Challenging National Borders in Debates Over Surveillance

FYI
Explanation of the argument:

This file includes a criticism of affs use of conventional national borders as the starting point for
limitations on surveillance. According to the 1NC, the surveillance practices and institutions revealed by
Edward Snowden demonstrate that our world has fundamentally changed. Rather than overreach by a
particular government, surveillance demonstrates that in place of national security and national intelligence
agencies, we now face a set of transnational (across/beyond nations) institutions and elites. As a result,
appealing to domestic protections that rely on the borders and legal institutions of an individual nation-state
may be counterproductive for stopping repressive surveillance. Thus, the alternative suggests those
opposing surveillance must also change their organization, tactics, and theories to become transnational and
cosmopolitan. Failure to change these approaches may encourage nationalism, conflict, and the fear of
foreign peoples that justify surveillance.
Glossary
While I am providing a brief explanation of the terms used (primarily from the 1NC evidence), everyone
should know that each of these terms (especially something like cosmopolitanism) are highly contested and
sources of serious conceptual debates in their relevant fields.
Cosmopolitanism A political and ethical theory based on identification with the world, rather than any
particular group within that world. Additionally, cosmopolitanism is typically aligned with a willingness to
reflect on and criticize the local forms of identification common in our home society. Thus,
cosmopolitanism is usually associated with political and ethical universalism over particularism. The root
cosmos refers to the whole world. A cosmo-politician makes the whole world their political community.
Immanuel Kant, a prominent representative of cosmopolitan ethics and politics in the European
Enlightenment, developed his ethical system based on the idea that one should imagine that moral rules
would be applied to all humanity rather than one nation. Many cosmopolitans have taken up this idea for
defending a system of moral obligations and rights that are human rights instead of civil (tied to a
city/residence/particular political unit) or political (tied to a polis city/polity) rights. Critics of
cosmopolitanism often condemn its focus on the world at the expense of local, national, or communal.
Data Subject Defined in the evidence as: The data subject is a conditional form of existence whose
rights are dependent upon its behavior within digital networks. The authors coined this term to highlight
the way in which the rise of the Internet is fundamentally changing how we identify who we are. To be a
political or national subject means being part of a particular government or nation. A particular persons
signature characteristics used to be established through unique physical presence or mark (like a signature).
Operating online, one still forms of set of characteristics or a traceable identity but only mediated by
digital technologies. What exactly that identity (cookies, search histories, social media behavior etc) is
remains legally and politically unclear. This argument raises important questions about how, where, and by
who rights are claimed and exercised.
Demos The political grouping of a democracy. Democracy means rule by the people. The question: who
are the people? is a fundamental problem in political theory. A cosmopolitan critique of national
democratic government argues that truly democratic systems must include more simply people of a
particular nationality.
Depoliticized Debates in political theory (and practice) raise important questions about what should count
as a political issue. Different societies at different points in history treat what should be considered
political quite differently. The term politicize transforms the noun politics into a verb, to make
something political or to argue that it ought to be. Depoliticize is an action in the opposite direction, to
remove something from politics. In the case of this argument, the most important examples are issues of
security and the boundaries of political community. The 1NC Walker evidence argues that while issues of
surveillance should make the issue of who counts as part of our political community (and where to draw the
boundaries of that community) political. As long as the debate over surveillance remains one of security
vs. liberty, were implicitly talking about national security, and avoiding any larger questions about the
legitimacy of privileging our nation above all else.
Nation-State This term is used to highlight that the state and the nation are being analyzed together, but
that they are not the same. Typically, the state refers to the administrative apparatus of government. In the
case of American society, various bureaucratic agencies authorized to performs particular tasks (i.e. collect
taxes, conduct surveillance, set interest rates). The nation is a much trickier concept. First, states dont
have to be connected to nations. Empires, city-states, and other political units have administrative
agencies, but do not govern in the name of a particular nation. Nations are often treated as imagined
communities (a term coined by scholar Benedict Anderson). A nation is defined by a group of people
coming to share a set of ideas, rituals, and values they believe are bundled together. A nation-state refers to
the overlap between the imagined national community and the agencies of a state. Conflicts often emerge
over whether or not the nation and state are truly aligned. In the instance of this file, one of the important
issues is that state security agencies (i.e. the NSA) are supposed to provide national security, supposedly a
mandate from the people. Yet, how and whether those are theoretically part of the nation that is being
protected feel the state is acting in their interests (or should ever prioritize national interests) is extremely
controversial.
