2015 NDI 6WS Biometrics Af

Addendum

Biometrics Addendum

1AC Cards/Impacts

Uniqueness -- Biometrics Increasing

Biometrics attempt to enforce the normalization of bodily
identities
Clarkson 14 [Nicholas L. Clarkson (PhD candidate in Gender Studies @ Indiana
University), Biometrics, Duke University Press, TSQ Volume 1, Numbers 12, May
2014, http://tsq.dukejournals.org/content/1/1-2/35.full]
The events of September 11, 2001, offered a rationale for expanding and legitimizing surveillance practices already

Biometricstechnologies that measure

the body, often with the intent of identifying individuals 1featured significantly in that
in use or under development in the United States.

expansion. While full-body scanners at airport security checkpoints have been the most prominent face of this

biometric technologies, such as fingerprint

scans, iris and retinal scans, facial and hand geometry analyzers, and gait
signature analysis, among others, also feature in security discussions and
practices. Proponents of these technologies often argue that objective computer analyses provide better
expansion for many US residents, other

security than human agents while avoiding the liability of racial profiling. However, cultural critics of biometrics

these machines are infrastructurally encoded with

assumptions about race, gender, and ability and thereby continue to
enforce bodily norms consistent with profiling practices (Pugliese 2007, 2010). The
have argued that

analog antecedents of contemporary digitized biometrics highlight the legacy of biometrics as techniques of

British colonists used fingerprinting to distinguish Indian

subjects, whom British officers could not otherwise tell apart (Pugliese 2007: 120).
Furthermore, practices of measuring the body arose from the racist science of
anthropometry, a branch of physical anthropology that sought to
determine intelligence, for example, through a system of cranial
measurements. These cranial measurements were used to support arguments
that white men were more intelligent and civilized than women and the
other races (Pugliese 2007; Amoore and Hall 2009; Magnet 2011). Though anthropometry is widely
subjugation.2 For example,

discredited, biometrics researchers continue to cite anthropometric methods (Magnet 2011: 39). Sir Francis Galton's
use of the term biometry additionally highlights the connection between anthropometry and contemporary
biometrics. In 1910, Galton used this term to describe the process of collecting measurements in service of
anthropometric hypotheses.3 Though practices of measuring the body have a long history, the contemporary
meaning of biometrics appeared in the early 1980s. The Oxford English Dictionary's first noted use of the term
appeared in American Banker in 1981, in which authors hoped that biometrics would prove useful for unspecified

biometric surveillance
systems proliferated in tandem with neoliberal reforms before their
exponential expansion under the rubric of homeland security . In the midst of
banking operations.4 This is consistent with Kelly Gates's (2011) claim that

the continuing proliferation of biometric technologies, transgender theory and trans bodies provide a unique

when trans bodies confound

body scanners and individuals with dark skin tones reveal the racialized
calibrations of facial geometry analysis, we are reminded that gender and
race remain central to contemporary identity projects in spite of claims to
the contrary by the biometrics industry.5 Gates argues that biometric systems
respond to the need to bind identities to bodies while our identity
information supposedly circulates untethered through computer networks .
vantage point from which to critique such developments. In particular,

Because our vocabularies of gender and race have such limited ability to provide useful information about an
individual, one might think that attempts to secure identities to bodies would be minimally invested in gender or
race. Nevertheless,

manufacturers persistently encode normative assumptions

about gender and race into biometric systems even as they claim to
produce objective technologies. Beyond the utility of trans bodies for highlighting the gendered
and raced assumptions of biometrics, it is also crucial for the lives of transpeople that we continue to investigate

the most vulnerable

transpeople are the ones most exposed to mechanisms of surveillance .
and theorize these developments. As Dean Spade emphasizes in Normal Life (2011),

Biometrics are not only deployed to protect expensive, privatized resources (such as banking assets); these
techniques are frequently imposed upon the most vulnerable populations in the most coercive relationships. This
includes mandated fingerprint scanning for welfare recipients, retinal and fingerprint scanning for prisoners, and
fingerprint scanning for migrants to the United States through the Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT

For trans theory, then,

biometrics are a focal point for examining the biopolitical nexus of
gendered, raced, and sexualized concerns. Exploring the connections
between our experiences of biometrics and those of other, similarly
targeted groups reveals the bodily norms encoded into and enforced by
these technologies.
program (Magnet 2011; Department of Homeland Security 2013).

Biometrics -- Violent
Abstraction from experience renders the body open to
interpretation and discrimination.
Haggerty & Ericson 2K [Kevin D. Haggerty (Professor of Criminology &
Sociology @ University of Alberta), & Richard V. Ericson (Professor of Criminology
and Sociology @ University of Toronto), The surveillant assemblage, British Journal
of Sociology Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 4 (December 2000) pp. 605622,
http://bigo.zgeist.org/students/readings/IPS2011/8/Haggerty%20ericson
%202000.pdf]
A great deal of surveillance is directed toward the human body. The
observed body is of a distinctively hybrid composition. First it is broken
down by being abstracted from its territorial setting. It is then
reassembled in diferent settings through a series of data flows. The result
is a decorporealized body, a data double of pure virtuality. The monitored
body is increasingly a cyborg; a flesh-technology-information amalgam
(Haraway 1991). Surveillance now involves an interface of technology and
corporeality and is comprised of those surfaces of contact or interfaces
between organic and non-organic orders, between life forms and webs of
information, or between organs/body parts and entry/projection systems
(e.g., keyboards, screens) (Bogard 1996: 33). These hybrids can involve something
as direct as tagging the human body so that its movements through space can be
recorded, to the more refined reconstruction of a persons habits, preferences, and
lifestyle from the trails of information which have become the detritus of
contemporary life. The surveillant assemblage is a visualizing device that
brings into the visual register a host of heretofore opaque flows of
auditory, scent, chemical, visual, ultraviolet and informational stimuli. Much of
the visualization pertains to the human body, and exists beyond our normal
range of perception. Rousseau opens The Social Contract with his famous
proclamation that Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. To be more
in keeping with the human/machine realities of the twenty-first century, his
sentiment would better read: Humans are born free, and are immediately
electronically monitored. If such a slogan seems unduly despairing, one might
consider the new electronic ankle bracelet for infants, trademarked HUGS, which is
being marketed to hospitals as a fully supervised and tamper-resistant protection
system that automatically activates once secured around an infants ankle or wrist.
Staff [are] immediately alerted at a computer console of the newly activated tag,
and can enter pertinent information such as names and medical conditions.
Password authorization is needed to move infants out of the designated protection
area and if an infant is not readmitted within a predetermined time limit an
alarm will sound. An alarm also sounds if an infant with a Hugs tag is brought near
an open door at the perimeter of the protected area without a password being
entered. The display console will then show the identification of the infant and the
exit door on a facility map. Alternatively, doors may also be fitted with magnetic

locks that are automatically activated. As well, Hugs can be configured to monitor
the progress and direction of the abduction within the hospital. Weighing just 1/3 of
an ounce, each ergonomically designed infant tag offers a number of other
innovative features, including low-battery warning, the ability to easily interface
with other devices such as CCTV cameras and paging systems and time and date
stamping. (Canadian Security 1998) Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University
is the self-proclaimed first cyborg, having implanted a silicon chip transponder in
his forearm (Bevan 1999). The surveillance potential of this technology has been
rapidly embraced to monitor pets. A microchip in a pets skin can be read with an
electronic device which connects a unique identifying number on the microchip to
details of the pets history, ownership and medical record. Warwick has proposed
that implanted microchips could be used to scrutinize the movement of employees,
and to monitor money transfers, medical records and passport details. He also
suggests that anyone who wanted access to a gun could do so only if they had one
of these implants . . . Then if they actually try and enter a school or building that
doesnt want them in there, the school computer would sound alarms and warn
people inside or even prevent them having access. (Associated Press 1998) These
examples indicate that the surveillant assemblage relies on machines to make and
record discrete observations. As such, it can be contrasted with the early
forms of disciplinary panopticism analysed by Foucault, which were largely
accomplished by practitioners of the emergent social sciences in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. On a machine/human continuum, surveillance at that time
leaned more toward human observation. Today, surveillance is more in keeping with
the technological future hinted at by Orwell, but augmented by technologies he
could not have even had nightmares about. The surveillant assemblage does
not approach the body in the first instance as a single entity to be molded,
punished, or controlled. First it must be known, and to do so it is broken down
into a series of discrete signifying flows. Surveillance commences with the
creation of a space of comparison and the introduction of breaks in the
flows that emanate from, or circulate within, the human body. For example,
drug testing striates flows of chemicals, photography captures flows of reflected
lightwaves, and lie detectors align and compare assorted flows of respiration, pulse
and electricity. The body is itself, then, an assemblage comprised of myriad
component parts and processes which are broken-down for purposes of
observation. Patton (1994: 158) suggests that the concept of assemblage may
be regarded as no more than an abstract conception of bodies of all kinds,
one which does not discriminate between animate and inanimate bodies,
individual or collective bodies, biological or social bodies. It has become a
commonplace among cultural theorists to acknowledge the increasing
fragmentation of the human body. Such an appreciation is evidenced in Groszs
(1995: 108) schematic suggestion that we need to think about the relationship
between cities and bodies as collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds
between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often temporary
sub- or micro-groupings . . . their interrelations involve a fundamentally disunified
series of systems, a series of disparate flows, energies, events, or entities, bringing
together or drawing apart their more or less temporary alignments. Likewise, the
surveillant assemblage standardizes the capture of flesh/information flows

