense. This means that the neg can just moot the 1AC
Predictability
1) Piks let the neg be a moving target
2) Time skew
Fairness
1) Neg can change advocacy during the block which ruins 2AC answers
and skews 1AR
2) Impossible for the affirmative to effectively answer a floating PIK
Predictability
1) Piks let the neg be a moving target
2) Time skew
Education
1) No in round education when the negative team can just change the
debate mid round
CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS, Harvard Law Review, 2007, Vol. 120, February 2007,
DOA 7/02/15, AMB@GDI)
jects,212 anti-theory theory,213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215
practice over theory,216 and chaos and openness over order and formality. As a result, the
contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive vision of common social claims, but rather
the
commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the
civil rights movement has disappeared.217 There is no unifying discourse or set of
engages in the description of fragmented efforts. As Professor Joel Handler argues,
values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor Handler warns
[E]veryone else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives . . . .218 Intertwined with the resignation
from law and policy, the new bromide of neither left nor right has become axiomatic only for some.219
The contemporary critical legal consciousness informs the scholarship of those who are interested in progressive social
activism, but less so that of those who are interested, for example, in a more competitive securities market . Indeed, an
interesting recent development has been the rise of conservative public interest lawyer[ing].220
Although public interest law was originally associated exclusively with liberal projects, in the past three
decades conservative advocacy groups have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of
traditional legal strategies to promote their causes.221 This growth in conservative advocacy is
particularly salient in juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive advocacy. Most recently, some
thinkers have even suggested that there may be something inherent in the lefts conception of social
change focused as it is on participation and empowerment that produces a unique distrust of legal
expertise.222 Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal
cooptation effect here can be explained in terms of the most profound risk of the typology that of
legitimation. The common pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in
dominant structures by pointing, for example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to assume that
specific instances of counterhegemonic activities translate into a more complete transformation. This
At the same time, the elephant in the room the rising level of economic inequality is left unaddressed
and comes to be understood as natural and inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that
critical theorists decry as losers self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see
systemic losses as the product of their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as
representing the boundaries of their willed reality. The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often
fundamentally performative, obscuring the distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive.
The
emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a microcosm of the whole and the audience is national
and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to
ethnographic studies from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the
latter including works on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres
was that each individual story could translate into a time of the nation body of knowledge and
motivation.227 In contemporary legal thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the
larger, translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and
grassroots groups, few new local-statenational federations have emerged in the United States since the
1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth
century are in decline.228 There is, therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an
absent intermediate public sphere, which has been termed the missing middle by Professor Theda
been a key focus of legal thinkers over the past several decades. The aggregate impact of emerging schools of thought
challenging the value of legal reform in producing social change has been the development of a contemporary critical
Critical claims go
further than simply expressing disappointment in the capacity of the
legal system to achieve the desired goals of a social movement. An
argument that has become increasingly prevalent in legal scholarship states
that the law often brings more harm than good to social movements
that rely on legal strategies to advance their goals. The law entices
groups to choose legal strategies to advance their social goals but
ultimately proves to be a detrimental path. The negative effect is
generally understood as "legal cooptation" - a process by which the focus on legal
legal consciousness - a conventional wisdom [*939] about the relative inefficacy of law. n1
reform narrows the causes, deradicalizes the agenda, legitimizes ongoing injustices, and diverts energies away from more
effective and transformative alternatives. Consequently, the argument proceeds, the turn to the law actually reinforces
existing institutions and ideologies. As they engage with the law, social reform groups become absorbed by the system
even as they struggle against it.
language games and terminology which are used (often unreflectively) by the officials inside the legal system. The
CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS, Harvard Law Review, 2007, Vol. 120, February 2007,
DOA 7/02/15, AMB@GDI)
extralegal
activism tends to operate on a more divided and hence a smaller
scale than earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas. Consequently,
within critical discourse there is a need to recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action. We should
question the narrative that imagines consciousness-raising as
directly translating into action and action as directly translating into
change. Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is questionable whether forms of activism that
are opposed to programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact,
The advantage of an externally oriented approach lies in its critical distance, in its ability to present before our eyes things
that happen behind our backs. Ideally, these external insights can be folded back into the internal practice to improve it.