Sovereign State Sovereignty is another concept from political theory and practice with an incredibly long
and complicated history. For a short-hand, sovereignty refers to supreme authority or control. A sovereign
state is self-governing. It is the highest authority in the land. Many cosmopolitans and human rights
activists argue that absolute sovereignty encourages states to abuse their authority.
Methodological Nationalism Read the above definitions before this one. Methodological nationalism is a
term coined by Ulrich Beck to describe the practice in the social sciences of presuming that the nation-state
is the basic unit of analysis. When asking questions about security, we often assume this means national
security. When discussing surveillance, we start with national political debates over the application of
national laws. According to Beck, this picture of the world is not only inaccurate, but also potentially
unethical. That is, we fall into the trap of treating nation-states as something inherent in our world, instead
of a product of our political and analytical choices. As a result, social scientists may be failing in their
duty to analyze the world as it could/should be by treating their existing world as an inevitability. If nationstates were made, they can be unmade/changed.
1NC
Stopping surveillance at national borders depoliticizes the issue. The technical
question of how to ensure protection of citizens presumes the authority of national
security.
RBJ WALKER Professor of Political Science and of Cultural, Social and Political Thought @ University
of Victoria (British Columbia) 14 Which Democracy for Which Demos? in Polity and Crisis eds.
Massimo Fichera, Sakari Hnninen, and Kaarlo Tuori p. 179-181
So in both cases, much of the interpretive terrain is familiar enough, but there is also sufficient scope to
imagine that something more interesting is at stake. There may be grounds for pessimism, for fears that
unrest may bring some kind of authoritarian backlash or just that the diversity of demands can lead only
into unfocused and ultimately futile agitation. There may be grounds for optimism, for a few more
concessions, perhaps, but also for hopes that new energies and values will stimulate alternatives to the
highly centralized and tightly controlled forms of democracy shaped by the dynamics of modernization
from above. Much remains unpredictable. It remains unpredictable not least in relation to the degree to
which the polis expressed in the claims of statist law remains consistent with the polis shaped by the
demands of emerging forms of economic value. Even on familiar nationalist terms, the possibilities for
democracy hinge on struggles to define which and what kind of demos can sustain which kind of
democracy, and on which kind of democracy can constitute and sustain what kind of demos, especially in
relation to the twin gods of modern political life. In principle, state law remains paramount. In practice,
other sovereignties are in play. Law is one thing, but legitimacy is quite another, and a widening gap
between legitimacy and law invariably spells trouble. Europe has considerable experience of this respect. In
the different but related events centred in the USA, a single whistleblower has added yet more information
to our still hazy but deeply disturbing knowledge of the capacity of various intelligence and security
services, in still uncertain degrees of alliance with many small companies as well as with large
corporations, to enlarge their presumed right to detailed information about citizens and foreigners alike.
The word treason has been mentioned, even by relatively progressive politicians, and thus the relation
between legality and legitimacy has also begun to open up with some virulence but in a rather different
way. This capacity for unprecedented knowledge/power rests partly on the legitimacy of a claim that it is
justified by the need for security, as well as by claims that the relevant procedures are covered by
appropriate legal safeguards. It also rests partly on massive advances in technological capacities for
surveillance of many kinds: for data-mining, for computer simulation, for the tapping of transmission lines,
for making judgments about persons of interest through probabilistic generalizations, worst-case
scenarios, and so on. The extraordinary scale and reach of the technical systems in question and the
complex institutional apparatus that is somehow supposed to be in control of it all has given rise to
horrified comparisons with other famous historical cases of Big Brother politics, from the Nazis, to the
Soviets, to J Edgar Hoovers FBI, to the Stasi to any number of terrifying police states in many places. The
scale of operations alone may well warrant such comparisons even if these specific cases may be
profoundly misleading on other fronts. These twin foundations have extensive historical roots. It is not
exactly news that states spy on their citizens, or on the citizens of other states. And the claim that
fundamental political principles, especially liberty, must reach some limitation when trumped by threats
of insecurity is hardly novel either. A version of it is found in Hobbess famous account of liberty under
law. Another version is found in Carl Schmitts account of sovereignty as a capacity to decide on the
exception to established norms. Both are echoed in the familiar claim that democracy must stop at the