of the human body. It is not so much immediately concerned with the

direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an
ultimate consequence), but with transforming the body into pure
information, such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable.
Such processes are put into operation from a host of scattered centres of
calculation (Latour 1987) where ruptures are co-ordinated and toward which the
subsequent information is directed. Such centres of calculation can include forensic
laboratories, statistical institutions, police stations, financial institutions, and
corporate and military headquarters. In these sites the information derived from
flows of the surveillant assemblage are reassembled and scrutinized in the
hope of developing strategies of governance, commerce and control. In the
figure of a body assembled from the parts of different corpses, Mary Shellys
Frankenstein spoke to early-modern anxieties about the potential consequences of
unrestrained science and technology. Contemporary fears about the implications of
mass public surveillance continue to emphasize the dark side of science. Today,
however, we are witnessing the formation and coalescence of a new type of
body, a form of becoming which transcends human corporeality and
reduces flesh to pure information. Culled from the tentacles of the surveillant
assemblage, this new body is our data double, a double which involves the
multiplication of the individual, the constitution of an additional self (Poster 1990:
97). Data doubles circulate in a host of different centres of calculation and serve as
markers for access to resources, services and power in ways which are often
unknown to its referent. They are also increasingly the objects toward which
governmental and marketing practices are directed (Turow 1997). And while
such doubles ostensibly refer back to particular individuals, they
transcend a purely representational idiom. Rather than being accurate or
inaccurate portrayals of real individuals, they are a form of pragmatics:
diferentiated according to how useful they are in allowing institutions to
make discriminations among populations. Hence, while the surveillant
assemblage is directed toward a particular cyborg flesh/technology
amalgamation, it is productive of a new type of individual, one comprised
of pure information.

Impact Framing
The ableist construction of biometric technologies functions as
a normalizing technique to manage and exclude disabled
bodies.
Saltes 13 [Natasha Saltes (PhD Candidate in Department of Sociology @ Queens
University, MA in Critical Disability Studies), Abnormal Bodies on the Borders of
Inclusion: Biopolitics and the Paradox of Disability Surveillance, Surveillance &
Society 11(1/2): 55-73, 2013, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillanceand-society/article/view/abnormal/]
Writing in the context of racism and sexual oppression, McWhorter (2009) hones in on the concept of abnormality

psychiatry became a technology of

identified persons who it
supposed could not be assimilated into the life of the community, and then
it went to work to capture those individuals, discipline them, and thereby
defend society from the threat they posed. In the process, the public became
sensitized to newly recognized dangers:eccentrics, and nonconformists of all kinds. Such
peopleabnormal peoplewere not only problems for those whose intimate lives
they shared but were threats to the general public and rightfully subject
to surveillance and constraints imposed through psychiatry and other means by or
and provides a compelling appropriation of Foucault. In explaining how

abnormality (Foucault 2003, quoted in McWhorter 2009: 30), she writes: [I]t

on behalf of society as a whole. (McWhorter 2009: 30-31) In the same way that psychiatry became a technology of
abnormality (Foucault 2003a: 163), so too did

the biomedical definition of disability

in that it

categorized people with impairments as unhealthy, defective and incapable,

rendering them social burdens and therefore a threat to the normalizing society. For people
with impairments, the path to a normalizing society is one marked by a sequence
of dividing practices (Foucault 1982: 777) that begins by classifying abnormal
identified and

bodies through the implementation of ableist policies and practices and

the demarcation of spaces as those designated for normal
abnormal (impaired) bodies

(able)

and

(Hansen and Philo 2009). Kitchin (1998) recognizes the ways in which

disability is spatially produced through power relations that work to organize people with impairments. He claims

the social relations that emerge through socio-spatial processes serve

to isolate and marginalize people with impairments (1998: 343). In the context of the
that

excessive demand clause, the political tactic of managing bodies through the use of medical data to categorize
desirable immigrants from undesirable immigrants in accordance with perceived excessive demand on health and

The use of this data to

determine who will be granted permanent residency also illustrates how
socio-spatial processes work through power relations to exclude people
with impairments. According to Wiebe (2008), biopolitical agendas that regulate health in order to
optimize economic prosperity inevitably construct a narrow conception of citizenship
extended only to those deemed healthy and productive. Wiebe adds that
surveillance derives from a fear of the unknown , which translates into the
states ambition to conduct risk management practices (2008: 337). Writing on the
social services illustrates the operation of biopolitics (Wiebe 2008, 2009).

theme of surveillance as biopower, Ceyhan (2012) echoes Wiebes sentiment, remarking that surveillance operates
as a technology of biopoliticalized security (2012: 39) as a means of mitigating uncertainty. Indeed, it is the

Canadian states assumptions about impairment and its inclination toward managing economic risk and
uncertainty that the purpose of conducting disability surveillance at the border becomes evident. Biopolitics at the

The pervasiveness of surveillance

and its inherent discriminatory characteristic of identifying and classifying certain
individuals and groups as risky have given rise to the notion of surveillance
as social sorting. According to Lyon, surveillance as social sorting centres on the social and economic
Border: Social Sorting and Ableist Biometric Technologies

categories and the computer codes by which personal data is organized with a view to influencing and managing
people and populations (2003: 2). It is the process of predicting and preventing risk by classifying subgroups of
society deemed to pose a threat (Lyon 2003). Lyon attributes social sorting and digital discrimination to the
prevalent use of networked technology (2003: 8) and the rising attention paid to the body itself as a source of
surveillance data (2007: 55). The concept of social sorting and the emphasis on the body as a source of data is
especially relevant in the context of disability surveillance in that the collection and documentation of information

The
data double therefore can become disabled in much the same way as the
individual insofar as it is not perceived, viewed, monitored and treated
equally as non-impaired data doubles. The data double itself may include
biometric details or other forms and fragments of information that allude
to or signify the embodiment of impairment. The implication of this is that the
abnormality of the body is extended to the digital and what serves to
mark, label and stigmatize the body in the physical environment now has the ability to mark,
about the body reduces people with impairments to impaired bodies and further still to impaired data.

label and stigmatize the body digitally. Referring to electronic patient records (EPR) as an example of the
digitalization of the body, van der Ploeg considers the data they contain to be extended forms of unique
identifiers due to the personal information they contain, including biometric data (2003: 62). The increased use of

biometric identifiers in EPRs (as well as in other contexts such as immigration) are
superimposing traditional forms of identifiers such as name and birth date as they are
considered a more reliable representation of identity (van der Ploeg 2003). In challenging the gendered neutrality of

representations of data render a disembodied and

highly abstract depiction of the world by removing social context (2009: 286).
Monahan contends that surveillance systems artificially abstract bodies, identities
and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and
aggravate gender and other social inequalities (2009: 286). He considers the embodied
surveillance, Monahan argues that

consequences that arise from surveillance practices that operate on a level of abstraction (2009: 286). Building
from Monahans argument on the socially de-contextualized collection of data and applying it to disability
surveillance provides a useful means with which to contextualize the consequences of conducting disability