For example, if a legal theorist can convince a judge that she has an unconscious class, race, or gender bias, this insight
might affect her future decisions. The external perspective also brings to light legal notions that are silently assumed in
the ordinary practice of law but which seem artificial and problematic when considered from a distance. For instance, law
students are essentially thrown into a system that they are forced to accept in order to function, such as the feudal
classifications that haunt contemporary property law, with its fee simple determinables, springing remainders, and the
seen in Marx's claim that jurisprudence is a reflection of class interests,[46] in Nietzsche's claim that
democracy and equal rights constitute a type of "slave morality,"[47] and in Foucault's claim that the
because the critique is so far removed from the practice of law that
it
Putnam summarized this point nicely: Many thinkers have fallen into Nietzsche's error of telling us they
had a "better" morality than the entire tradition; in each case they only produced a monstrosity, for all
they could do was arbitrarily wrench certain values out of their context while ignoring others. We can only
hope to produce a more rational conception of rationality or a better conception of morality if we operate
from within our tradition . . . .[53] While we must interrogate our traditions, there is no sense in escaping
them altogether because that would leave us homeless. As Richard Rorty is fond of saying, "
We have
to start from where we are ."[54] To paraphrase Putnam, we can only hope to
form a more rational legal system by working within the present
system without fetishizing it.[55] This point can be illustrated by looking at the failures and
successes of external feminist theory. When Catharine MacKinnon pronounces that "the state is male,"[56]
the critique is so total that it seems to leave no room for changing the system without displacing it entirely.
However, this position is belied by MacKinnon's undisputed efforts at reforming this "male" system from
within.[57] Feminist theory succeeds when it steps into legal doctrine and points out, for example, that the
legal definition of rape contains a male bias (in requiring physical resistance by rape victims) or that the
public-private split which runs through the law has traditionally left women in an unprotected private
realm.[58] Here, as elsewhere, external critics need to translate or mediate their message so that the
the internal perspective [*143] is reduced to folly, confusion, and ignorance-judges are tools of the bourgeoisie, n60
modern day inquisitors, n61 or mere conduits for reinforcing social hierarchies, such as corporate and administrative
bureaucracies. n62 The problem here is that the internal side of law is reduced to blind ideological reflexes, much as
behaviorism reduced the inner experience of human emotions to stimulus and response. The external characterization
fails to capture the reality of legal practice in which judges weigh policies and principles, struggle to achieve justice, and
occasionally question the law and its fundamental assumptions.
While
manipulation of microbes to perform specific tasks. Experts are divided as to the risks involved in this new
technology, but they could be tremendous, especially if someone were to release, accidentally or
Mass
surveillance could help greatly here, by catching lethal pandemics in their
earliest stages, or beforehand, if we were to see one being created artificially.
It could also expose lax safety standards or dangerous practices in legitimate
organisations. Surveillance could allow for quicker quarantines, and more effective
treatment of pandemics. Medicines and doctors could be rushed to exactly the right places, and
malevolently, infectious agents deliberately engineered for high transmissibility and deadliness.
micro-quarantines could be instituted. More dramatic measures, such as airport closures, are hard to
implement on a large scale, but these quick-response tactics could be implemented narrowly and
selectively. Most importantly, those infected could be rapidly informed of their condition, allowing them to
the movements and actions of those who fell ill would make it much easier to research the causes and
pathology of diseases. You can imagine how many lives would have been saved had AIDS been sniffed out
by epidemiologists more swiftly.
Indeed, there are whole new bodies of research that could emerge from the
data provided by mass surveillance. Instead of formulating theories and
laboriously recruiting a biased and sometimes unwilling group for testing,
social scientists, economists and epidemiologists could use surveillance data
to test their ideas. And they could do it from home, immediately, and have
access to the worlds entire population. Many theories could be rapidly
confirmed or discarded, with great benefit to society. The panopticon would
be a research nirvana.
Oversight Solves
Oversight of the executive branch is the most important
thing we can do to solve the intelligence state
Balkin, 08
Jack, Prof of Law @ Yale, National Surveillance State, 93 Minn. L. Rev. 2 20082009, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1224&context=fss_papers
Oversight of executive branch officials may be the single most important goal
in securing freedom in the National Surveillance State. Without appropriate
checks and oversight mechanisms, executive officials will too easily slide into
the bad tendencies that characterize authoritarian information states. They
will increase secrecy, avoid accountability, cover up mistakes, and confuse
their interest with the public interest.