edge of the apparatus guaranteeing national security. That edge, of course, was the boundary of the state
itself, the place where territorial limit and the limit of sovereign law must coincide, at least in principle. But
the scale, scope and reach of contemporary surveillance operations points to a very different kind of
political order, although precisely what kind of political order this may be is far from clear. Mapping
networks is not the same as mapping the territorial limits of sovereign states. Much of the immediate
critical commentary on the capacities for surveillance that have been revealed so far arise from a concern
for the erosion of privacy. Privacy is undoubtedly one of the key values embodied in the more overtly
liberal forms of democratic politics. It is one of the characteristic expressions of a political culture
grounded in citizens being able to be subjects for themselves rather than the subjects of others. It speaks to
the many traditions in which freedom of conscience and the most basic ideas about what it means to be a
person, about how one might reconcile ones citizenship with ones humanity, about personhood, have been
expressed through the possibilities of democratic politics. Laws may or may not prevent the spying
machines from snooping on the substantive content of phone calls and electronic correspondence, but there
seems to be relatively little safeguard against the collection of so-called metadata, aggregate information
that treats people once again as mere objects, made subject to external rule rather than self-rule, and to ever
mutating forms of what various recent literatures seek to understand as governmentality, bio-politics and
the manipulation of paranoia rather than anything resembling a democratic society. Democrats, especially
liberal democrats, have ample reason to be angry and afraid. As Hobbes himself also saw very clearly, the
sovereign power promising to bring subjects a more secure form of liberty could well be the very same
power that destroys subjects in the name of the security of subjects. From this angle, it is not silly to
suspect that the scale of the contemporary capacity for surveillance has the capacity to destroy much of
what we have come to name as democracy.3 But privacy, subjectivity and liberalism are not the only
principles at stake here. At the heart of the matter, as it has been for the dozen or so years of the supposed
war on terror, is what we are supposed to make of the relationship between principles of liberty and the
demands of security. In the present context, many military figures have been deployed in order to make
claims about the degree to which surveillance has prevented many acts of terror. The loss of liberty, the
explicit argument goes, is simply the price to be paid for security under contemporary conditions. The
implicit argument, of course, is that these are exceptional conditions, conditions under which the cost in
liberty is worth the price we are asked to pay. Between them, the explicit and the implicit capture an
enormous terrain of competing political principles. The same can be said for the constant appeal to the
figure of a balance between liberty and security, the apparent choice, as if in a supermarket, between
competing commodities purchasable with the same currency.4 President Obama elegantly expressed the
underlying premise of a homogeneous but scalar order at work here when he said that You cannot have
100 per cent security and then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience.5 He went on to remark:
You know, were going to have to make some choices as a society.6 A demos is invoked. A choice is
going to have to be made, by someone. A line must be drawn, at some point along the scale. The question
of the relation between sovereign authority and the demos, between the sovereignty of a people and the
sovereignty of a state the relation upon which all claims about modern forms of democracy, and law, and
legitimacy, are grounded is broached. But this question has already been depoliticized by the framing of
the problem as a choice between two equal values on a continuum, a choice framed in relation to what
amounts to a normal curve of distribution, the bell curve on which the relative price of competing but equal
principles can be calculated at a point of balance somewhere along the curve, or at the point at which two
such curves meet. Balance is such a seductive concept, perhaps one of the most seductive of all political
concepts. In this particular context, and with the insertion of a logic of markets into the logic of state law, it
is entirely misleading. Liberty and security are simply not competing values of equal status. These do not
constitute a pairing like liberty and equality, which at least nominally have equal status among the highest
principles of modern politics, even if their relationship is better understood as aporetic rather than as a
choice to be made along a curve of rational distribution. Security names the condition of possibility under
which the relation between liberty and equality might be negotiated, not least through democratic
procedures. Security is the name we give to a limit condition, to the edge of the curve, to the exception to
the normal rule, to the point at which it becomes legitimate to suspend the law, to invoke the necessity for
secrecy, for surveillance, for sovereign decision. This is partly why we remember Hobbes, and Schmitt, and
why we fear the manipulation of fear and paranoia; it is why the illiberal character of modern liberal