A useful starting point is to consider the

ways in which certain surveillance strategies such as biometric
technologies separate the social from the body. Biometric technologies operate by
surveillance within a biomedical perspective.

capturing physiological markers of bodies including fingerprints, face or voice recognition, iris and handwriting
authentication. The data produced by the body is then used to verify identity (Maddern and Stewart 2010).

biometric systems do not only verify identity, but they also play a
significant role in assigning identities. This is worth considering in light of the governments
However,

reliance on biometric data, which stems from the belief that biometric technology is infallible (Maddern and Stewart
2010). The use of biometric technology at the Canadian border is being touted by Citizenship and Immigration
Canada (2012b) as a highly reliable way to reduce identity fraud. In a public notice released online announcing the
scheduled implementation of biometric technologies in 2013, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (2012b) states
that biometrics would strengthen the integrity of Canadas immigration program by helping prevent known
criminals, failed refugee claimants, and those previously deported from using a different identity to obtain a visa
and that biometrics will strengthen and modernize Canadas immigration processes. In lauding the collection of
biometric data as part of the immigration process, the Canadian government neglects to consider how the
technology might have a discriminatory impact for certain groups. Pugliese (2010) questions the infallibility of

biometric
technologies fail to accurately capture the data and images of bodies that
do not conform to the features of whiteness, which biometric technologies were designed
to accommodate. 7 Similarly, by virtue of their ableist design, biometric technologies also filter
technologies that filter bodies through a racialized lens. He looks in particular at the ways in which

bodies through a normalized lens. Trials have shown that biometric systems are not
designed to conform to disabled people, but that disabled people are
expected to be able to conform to the systems design (Maddern and Stewart 2010).
The ableist way in which they collect physiological data inherently carries out the function of social sorting by
classifying and categorizing those who are not able to pass easily through the system. The passage below
illustrates this point: For someone in a wheelchair if you cant perfectly adapt your position it could be difficult. For
blind people it certainly can be difficult because they cant seeYou dont actually have to focus, but you do have
to keep a constant relationship with the camerathats why we couldnt get acceptable enrolment (in a recent trial)
for a quite a large selection of people with disabilities. (respondent and biometric technology user quoted in
Maddern and Stewart 2010: 247) This quote reveals the challenges that biometric technologies present for some

The inability to navigate through biometric systems not

only impedes mobility, but reduces people with impairments to deviant
bodies that do not conform to preconceived standards of ontological
normality. According to Haggerty and Ericson, The observed body is of a distinctively
hybrid composition. First it is broken down by being abstracted from its
territorial setting. It is then reassembled in diferent settings through a
series of data flows. The result is a decorporealized body, a data double
of pure virtuality. (2000: 611) For some people with impairments, their bodies are in a
sense already decorporealized before they are even reassembled , due to the
people with impairments.

biometric systems inability to accept and process their varied physiological traits. Similarly, Garfinkel suggests that

biometric technologies are problematic in that they do not identify

people, they identify bodies (2000: 65 emphasis in original). Here we can begin to see that the
surveillance gaze is similar to that of the medical gaze in that it calls
abnormal bodies into question. In examining biometrics through a governmentality perspective,
Epstein observes that biometric databases operationalize two types of risky
bodies: guilty bodies understood as transgressors of the law and
immigration violators understood as destructive bodies (Epstein 2007: 160). For
people with impairments, biometric technologies seem to operationalize a third type of risky body understood as
nonnormative bodies. By failing to process the data from bodies that do not conform to the systems ableist
design, biometric technologies also function as a technology of abnormality (Foucault 2003a: 163). In reinforcing

biometric technologies operate as part of a broader biopolitical

project aimed at eliminating abnormality. Biometric technologies, especially when used in
corporeal norms,

combination with provisions that emphasize ontological normality such as the excessive demand clause, do not
account for the social construct of disability. Consequently, it is not ableist and discriminatory social structures,

The flawed body is then

evaluated against normative corporeal standards used to determine
citizenship often resulting in an undignified, if not outright exclusionary,
immigration process.
systems and attitudes that are deemed flawed, but the body.

Root Cause
Ableism is foundational to all oppression
Siebers 9 [Tobin Siebers (Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism @ University
of Michigan), The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification, 10/28/9, Lecture,
http://disabilities.temple.edu/media/ds/lecture20091028siebersAesthetics_FULL.doc]
Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another . It is a form
of intergroup violence. That oppression involves groups, and not individuals,
means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression
always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a
public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances .
Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferioritywhat some call in-built or biological

Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and

physical features of the group, and it figures as disability . The prototype of
biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always
comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel.
This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of
aestheticsnot only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the
inferiority.

signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation
and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic

despite my statement that disability now

serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of
reducing other minority identities to disability identity . Rather, it is a matter
of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems . In
examples from the historical record. First,

disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying

this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at

the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in
general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is
represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same
process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. Racism
disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority
of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. Sexism
disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of
mental and physical inferiority. Classism disqualifies on the basis of
family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical
status. Ableism disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then
stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact
that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention,
representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as
undeniable facts of nature. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for
defects, but

human inferiorityand the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppressionthe
prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human

This usage will continue, I expect, until

we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social
construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of
inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it.

race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of
justifiable human inferiority.

Interrogation Good
The affirmatives rhizomatic characterization of bodily
surveillance is key to accurate diagnoses of modern power.
Ball 5 [Kirstie Ball (Professor of Organization @ The Open University Business
School, PhD in Organization Studies from Aston University), Organization,
Surveillance and the Body: Towards a Politics of Resistance, Organization, January
2005 vol. 12 no. 1 89-108, http://org.sagepub.com/content/12/1/89.short]
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
Recent

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 ofers 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.

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 diferent interpretations of life to be
made, as well as interpretations of surveillance itself. At least three common meanings are attributed to
Representation refers to the technological element, acknowledging how

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
diferent 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

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
the surveilled domain between various parties;

meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where power/resistance operates, and where

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
networks are bound together.

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 datagathering systems between diferent 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.

surveillance has a rhizomatic character: it

has many and diverse instances connected to an underlying, invisible
infrastructure, which concerns interconnected technologies in multiple
contexts. Haggerty and Ericson (2000) pose a new challenge, which concerns how resistance is to be
conceptualized. Unlike organizational conceptions of resistance, which are built
around some arboreal, centralizing dominant force, Haggerty and Ericson
suggest that more widespread and decentred notions are to be employed .
It is no longer sufficient to resist surveillance practices by restricting or
controlling one technology; one must also consider the impulse to integrate,
simulate and apply disparate information categories across a range of
contexts that intersect at those surfaces of contact or interfaces between
organic and non-organic borders, between life forms and webs of
information, or between organs/ body parts and entry/projection systems
Accordingly Haggerty and Ericson argue that

(Bogard, 1996: 33). They characterize the human body as flesh made information, drawing on arguments that
emphasize hybridity and cyborgism (Haraway, 1991), positioning it as a marginality, a state of in-between-ness of
technologies and the local (Leigh-Starr, 1991). This is a point to which I shall return. Although Haggerty and Ericson

rhizomatic surveillance opens more opportunities for scrutiny of

surveillance practices, they privilege the breaking of the body into flows
to feed the assemblage over the reconstitution of the body with such
flows (Hier, 2003), and thus the question of resistance is not sufficiently addressed in their analysis. The main
advantage of Haggerty and Ericsons work is that they shatter the notion underlying many
of the claims made by proponents of biodata that the body is a source of
truth. This enables a critique of these practices as somehow definitive, absolute or final to be established.
argue that

However, Haggerty and Ericson do not venture far enough: the degree of tension and inbetween-ness
characterizing the hybrid or cyborgian subject (Haraway, 1991) is underemphasized. In a manner similar to Ball
(2002), the identification of the body is more akin to Callons (1991) intermediarya hybrid entity that points

A
politicization of the constitutive instability of the body is needed to
augment a practical and analytical understanding of how resistance to
surveillance practices might be conceptualized. In order to address this
argument, a brief review of developments concerning a sociology of the
body will be reviewed, and its contribution to an understanding of
resistance to surveillance will be considered.
back to the network of which it is part and defines roles for other actors within it (Michael, 1996).

Embodiment Good
Building a politics of diference centered on embodied
experiences of disability is key to overcome the abstracting
limitations of the social model and destabilize ableist
discourse.
Loja et al 13 [Ema Loja (Researcher Fellow @ University of Leeds Center for
Disability Studies, PhD in Psychology from University of Porto), Maria Emlia Costa
(Professor of Psychology @ University of Porto), Bill Hughes (Professor of Sociology
@ Glasgow Caledonian University) & Isabel Menezes (Associate Professor in
Education @ University of Porto), Disability, embodiment and ableism: stories of
resistance, Disability & Society, Volume 28, Issue 2, 2013,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2012.705057]
What

counts as a legitimate body' (Shilling 1993, 145) is a question that has been
at the core of disability discourse. Disabled people have struggled with a
corporeal identity that is predominately defined by a medical model that reduces it to abnormality
(Zitzelsberger 2005), stressing the need for correction or normalization (Edwards and Imrie 2003). The medical gaze

Impaired bodies are

regarded as abnormal, deviant, inferior and even sub-human (Campbell 2008).
Furthermore, the prominence of bio-medical ideas in the public discourse on
disability monopolizes not only physical capital but also political,
symbolic and social capital, loosely corresponding to and operationalised
on diferent social fields' (Gottfried 1998, 459). Subjects are produced and placed
within a hierarchy of bodily traits that determines the distribution of
privilege, status, and power' (Garland Thomson 1997, 6). As Braidotti (1996, 136, cited in Meekosha
plays a crucial role in invalidating bodies that do not conform to the norm.

1998) states, some bodies matter more than others: some are, quite frankly, disposable'. Disabled bodies
epitomize the latter. The social model of disability makes a clear distinction between impairment and disability. It
rejects medical categories focusing on the elimination of prejudice and discrimination and defends self-

The body is the site of

physical disability (Stoer, Magalhes, and Rodrigues 2005), but a number of academics
have argued that the social model of disability has excluded it from
disability discourse (Morris 1991; Hughes 2000; Patterson and Hughes 2000). In fact, the social model
determination, social integration and the civil rights of disabled people.

considers the impaired body untouched, unchallenged: a taken-for-granted fixed corporeality' (Meekosha 1998,
175) and within disability studies the term body tends to be used without much sense of bodiliness as if the
body were little more than flesh and bones' (Paterson and Hughes 1999, 600). However, debate about the body and
impairment is re-emerging within the disability movement (for example, Shakespeare 1992; French 1993).

The

movement has been recovering this lost corporeal space, and as Hughes and
Paterson (2006, 101) emphasize: disability is experienced in, on and through the
body, just as impairment is experienced in terms of the personal and
cultural narratives that help to constitute its meaning'. To bring bodies back in' (Zola
1991, 1) or to recognize how corporeal practices produce and give a body its place in everyday life' (Turner 2001,

In order to validate the impaired body

within disability studies, Campbell (2001, 44) has defined ableism as: a
network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind
of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfecct, speciestypical and therefore essential and fully human' . Ableism imposes a corporeal standard,
259) are questions fundamental to the disability project.

the falling away from which represents the pathway to disability (Campbell 2009), which for disabled people
produces two consequences: the distancing of disabled people from each other and the emulation by disabled
people of ableist norms (Campbell 2008). The body politics of Critical Disability Studies that ableism envisages
offers valuable ways to theorize disability and challenge disability oppression (for example, Corker 1999; Hughes

the politics of diference can be an important lens for

destabilizing ableism because it legitimates not sameness but human
variation (Jones 2006). As Taylor (1994, 51) says, the politics of diference is about
recognizing the equal value of diferent ways of being', and moving to a
tradition concerned with rights to secure positive recognition, albeit
symbolically, for minority identities (Galeotti 2002). The social struggle of disabled people
1999). Furthermore,

understood as a struggle for recognition' (Honneth 1995a, 1995b) embodies the deconstruction of ableism and the
celebration of difference.

Disability is Pervasive
Constant interrogation of ableism is critical the specter of the
disabled body permeates our cultural imaginary and
foundationally informs our epistemology.
Snyder & Mitchell 1 [Sharon L. Snyder (assistant professor in the Department
of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago), &
David T. Mitchell (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Ph.D. in
Disability Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago), Re-engaging the
Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment, Public Culture 13(3):
367389, 2001, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/13/3/367.full.pdf]
Consequently, disability studies has formulated the problem of the medicalized body in a manner similar to that
undertaken earlier in body studies, taking up medical institutions (and the ancillary administering of diagnosis,

The pathologization of human

diferences is theorized as an imposition on the bodya regulatory efort
to standardize inherent dynamism. But while body studies provided a foundation for a more
general model of critique around the categories of illness, health, pathology, and even bioethics, disability
studies moves beneath these terms to encounter disability directly in the
experiences of human populations which were merely referenced
euphemistically by those more general terms. Disability studies narrows
the focus of its investigation to the social implications for bodies deemed
excessively aberrant. In doing so, scholars have expanded the domain of
cultural understandings about disability beyond the walls of its scientific
management. For disability studies, the disabled body is neither a matter of individual malfunctionas cast
by medicinenor an effect of the abstraction of the body within the health professions. Instead, disability
translates into a common denominator of cultural fascination (if not downright
obsession) one that infiltrates thinking across discursive registers as a shared
sequestration, and case study) as the primary locus of its critique.

reference point in deciding matters of human value and communal belonging. In this emergent field, the able body
is no longer characterized as merely a false quantitative ideal, as it had been in body studies, but rather as an

This subtle shift in

emphasis allows humanities scholars in disability studies to extend the
discussion of bodily deviance from the context of rehabilitative
institutions to that of wider ranging cultural locations. For instance, Lennard J. Davis
aesthetic product of cultural forces that oppress those categorized as disabled.

(1995) analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical development of disability activism and
community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick (1996) analyzes the influential role of public health films in
the promotion of eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak show, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues that
disabled peoples bodies have been represented as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology that
marks the disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white, masculine citizenry. Paul K. Longmore
(1997) assesses television genres, such as disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect mainstream
representations of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Narrative Prosthesis
(Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of disability to literature in Europe and the United
States by discussing the longstanding artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization.

Disability studies scholars have also analyzed the opportunistic use of

corporeal metaphors to emblematize societal weaknesses in literary and
philosophical figurations of disability. Ultimately, these analyses of the pervasive dependency
upon textual and visual representations of disability in various cultural media have forced a reformulation of a
theory of marginality itself within disability studies. This is one site at which disability studies diverges from the

approach established by other civil rightsbased programs. While many minority movements have argued that their

disability
studies has formulated an analysis of social depreciation targeting the
perpetual recourse to images of disability in narrative and visual mediums .
As a result, disability studies follows a figuration of marginality as the
expression of an overheated symbolic organism that conveys potent
meanings as a result of its palimpsest-like discursive history (cf. Stewart 1993).
social devaluation occurs as a result of their marginal presence in representational media,

Theaters of Repression The work of disability studies scholars consolidated the argument that bodily and cognitive
differences were integral to various registers of meaning-making within culture. While the earliest research in the
field kept returning to a denunciation of three prominent literary figuresShakespeares Richard III, Melvilles
Captain Ahab, and Dickenss Tiny Timthe growing body of historical research called for wider ranging
methodologies. As with later developments in race and gender studies, disability studies outgrew its denunciations
of stereotypes; instead, theorists began to argue that disability represented a deep-seated, yet uninterrogated,

If the able body proved a utopian fiction of abstract bodily

norms, disabled bodies occupied the phantasmic recesses of the cultural
imaginary. The diferent body was more than a site for public
scapegoatingcognitive and physical aberrancies acted as reminders of Others in our midst who challenged
cultural conflict.

beliefs in a homogeneous bodily order. Out of these efforts to elucidate the constructed nature of disabled bodies in
history, disability studies set out to diagnose the investments of an ableist society in disabilitys various

Cultural eforts to medicalize or domesticate disability efectively

repressed the power of aberrancy to unmoor notions of the body as a
matter of norms, averages, and deviations. Locating disabled bodies as
rare examples of extraordinary deviance essentially cordoned of disability
from the diferences that characterize typical biological diversity. For
disability studies, the impersonal was the political. Such a sequestration
evidenced the mainstream desire to reduce the diferent bodys (or
minds) ability to destabilize normative models of health .
incarnations.