societies is becoming so insidious. When Obama invokes a we that must make choices, he coolly avoids
the central question of which sovereign authority is supposed to be in play, effectively passing
responsibility onto society, onto a social negotiation over exchangeable norms while legitimizing a
sovereign decision of the state to suspend norms. When he treats the spatiotemporally expansive apparatus
of surveillance that has been revealed over the past few years as just another moment in a normalized
routine in a spatially contained statist politics of norms and exceptions that is then masked by rhetorics of
balance and consumer choice, he simply reveals the enormous gap between legality and legitimacy that is
now opening up in so many situations in so many places. The relative autonomy and the public/private and
globally networked character of contemporary intelligence agencies undermines the regulative ideal of a
sovereign state acting to secure the liberty of its citizens. The whistleblower has been named as a traitor,
but if the accusation is deemed to be plausible in law it remains to be seen whether it is an accusation that is
grounded in legitimate authority, or in relation to which polis we are supposed to identify either the law or
the authority. In this case, the relation between democracy and demos opens up in especially confusing
ways, as long-established tensions between sovereignty expressed in state law and sovereignty expressed in
economic value converge with tensions between the sovereignty we know from the history of states and the
international system and the kind of sovereignty, or anti-sovereignty, we vaguely remember from systems
of empire. Empire, we might recall, is precisely the form of rule against which the modern state struggled,
against theologies and emperors to affirm a new basis for political possibility, eventually enabling the
possibilities of democracy within a singular demos. Which democracy for which demos are we talking
about in this particular context? After all, some of the most startling revelations about the scale of
contemporary forms of surveillance have been made in relation to Europe at least if the UK is taken to be
part of Europe, and especially if this part of Europe is engaged in snooping into the lives of citizens
throughout Europe, or into European institutions within the USA. Laws of imperium are officially obsolete,
having been replaced by the modern double of state and international law. Laws of economic value are
officially subordinate to state law and international law. Such regulative ideals have been increasingly
implausible guides to empirical practices for a long time. They nevertheless remain powerful guides for the
ways in which we think about democracy and its possibilities. In some places, these ideals still have
purchase. In some they seem increasingly perverse.
National opposition to transnational surveillance reproduces the conditions for

digital geopolitics. This turns the case.
Zygmunt BAUMAN Sociology @ Leeds (Emeritus) ET AL 14 After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of
Surveillance Intl Political Sociology 8 Additional Authors: Didier Bigo Kings College London and
Sciences-Po Paris; Paulo Esteves Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro; Elspeth Guild Queen
Mary and Radboud University Nijmegen; Vivienne Jabri Kings College London; David Lyon Queens
University and R. B. J. Walker University of Victoria and Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
p. 128-131
Games That States Play Along the Meobius Strip
The transformation of territorial lines into a Mobius strip rearticulates the sovereign games that states
usually play. While big data collection blurs categorizations of what is domestic and what is foreign,
the consequent reconfiguration of the boundaries of the sovereign state into a Mobius strip has in turn
become a site, in and of itself, of political struggles, resistance and dissent. Along the Mobius strip, states,
social movements, and individuals can play a variety of games, reenacting the meanings of sovereignty and
citizenship, security, and liberty. In the case of states, reactions against mass surveillance have varied from
assertions of universal rights to reconstitutions of sovereign territorial boundaries, from the digitization of
security to the digitization of geopolitics. Several dimensions of the Brazilian governments recent reaction
against techniques of mass surveillance are exemplary of the different games that states play along the
Mobius strip. This section will address these games and how they shape political struggles around the
digitized reason of state.
How to Turn the Mobius Strip Back into Sovereign Lines
Edward Snowdens exposure of NSA surveillance operations in Brazilincluding the monitoring of
President Rousseffs mobile phone and the collection of data from the countrys oil company and,
indiscriminately, from Brazilian citizens triggered a series of actions in several arenas. In addition to the
postponement of a state visit to the United States, originally scheduled for October 2013, President
Rousseff dedicated her statement at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly to the issue of
mass surveillance or, as she called it, a global network of electronic espionage. The statement condemned
the NSAs practices on two grounds: violation of human rights and disrespect to national sovereignty.