AT: Social Model

The social model is insufficient overly abstracted from
experience.
Terzi 4 (Lorella Terzi, School of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies,
Institute of Education, University of London. Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 21,
No. 2, 2004)
My questioning of the definition of impairment and disability provided by the social model certainly does not aim at

If we accept
that society discriminates against impaired people, then we can also
understand the claim of the disablement structure of society . What I hold,
ultimately, is that there certainly is a causal relation between oppression and
disability, when society plays a strong role in excluding and marginalizing
impaired people. But in maintaining that disability is squarely socially
caused, the social model theorists are over-socialising their position . Their
model, then, as we have seen, needs clarifications and extensions [56]. More specifically, the social model
overlooks the impairment efects, in terms of their restriction of activities
or the possible inabilities to perform diferent functions . In so doing, it
downplays the importance of the relational nature of impairment,
disability, and society. Moreover, in asserting the total separation between impairment and disability,
it opens up the chance of a proliferation of terms other than disabilities ,
simply reintroducing a linear causal link between impairment and disability and in all cases.

to denote inability or being unable to do things, which, if politically correct, appears less justified theoretically. One
example to illustrate this position is related to some forms of congenital blindness, which, for instance, prevent
people from performing certain actions, such as driving a car. This form of impairment, which can be considered a
clear inability and a disability if referred to driving (at present society is structured to have sighted drivers only), is
certainly not a cause of inability or disability in many other possible activities, like enjoying music or cooking or
acting as a state minister. It is now clearer, therefore, why some

disabled scholars have voiced

the need to reconsider impairment, and why medical sociologists have pointed to the relational
aspect of some impairment with illness and disability. These considerations highlight the need for a different
framework, providing a more coherent basis for the understanding of impairment, disability, society and their
reciprocal implications. I suggest that a philosophical perspective based on Amartya Sens capability approach
could take these issues in fruitful directions. The discussion of the latter, however, is well beyond the aim of this
article. A final critical point, on the relation between impairment, disability and society, concerns moral and social

In maintaining that disability is socially caused, the social model

of disability attributes the responsibility of disablement completely to
society. In his development of a social understanding of impairment, Abberley argues that impairment is
socially caused; therefore asserting that society is responsible also for the
impairment it produces. However, in light of the previous critical points and although the issue of
responsibility is very complex, a few considerations emerge. First, if society causes discrimination,
either politically or economically, and, therefore, restriction of activity or participation, then
society is responsible for the disablement in an unacceptable way . The same
applies when society causes impairment, as a con- sequence of war, for instance. But there are
circumstances when impairment and its efects do not stem from social
causes and many of the examples above have illustrated this claim. There
are, consequently, diferent considerations related to responsibility with
respect to impairment. How could a congenital impairment unrelated to any endemic condition be
responsibility.

considered societys responsibility? Moreover, even if one fully endorsed the social model position, it would be quite
problematical how society could be held responsible in the case of disablement connected to the activity of driving

there are impairments that

are a consequence of a persons agency, in other words of her particular
actions or activities, some of which can well be highly risky activities ,
voluntarily undertaken. When impairment arises from a hang-gliding accident, to
mention an extreme case, considerations of societys responsibility are
difficult to sustain. In that case, in fact, when the sport has been voluntarily chosen with full awareness of
by a person visually impaired owing to congenital blindness. Finally,

its potential risks, when all that could have been done to prevent the accident has been done and when rescue has

the social model of

disability shows the element of over-socialisation and improper
generalisation seen in the causal link established between society and
disability, thus reconfirming the internal limitations highlighted so far .
been provided, where should societys responsibility be placed? Here again,

Framework Cards

T-Consent
Biometrics is T
Abernathy et al 13 (William, S-American professor at the Harvard University
Business School, 9-14-2003, "Biometrics: Who's Watching You?," Electronic Frontier
Foundation, https://www.eff.org/wp/biometrics-whos-watching-you)
Among the many reactions to the September 11 tragedy has been a
renewed attention to biometrics. The federal government has led the way
with its new concern about border control . Other proposals include the use of
biometrics with ID cards and in airports, e.g. video surveillance enhanced by
facial-recognition technology. The purpose of this document is to sketch out EFF's concerns about
biometrics. In today's public arena, biometric technologies are being marketed as a "silver bullet" for terrorism;
however, very little independent, objective scientific testing of biometrics has been done. Deploying biometric
systems without sufficient attention to their dangers makes them likely to be used in a way dangerous to civil
liberties. This document is very much a work in progress and we welcome comments. Biometrics refers to the
automatic identification or identity verification of living persons using their enduring physical or behavioral
characteristics. Many body parts, personal characteristics and imaging methods have been suggested and used for
biometric systems: fingers, hands, feet, faces, eyes, ears, teeth, veins, voices, signatures, typing styles, gaits and

Biometric technology is inherently individuating and interfaces easily

to database technology, making privacy violations easier and more
damaging. If we are to deploy such systems, privacy must be designed into them from the beginning, as it is
hard to retrofit complex systems for privacy. Biometric systems are useless without a wellconsidered threat model. Before deploying any such system on the national stage, we must
have a realistic threat model, specifying the categories of people such
systems are supposed to target, and the threat they pose in light of their
abilities, resources, motivations and goals. Any such system will also need to map out
odors.

clearly in advance how the system is to work, in both in its successes and in its failures. Despite these concerns,

political pressure for increasing use of biometrics appears to be informed

and driven more by marketing from the biometrics industry than by
scientists. Much federal attention is devoted to deploying biometrics for
border security. This is an easy sell, because immigrants and foreigners are, politically speaking, easy
targets. But once a system is created, new uses are usually found for it, and those uses will not likely stop at the
border. With biometric ID systems, as with national ID systems, we must be wary of getting the worst of both

a system that enables greater social surveillance of the population in

general, but does not provide increased protection against terrorists. Sec. 403(c) of the USA-PATRIOT Act
worlds:

specifically requires the federal government to "develop and certify a technology standard that can be used to
verify the identity of persons" applying for or seeking entry into the United States on a U.S. visa "for the purposes of
conducting background checks, confirming identity, and ensuring that a person has not received a visa under a
different name." The recently enacted Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, Sec. 303(b)(1),
requires that only "machine-readable, tamper-resistant visas and other travel and entry documents that use
biometric identifiers" shall be issued to aliens by October 26, 2004. The Immigration and Naturalization Service
(INS) and the State Department currently are evaluating biometrics for use in U.S. border control pursuant to
EBSVERA. The chronic, longitudinal capture of biometric data is useful for surveillance purposes. Our Surveillance

Biometric systems entail repeat surveillance,

requiring an initial capture and then later captures. Another major issue
relates to the "voluntariness" of capture. Some biometrics, like faces,
voices, and fingerprints, are easily "grabbed." Other biometrics, at least under present
Monitor page highlights some of these issues.

technology, must be consciously "given." It is difficult, for instance, to capture a scan of a person's retina or to

Easily grabbed biometrics are a

problem because people can't control when they're being put into the
gather a hand geometry image without the subject's cooperation.

system or when they're being tracked. But even hard-to-grab biometrics involve a trust issue in
the biometric capture device and the overall system architecture. To be effective, a biometric system
must compare captured biometric data to a biometric database . Our National ID
System page highlights issues surrounding database abuse, which has both static and dynamic dimensions. The
static issues surrounding databases are mainly about safeguarding large and valuable collections of personally
identifying information. If these databases are part of an important security system, then they (and the channels
used to share PII) are natural targets for attack, theft, compromise, and malicious or fraudulent use. The dynamic

Databases
that seek to maintain accurate residence information must be updated
whenever one moves. Databases that are used to establish eligibility for
benefits must be updated so as to exclude persons no longer eligible. The
broader the function of the system, the more and broader the updating
that is required, increasing the role of general social surveillance in the
system. By far the most significant negative aspect of biometric ID
systems is their potential to locate and track people physically. While many
surveillance systems seek to locate and track, biometric systems present the greatest
danger precisely because they promise extremely high accuracy . Whether a
issues surrounding databases mainly concern the need to maintain reliable, up-to-date information.

specific biometric system actually poses a risk of such tracking depends on how it is designed. Why should we care
about perfect tracking? EFF believes that perfect tracking is inimical to a free society. A society in which everyone's
actions are tracked is not, in principle, free. It may be a livable society, but would not be our society. EFF believes
that perfect surveillance, even without any deliberate abuse, would have an extraordinary chilling effect on artistic
and scientific inventiveness and on political expression. This concern underlies constitutional protection for
anonymity, both as an aspect of First Amendment freedoms of speech and association, and as an aspect of Fourth

Implemented improperly, biometric systems could: increase

the visibility of individual behavior. This makes it easier for measures to
be taken against individuals by agents of the government, by
corporations, and by our peers. result in politically damaging and personally embarrassing
disclosures, blackmail and extortion. This hurts democracy, because it reduces the
willingness of competent people to participate in public life . All biometric
Amendment privacy.

technology systems have certain aspects in common. All are dependent upon an accurate reference or

If a biometric system is to identify a person, it first must

have this sample, positively linked to the subject, to compare against .
Modern biometric identification systems, based on digital technology,
analyze personal physical attributes at the time of registration and distill
them into a series of numbers. Once this reference sample is in the
system, future attempts to identify a person are based on a comparison of
a "live" sample and the reference sample or samples.
"registration" sample.

Counter-interpretation Surveillance is the collection of

personal information
Fernback 13 (Jan, 1/11/15, Culture Digitally, In Context: Digital Surveillance,
Ethics, and Prism, http://culturedigitally.org/2013/06/in-context-digital-surveillanceethics-and-prism/, 7/3/15, WG*)
Nissenbaum advocates understanding privacy neither as a right to secrecy nor
as a right to control but as a right to appropriate flow of personal
information [p. 127]. I am interested in examining the notion of
appropriate flow as it regards information gleaned from surveillance.

Clearly, information assembled from Google searches, disassociated from

the user, and then bundled with millions of other data subjects to be sold
for predictive data modeling difers contextually from RFID chips
implanted into a data subjects body.

Definitions
Resolved means to reduce by analysis
(Merriam Webster Dictionary 2010)

Surveillance Is the collection, collation, analysis, and

dissemination of data.
Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary 12 ("surveillance." Farlex Partner
Medical Dictionary. 2012. Farlex 25 Jun. 2015, http://medicaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/surveillance)
The collection, collation, analysis, and dissemination of data

Surveillance isnt static and can manifest itself in any

relationship.
Shawki 9 (Sharif, Professor @ Illinois Western University "Surveillance and
Foucault: Examining the Validity of Foucault's Notions Concerning Surveillance
through a Study of the United States and the United Kingdom" (2009). Honors
Projects. Paper 23. http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/socanth_honproj/23)
Before the application sections commence, Foucault's definition of surveillance will be given to provide a clear
picture as to what the term encompasses. First of all, the French word that Foucault utilizes is surveiller. As the
translator to Discipline and Punish notes, there is no proper English equivalent The English correspondent of

Foucault defines surveillance

as a potentially aggressive action. It is clearly not neutral and can be used
by one side to subjugate another. There are always motives behind surveillance and these
motives are usually self-serving. Foucault defines surveillance as a watch kept over a
person or a group. But one must realize that this simple definition contains several components.
Foucault considers surveillance in both a personal and complex manner.
Surveillance can take place between two people such as neighbors. This
type of surveillance is very simple and usually involves insignificant
issues. At the same time, surveillance can involve many people as well as
institutions. Thus, commanders can surveille many soldiers because these commanders have been given the
authority to do so. Therefore, surveillance is not considered as one static entity . This is a
surveiller, "surveillance," is too restricted and too technical.86 Thus,

benefit because Foucault allows himself to consider personal self-surveillance as well as institutional surveillance.

Surveillance is a form of disciplinary power.

Fuchs 10 (Christian, Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala
University, The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series, October 1, 2010,
http://www.sns3.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/The-Internet-SurveillanceResearch-Paper-Series-1-Christian-Fuchs-How-Surveillance-Can-Be-Defined.pdf)

For Foucault, surveillance is an instrument of disciplinary power . He has

stressed that the term power designates relationships (Foucault 1994, 337), it brings into play relations

Surveillance is a social relationship between humans

that involves disciplinary power and makes use of instruments for producing knowledge about
these humans in order to coerce and dominate the. To reduce surveillance to the level of
surveillance technologies not only robs it of its social dimension, it is a
form of techno-deterministic reductionism and fetishism that reifies
surveillance and thereby destroys the concepts critical potential .
between individuals (337).

AT: Policymaking
Policymaking Bad
Makau 96 (Josina., Ph.D. in Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkeley,
Responsible Communication, Argumentation Instruction in the Face of Global Perils)
Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation

. Like the Nazi doctors, students in traditional argumentation courses are

taught "how to reduce life and the mystery of life to abstraction ." Weisel
urges educators to teach students what the Nazi doctors never learned that people are not
abstractions. Weisel urges educators to learn from the Nazi experience the importance of
humanizing their charges, of teaching students to view life as special,
'with its own secrets, its own treasures, its own sources of anguish and with some
measure of triumph.' Trained as technocrats with powerful suasory skills but little
understanding , students participating in traditional argumentation courses would have difficulty either
instruction

grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly, they would have difficulty grasping or
appreciating Christian's framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above all, openness,
trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these trained technocrats. Traditionally
trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues. Trained to view problems in black and
white terms and conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and traditional courses become
subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not necessarily an evil or unprincipaled
person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional
debaters, deprived of true dialogic encounter , fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the
'multiplicity of viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc. which constitute a situation'.
They are thus inclined to lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and
perspicacious judgment.' Encouraging student to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept
uncritically a sovereign view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and others 'situatedness,' the
traditional argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious

the argumentation course foster precisely the

'aggressive and manipulative intellect bred by modern science and
discharged into the administration of things' associated with most of
the world's human made perils. And is therefore understandable that feminist and others critics
resources. It would appear, in fact, that

would write so harshly of traditional argumentation of debate.

AT: Cede Political

Politics has already been ceded by the elites.
Rancire14 (Jaques, The Hatred of Democracy , pg 72-74 , Jaques Rancire is a Professor of Philosophy
at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris)

We can now return to the initial terms of our problem: we live in societies
and States known as 'democracies', a term by which they are
distinguished from societies governed by States without law or with
religious law. How are we to understand that, at the heart of these
'democracies', a dominant intelli-gentsia, whose situation is not obviously
desperate and who hardly aspire to live under diferent laws, day in day
out blame all of humanity's misfortunes on a single evil they call
democracy? Let's take things in order. What is meant when it is said that we live in democracies? Strictly speaking,
democracy is not a form of State. It is always beneath and beyond these forms. Beneath, insofar as it is the necessarily egalitarian,

Beyond, insofar as it is the public

activity that counteracts the tendency of every State to monopolize and
depoliticize the public sphere. Every State is oligarchic. One of the
theoreticians of the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism
quite happily acknowledges it: 'It is impossible to conceive of a regime
which in one sense is not oligarchic."7 But oligarchy can give democracy
more or less room; it is encroached upon by democratic activity to a
greater or lesser extent. In this precise sense, the constitutional forms and practices of oligarchic governments
and ne-cessarily forgotten, foundation of the oligarchic state.

can be said to be more or less democratic. Usually the mere existence of a representative system is re-garded as the crucial
criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward

With this in mind, we

can specify the rules that lay down the minimal conditions under which a
representative system can be declared democratic: short and nonrenewable electoral mandates that cannot be held concurrently; a
monopoly of people's representatives over the formulation of laws; a ban
on State functionaries becoming the representatives of the people; a bare
minimum of campaigns and campaign costs; and the monitoring of
possible interference by economic powers in the electoral process. Such rules
democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone.

have nothing extravagant about them and in the past many thinkers and legislators, hardly moved by a rash love of the people,
have carefully considered them as potential means to maintain a balance of powers, to dissociate the representation of the general
will from that of particular interests, and to avoid what they considered as the worst of governments: the governments of those who
love power and are skilled at seizing it. All one has to do today to provoke hilarity is list them. With good reason for what we call
democracy is a statist and governmental functioning that is exactly the contrary: eternally elected members holding coministerial
functions and whose essential link to the people is that of the representation of regional interests; governments which make laws
themselves; representatives of the people that largely come from one administrative schoo1;48 ministers or their collaborators who
are also given posts in public or semipublic companies; fraudulent financing of parties through public works contracts;
businesspeople who invest colossal sums in trying to win electoral mandates; owners of private media empires that use their public

In a word: the monopolizing of la chose

publique by a solid alliance of State oligarchy and economic oligarchy. We
see why those who despise 'democratic individualism' do not reproach this
system of predation of the public interest and public goods for anything.
In fact, these forms of over-consumption of public functions do not come
within the province of democracy. The evils of which .our 'democracies'
sufer are primarily evils related to the insatiable appetite of oligarchs.
functions to monopolize the empire of the public media.