Consistent with Rousseffs speech, the most noticeable outcome was the inclusion of privacy rights in the
agenda of the UN Human Rights Committee and the introduction of a Resolution at the UN General
Assembly, with the support of the German government. Even though the resolution did not mention the
United States, its proposal was a way to censure the practices of mass surveillance conducted by American
agencies. Nevertheless, contrary to the many accusations of violations of national sovereignty (vocalized by
many governments, Brazil and Germany included), what distinguished this reaction was the stage on which
it took place and the vocabulary through which it was articulated. At the UN, states are supposed to employ
a universal vocabulary, enabling therefore claims for the recognition of privacy as a human right.
The enactment of a universal vocabulary destabilizes the core of mass surveillance practices, bringing to
the fore the ways in which they constitute their main object of concern: the data subject. The data
subject is a conditional form of existence whose rights are dependent upon its behavior within digital
networks. The observation and analysis of specific behaviors make it possible to draw generic profiles and
to identify threats and targets. Hence, the degree of separation between the subject and an identified target
triggers specific surveillance techniques and defines the rights to which the data subject is entitled. Under
the digitized reason of state regime, individual rights are conditioned by a specific series of relationships
and by the particular positions that the subject occupies within these boundless networks. Data
subjects are constituted and accessed with regards to their particular position. Their rights depend upon
how distantor notthey are from given targets. This positional articulation is at odds with the
cosmopolitan assumptions that underpin the universal rights campaign by the Brazilian and German
governments. Their attempts to reconstitute individual rights, and ultimately the regulative idea of an
autonomous subject, against the digitized reason of state, might appear outdated and, perhaps, conservative.
In this sense, political debates regarding the techniques of mass surveillance at the General Assembly were
primarily a struggle between two modes of existence: the data subject and the cosmopolitan subject of
universal rights. Nevertheless, the cosmopolitan leaning of the General Assembly resolution was a way to
reconstitute the promises of the modern international, not only through the safeguarding of individual
autonomy, but also through the assertion of the responsibility of states in protecting it. Against the practices
of mass surveillance, states such as Brazil and Germany have tried to turn the Mobius strip back into
sovereign territorial lines.
Nevertheless, the cosmopolitan move was not made at the expense of state sovereignty, at least not in the
case of the Brazilian government. Within this particular game, the enactment of a cosmopolitan vocabulary
authorizes the state to act in order to protect its citizens rights, including the right of privacy and, as will
be discussed below, to protect data. Hence, at the UN, the game that Brazilian authorities are playing is
actually an attempt to reconcile individual autonomy, state sovereignty, and universal rights. Although
strategically this game challenges the foundations of the digitized reason of state, the techniques mobilized
and eventually deployed to protect citizens rights may, in effect, reinforce it. Claiming that privacy is a
human right, Brazilian authorities support the creation of a multilateral and multi-stakeholder arrangement
capable of ensuring freedom of expression, privacy of individuals and respect for human rights
(Rousseff). Yet, the same claim authorizes the Brazilian government to declare its resolve to do everything
within its reach to defend the human rights of all Brazilians and to protect the fruits born from the ingenuity
of [its] workers and [its] companies (Rousseff). That is, what President Rousseff has in mind is a set of
domestic measures intended to build up national capabilities to protect the privacy of Brazilian citizens
against the threat of US mass surveillance.4 Even though the multilateral regulation of cyberspace and the
national capacity for the protection of citizens privacy might complement each other, the prospects for the
development of techniques of national protection may trigger another game: a digitized geopolitics.
The Digitized Reason of State and Its Digitized Geopolitics
The policies announced by the Brazilian government to contain the threats presented by US mass
surveillance techniques include the increase of international Internet connectivity and domestic content
production. According to Brazilian authorities, the production of domestic content, such as a national email
service or a national social media, would allow Brazilian citizens to keep their data within national borders.
The debate regarding the creation of a European data cloud raises similar issues. Indeed, Brazilian
authorities are not alone. In a similar vein, Dutch authorities have tried to keep the governments data out of
the reach of American companies, while the European Union is discussing the possibility of isolating data
storage from US mining techniques, and the German government is trying to keep traffic local by warning
Internet users when they pull out of European cyberspace. Not to mention the well-known cases of the
Chinese Great Firewall or the Iranian Halal Internet. In every case, states are thickening their digital
borders. Although one should not overlook the differences between what Brazilian or German authorities
are doing to protect data and privacy, and what the Chinese government is doing with its firewall, in each of
these cases a massive infrastructure has to be built. Hence, a vast array of technologies, legislations, and
expertise has to be developed and deployed either to protect data, to control traffic or even for surveillance.
On top of all of these investments in state capacities for protection or surveillance, security professionals
and intelligence experts have to be mobilized to manage the national systems.
By building their fortresses in the clouds, states shift from the cosmopolitan move to strategic play. While
the first move is based on claims to universal rights, the strategic game is based on claims to state
sovereignty, or in this case cybersovereignty. Within these strategic games, very often, the reference to
universal rights fades and ends up being replaced by a strategic reasoning embedded in uncertainty and
fear. Concepts such as national interest, national or state security, espionage, and war come to the fore when
state representatives go public to support policies and techniques that protect a given society. Cyberspace
is, then, described as a US-centered space, and so US cyber power should be balanced through the
development of national cyber capabilities or international coalitions.
In the Brazilian case, attempts to expand international Internet connectivity (within the regional space but
also on a global scale) are consistent with the idea of protecting national data as well as of balancing or
competing with the US position in cyberspace. The program comprises three articulated initiatives: the
construction of intercontinental undersea fiber cables, many of them connecting Southern countries; a
satellite program, planning to launch a Geostationary Defense and Strategic Communications satellite in
2016; and, finally, an overland fiber cable connecting countries in South America. One of the core moves in
this game has been the announcement of a BRICS cable, connecting all of the BRICS countries
independently from the United States.5 Every single initiative articulates different branches of the Brazilian
government with Brazilian or transnational corporations, and every project is transnational by its own
nature.6 This new game results in an expansion of the digitized reason of state. Instead of evading the
Mobius strip, states play geopolitics within it. The digitized geopolitics assumes that cyberspace is a
battlefield and that states must build up their own cyber capabilities in order to defend themselves and/or
must engage in international coalitions in order to face the challenges posed by mass surveillance and
digital espionage. The paradoxical effect of this particular game seems to be that states resistance against
mass surveillance ultimately reinforces the digitized reason of state regime. Reproducing the opposition
between security and freedom, while playing the digitized geopolitics game, states might end up subsuming
citizenship and rights to the positional logic of a data subject. While fighting against mass surveillance,
states may create the appropriate conditions to conduct mass surveillance themselves.
Our alternative We must develop transnational cosmopolitan opposition to

surveillance.
Ulrich BECK Sociology @ Munich 13 The digital freedom risk: too fragile an acknowledgment
https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/ulrich-beck/digital-freedom-risk-too-fragileacknowledgment
The Prism scandal has opened up a new chapter in the world risk society. In the past decades we have
encountered a series of global public risks, including the risks posed by climate change, nuclear energy,
finances, September 11 and terrorism and now the global digital freedom risk.
All these global risks (with the exception of terrorism) are more or less part of technological development,
as well as of the misgivings usually expressed in the phases of modernization of any respective new
technology. And now we have Edward Snowdens disclosures. All of a sudden, something is happening that
turns the global risk in this case the digital freedom risk into a globally public problem. However, the
risk logic at work here is different from what we have known so far.
Whereas the accidents in the reactors of Chernobyl and later on Fukushima triggered a public debate about
the nuclear power risk, the discussion about the digital freedom risk was not triggered by a catastrophe,
because the real catastrophe would actually be an imposed hegemonic control on a global scale. The selfimage of the information hegemony imposed, however, does not allow for this global risk.
In other words: this particular catastrophe would normally happen without anyone noticing. We have
become aware of the potential catastrophe only because a single secret service expert from the United
States applied the means of information control in order to tell the world about the global risk, and we are
faced with a complete inversion of the normal situation.
Our awareness of this global risk is, at the same time, an extremely fragile one, because, unlike the other
global risks, the risk we are dealing with does not focus on, result from or repeatedly refer to a catastrophe
which is physical and real in space and time. It rather and unexpectedly interferes with something we
have taken for granted, i.e. our capacity to control information, which has almost become our second
nature. But then, the mere visibility of the matter triggers resistance.