AT: Predictability
Everything is chaos
Der Derian 98 [James, The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and
Baudrillard, in On Security ed. Ronnie Lipschutz.
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html]
Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbess and Marxs interpretations of
security through a genealogy of modes of being . His method is not to uncover some deep
meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of
the past which have been created out of fear, and to affirm the creative
diferences which might yield new values for the future .33 Originating in
the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the
history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment
and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox . In brief, the history is one of
individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical other
of life, the terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized,
triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien
otherswho are seeking similarly impossible guarantees . It is a story of
diferences taking on the otherness of death , and identities calcifying into a
fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his
reinterpretation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must begin with Nietzsches
idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and
generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically
establishes the primacy of the will to power: Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of selfpreservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength

life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the most

frequent results.34 The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for
power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsches
view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and effective force of
becoming, from which values and meanings including self-preservation are produced which affirm life.
Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life, for life itself is essentially
appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of ones own
forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation but why should one always use those words in which
slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages.35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in

But the denial of this

permanent condition, the efort to disguise it with a consensual rationality
or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all efects of this
suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective
resentment of diference that which is not us, not certain, not
predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for
protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic
life: life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.36

affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable,
to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the reader: Look, isnt our need for knowledge
precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something
that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who

The fear of the

unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated
life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a
obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?37

sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of
fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything
true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is
sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it . Nietzsche
elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols: The causal instinct is thus
conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The why? shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its

That
which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is
excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but
own sake so much as for a particular kind of causea cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving.

for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanationthat which most quickly and frequently abolished the

A safe life
requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the
unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostilityrecycling
the desire for security. The influence of timidity, as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people
who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the necessities of
security: they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil
feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38

experiences.39 The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the offworld. Trust, the good, and other common values come to rely upon an artificial strength: the feeling of
security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he
owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god.40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false
sense of security can come from false gods: Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in
every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be
true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes.41 Nietzsches interpretation of the origins of religion
can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to ones ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only
through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe existsand that one has to pay them
back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these
forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new
strength.42 Sacrifices, honors, obedience are given but it is never enough, for the ancestors of the most powerful
tribes are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede
into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be
transfigured into a god. 43 As the ancestors debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the
role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: to rely upon an artificial strength: the feeling
one lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes
underrate them today), one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries
and hostile acts to which the man outside, the man without peace, is exposed since one has bound and

The establishment
of the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of
being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by written treaty, however, and distant gods by temporal
pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44

sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased and dissimulated. The

The fear of
the external other is transvalued into the love of the neighbor quoted in
the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured
through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original
source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal
otherness, generates the values which uphold the security imperative .
subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective resentment. The result?

Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining
security: My rights are that part of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to
preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that
they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle
with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to
themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power.
Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsches critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions
that created the security imperative and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it have diminished if not
disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good
conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment,

recreation and evaluation.46 Nietzsches worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has

the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the

apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and rules
through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state
comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox all that makes a free
life worthwhile. Nietzsches lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of
created an even worse danger:

rhetorical questions: Of future virtues How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more
solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that reverence which
overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the
incomprehensible and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown
less fearful? With the diminution of our fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness, not
also diminished?47 It is of course in Nietzsches lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds
the celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age.
Dismissive of utopian engineering, Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward
only so far as to sight the emergence of new philosophers (such as himself?) who would restore a reverence for
fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-Socratic era
to find the exemplars for a new kind of security. In The Genealogy of Morals, he holds up Pericles as an example, for
lauding the Athenians for their rhathymia a term that incorporates the notion of indifference to and contempt

It is perhaps too much to expect Nietzsches message to

resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions
seem most uncertain and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a
stimulus for improvement rather than cause for retrenchment. Yet
Nietzsche would clearly see these as opportune times, when fear could be
willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of diference, rather than
canalized into a cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks
and benefits.
for security.48

AT: SSD
Only affirmation empowers resistance every instance is key
it multiplies solvency
Johnson 97 (James, Rochester, Political Theory 25(4), JSTOR)
Resistance trades upon a number of affirmative possibilities. Foucault
locates these possibilities within a quite specific understanding of the rela- tions that
obtain between intellectuals and political movements .27 As he explains: If one
wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines and
disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one
should turn, but towards the possibility of a newform of right, one
which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time liberated from the
principle of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980, 108; emphasis added) The essential political problem for the
intellectual is ... that of ascertaining the possibil- ity of constituting a new politics of truth. (Foucault 1980,
133; emphasis added)

invented-so

Political analysis

and criticism

have

in

large measure still

to be

too have the strategies which will make it possible to modify the relations of force, to coordinate them in such a way that such a modification is possible and can be inscribed in reality. That is to say,
the problem is ... to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicization. (Foucault 1980, 190;
emphasis added)

AT: Roleplaying
They vacate individual agency to politics proper, weakening
politics and overdefining the value in life
Influxus 7 (Major contributor, Foucault blog,
http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/05/13/dividing-the-individual/)
When you say that the individual is not un-political are you agreeing with Craigs point that
liberal political theory, cannot recognise the political, because it vacates all dividing practices from the domain

Taking the individual as object, as base unit, is precisely not the

disciplinary pole of anatomo-politics. Disciplinary power , as Foucault articulates it
in HoSv1, is about dividing and sharing the body through a series of drives, impulses etc. The
relationship between liberal political theories, that take the individual as base
point, and a management of the body, that divides the anatomy into a series of potentials, should be
antagonistic to say the least. Which might be why disciplinary techniques often come as
challenges to liberal rights to privacy and bodily integrity. The standard move of
declaring someone pathological or deviant, in serious need of help, is to
exclude them from the liberal body, from being a candidate for ordinary ethical relations
between citizens. In other words if politics is taken to appropriately be concerned with
the individual person, then it can only be a form of biopolitics. It is a
way of organising the mass-population as though it were a collection of
atomic particles. As you point out through Hacking the person is an entity that is generated and
of politics proper?

categorised through many forms of auto-management. However, if politics takes the relevant aspects of
personhood to be attributes that all persons (supposedly) share-alike, such as reason, autonomy and universal
rights then the only division that matters is the original division of the population into individual persons. Hence,
once liberal political theory is taken up, all relevant decisions of division are already made for it.

AT: Dialogue
Dialogue is intersubjective
Kent et al 2 (Michael L. Kent, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication, Maureen Taylor,
Ph.D., is Gaylord Family Chair of Strategic Communication, Sheila M. McAllister-Spooner, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor
of Communication, Monmouth University, Research in dialogic theory and public relations)

Since dialogue is intersubjective, it necessitates interpretation and

understanding by all parties involved. Dialogue necessitates that all
participants are willing to exert themselves on the part of others in a dialogue to
understand often- diverse positions. Commitment to interpretation also means
that eforts are made to grasp the positions, beliefs, and values of others
before their positions can be equitably evaluated (Gadamer, 1994; Ellul, 1985;
Makay & Brown, 1972).

AT: Agonism
A politics of agonism presupposes an essentialist
categorization of antagonism versus agonism which
systematically brackets out ideological challenges
Oksala 12 (Johanna, Academy of Finland Research Fellow in the Department of
Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, 2012
Foucault, Politics, and Violence p. 63-66)
It is my contention that we do not have to accept Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy to argue that

democracy necessarily implies exclusion,

Ma moment of closure." As Mouffe effectively

modern pluralist democracy

constitutes a system of relations of power . Consensus in a liberaldemocratic society isand always will bethe expression of hegemony
and the crystallization of power relations. Consensus is the effect of physical violence,
however, only when this hegemony is established through violent means. The frontier that
establishes the distinction between inclusion/exclusion is always a
political one, but is not necessarily the result of physical violence. The democratic-liberal
society is a contingent and hegemonic articulation of the "people" through
a particular political regime of inclusion-exclusion , but it is not founded on the
argues through a post-structuralist framework, like- any other regime,

ontological necessity to distinguish the enemy. As I argued in the previous chapter, the foundational violence of
modern states is historical and contingent, not ontological. The conceptualization of necessary exclusion in terms of
friend and enemy leads, moreover, to a problematic narrowing the political arena. The agonism that Mouffe
advocates cannot be, understandably, violent confrontation between enemies. For Schmitt, the hostility inherent in
the friend-enemy distinction ultimately leads to the transformation of the political into war because no amount of

Moufe has to
introduce the important distinction between "antagonism" and "agonism ."
Antagonism takes place between enemies, that is, persons who have no
common symbolic space and who are therefore perceived as negating
each other's identity. Agonism, on the other hand, involves a relation not
between enemies but between "adversaries." Adversaries share a common
symbolic space, but they want to organize this space in a diferent way ."1
The aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism by
discussion, compromise, or exhortation can settle issues between enemies.20 To avoid this,

"providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which,
while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an
adversary" (Monde 2000, 103). In other words, agonism does not result in violence because the democratic-liberal
state and the possibilities it otters for legitimate opposition prevent antagonism from escalating into violent conflict.

Moufe defines an adversary in terms of two substantial features in

addition to sharing a common symbolic space . The first one is normative:
adversaries share an adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal
democracyliberty and equality. They must agree on the importance of
"liberty and equality for all" while disagreeing about their meaning and the way in which they
should be implemented. The second one is formal: adversaries are recognized as
having the right to defend their beliefs and ideas . They comprise the legitimate
opponent whom we are not entitled to coerce, exclude, discipline, or punish. An adversary is
somebody "whose ideas we combat, but whose right to defend those ideas
we do not put into question" (Mouffe 2000, 102). Roth features raise important questions for
political theory and practice. The unproblematic acceptance of liberty and equality

as the pre-given ground of politics raises the question of whether the

questioning of their ultimate value, through nonviolent means, necessarily
makes one an enemy. Should we not also give a recognized political voice
to the critics of these essentially Western political values instead of
labeling them terrorists? Would an open political contest not strengthen
and re- invigorate rather than weaken these values? The assumption that
adversaries are already in the position of a legitimate opponent in the
political field, on the other hand, compels us to ask whether political
struggles are ever simply debates between existing interpretations of our
under- lying values and principles, and not simultaneously struggles for
one's voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate
partner. Should asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, prisoners, and nomads
be excluded from the political debate because they have no legitimate
position in it? Who has the right to be recognized and heard as an adversary in this political debate?
Moufes binary logic of enemy versus adversary ultimately becomes a
limiting framework for conceptualizing political conflicts and struggles . The
agonism she advocates is essentially embodied in the confrontation between the political left and right. She has
repeatedly argued against "the illusion" that democratic politics could organize itself with- out them, in terms of

Instead of understanding agonism as

characterizing the field of myriad conflicts over varied issues and
identitiesat times organized on clear platforms, bin also consisting of
fragmented and vaguely formulated dissent, activ- ism, and lifestyle
choicespolitics is understood very traditionally as the party politics of
citizens who are entitled to vote . Although Moufe does not explicitly
ground her problematic distinction between enemy and adversary on the
question of violence, it is my contention that it is upheld by this
"constant" of her political ontology the hostility and violence inherent in politics. The
category of the "adversary" becomes the key to envisaging the specificity
of modern pluralist politics because it is the only means of removing the
ever-present hostility and violence from the sphere of politics . The
narrowing of the range of the political thus becomes the price we pay for
having to keep the irreducible violence at bay. The category of adversary does not
eliminate violence from modern democracies , however. It only shifts it to the margins, to
some

kind

of

"third

way,"

for

example."

corrective institutions and detention centers. While Foucault's thought effectively questions the idea of foundational physical violence on the level of the ontological, it exposes it on the level of the ontic. In chapters 5, (3, and 8
I go on to argue that he fundamentally challenges the idea that the liberal-democratic state only aims to positively
channel primordial hostility into legitimate opposi- tion in the form of conflicts between adversaries. Instead, he

the state produces and sustains historically specific practices of

violence through its monopoly on it . Violence in modern societies has
largely been eradicated from open encounters between enemies, but it is
practiced in the name of improvement in institutions of discipline,
correction, and punishment. The reason why conflicts between adversaries
do not escalate into violence in modern democracies is thus not because
there are efective and legitimate channels through which they are defusedsuch as democratic political participationbut because the state
has an insurmountable monopoly. A lot of conflicts are not defused, but in
fact are produced, and then simply contained within prison walls . It is my
contention that a consistently anti-essentialist approach to political
claims that

thinking would mean understanding violence nominalistically, and not as a

primordial, irreducible essence. Appropriating Foucault's thought, we should then also question
"the repressive hypothesis"38 in connection with political violence: the idea that political order functions only to

it efectively produces and sustains historically

specific practices of violence.
repress a primordial hostility. Instead,

AT: Decision Making

No terminal impact to decision making any action will be
ignored by Congress
Strm, 11 Masters in Political Science from Politihgskolen (Kari Milner,
TERRORISM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE, 2011, Masters
Thesis, http://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/174775/terrorism
%20democracy.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
The question of whether we can trust politics informed by GWOT is highly
relevant. Arguing the case against Wikileaks in a television debate Carl W. Ford, Assistant Secretary of State for
Intelligence and Research (INR) during the Bush era, listed the elaborate procedures set up to oversee the
executive, concluding that existing checks and balances are sufficient (BBC 5 February 2011a). Telling a different

we at regular intervals are

informed that governments and politicians are unaware of illegal
surveillance activities and counter-terrorism operations taking place on
their watch, as it were. The regularity of breaches of public trust therefore points to
another conclusion than that drawn by Ford, suggesting instead that existing democratic checks
and balances are both insufficient and inefficient. As far as US policy in the
area of terrorism is concerned Crenshaw notes that American counterterrorism
policy is not just a response to the threat of terrorism, whether at home or
abroad, but a reflection of the domestic political process. Perceptions of
the threat of terrorism and determination and implementation of policy
occur in the context of a policy debate involving government institutions,
the media, interest groups, and the elite and mass publics. The issue of terrorism
story, albeit not limited to the post-9/11 era, is the fact that

tends to appear prominently on the national policy agenda as a result of highly visible and symbolic attacks on
Americans or American property. However, the threat is interpreted through a political lens created by the diffused
structure of power within the American government. (2006b: 183).

Apathy now no one will care

Zurcher 14 (Anthony, ed. BBC echo chambers, Obama's NSA speech reflects American apathy, http://www.bbc.com/news/blogsechochambers-25787468)

The US public's reaction to the US surveillance program is in marked

contrast to the European view, particularly in Germany, where opinion is
decidedly negative. In a November 2013 poll, 70% of Germans objected to
government collection of phone and internet data for national security
purposes. "Europeans still operate under the assumption that it is critical
to uphold the rule of law," write Globalist editor Stephan Richter and German MEP Jan Philipp Albercht
for the Guardian. "The US government is more than flexible with the rule of law
by turning any notion of privacy into Swiss cheese. The dangerous
implications this holds for the core ideas of democracy are obvious." It's a
diplomatic bone, tossed with the understanding that our allies should applaud but not expect us to change too
much about what we do Ed Morrissey, Hot Air They continue:

American citizens themselves,

to a stunningly large extent, have bought into the notion that the "war on
terror" and "Islamic extremism" justify all means. Their acquiescence, if not active
tolerance, is what allows Washington to operate above the law, from drones to routinely spying on the German

chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Spanish people, to name but a few of the targets .

If Americans are
relatively unconcerned about the US government monitoring their own
population, they're even less worried about what it does in other
countries.