Let us try and explain the phenomenon in a different way: first of all there are some features all global risks
seem to share. In one way or another they all bring home to us the global interconnectedness in our
everyday lives. These risks are all global in a particular sense, i.e. we are not dealing with spatially,
temporally or socially restricted accidents, but with spatially, temporally and socially delimited
catastrophes. And they are all collateral effects of a successful modernization, which questions
retrospectively the institutions that have pushed modernization so far. In terms of the freedom risk, this
includes: scenarios in which the capacity of the nation state to exercise democratic control fails and other
cases in which the calculation of probabilities, or insurance protection, etc. do so too.
Furthermore, all these global risks are perceived differently in the different parts of the world. We are faced
with a clash of risk cultures, in order to offer a variation of Huntingtons concept. We are also faced with
an inflation of existential catastrophes, and with one catastrophe threatening to outdo the other: the
financial risk beats the climate risk; and terrorism beats the violation of digital freedom. This is, by the
way, one of the main barriers to any public recognition of the global risk to freedom, which, therefore, has
not yet become the subject matter for public intervention.
The latter is, clearly, changing today. Yet, the acknowledgement of this fact is a rather fragile one. Who
could the powerful player be, with an interest in keeping this risk alive in public awareness and thus
pushing the public towards political action? The first candidate to come to my mind would be the
democratic state. Alas, this would be like asking the fox to look after the chickens. Because it is the
state itself, in collaboration with the digital trusts, that has established its hegemony in order to optimize its
key interest in national and international security. Any movement here could, however, constitute a historic
step away from the pluralism of nation states towards a digital global state, which is free from control.
The citizen is the second potential player on our list. However, the users of the new digital information
media have, actually, become cyborgs. They employ these media as if they were senses, and consider them
an integral part of their concept of how they understand and act in the world. The members of the Facebook
generation, because of their dependence on social media, are on living within these media, in doing so,
relinquish a relevant part of their individual freedom and privacy.
Who, then, could exercise this kind of control? It could be, for example, the Basic Law. Alas in Germany,
Article 10 stipulates that postal and telecommunication secrecy is sacrosanct. That sounds like a phrase
from a world long gone, and by no means fits the communication and control options provided by a
globalized world. In other words: Europe, for example, provides excellent supervisory agencies, a whole
range of institutions who try to assert fundamental rights against their powerful opponents, e.g. the
European Court of Justice, data protection officers, and parliaments.
But paradoxically enough, these institutions fail, even if they work. Because the means of defence they
have at hand are restricted to national territories. While we are dealing with global processes, they are
bound to use the tools of intervention developed in the last century. This applies, by the way, to all global
risks: The national answers and the political and legal instruments our institutions offer can no longer meet
the challenges posed by the global risk society today.
All this might sound very pessimistic. Yet, we must go one step further and ask, whether we social
scientists, normal citizens, and users of digital tools know the right terms in order to describe how
profoundly and fundamentally these are transforming our societies and politics. I believe that we lack the
categories, maps or compasses we need to navigate the New World. This, again, corresponds to the
situation in the global risk society at large. Successful modernization and an escalating technological
evolution have catapulted us into fields where we may and must act, without providing us with the
vocabulary we need to adequately describe or name these fields and our options for action.
An example might help explain our position concerning the freedom risk. We tend to say that a new digital
empire is coming into being. But none of the historical empires we know neither the Greek, nor the
Persian, nor the Roman Empire was characterized by the features that mark the digital empire of our
times.
The digital empire is based on characteristics of modernity which we have not yet truly reflected upon. It
does not rely on military violence, nor does it attempt to integrate distant zones politically and culturally
into its own realm. However, it exercises the extensive and intensive, profound and far-reaching control
that ultimately pushes any individual preference and deficit into the open we are all becoming
transparent.
The traditional concept of the empire, however, does not cover this type of control. In addition, there is an
important ambivalence: We provide major tools of control, but the digital control we exercise is extremely
vulnerable. The empire of control has not been threatened by a military power, or by a rebellion or
revolution, or by war, but by a single and courageous individual. A thirty year-old secret service expert has
threatened to topple it by turning the information system against itself. The fact that this kind of control
seems unfeasible, and the fact that it is much more vulnerable than we imagine, are the two sides of one
and the same coin.
The individual can, indeed, resist the seemingly hyper-perfect system, which is an opportunity that no
empire has ever offered before. The brave can resort to counter-power, if they choose to offer resistance on
the job. One of the key questions is, therefore, whether we should not oblige the major digital companies to
legally implement a whistleblower union and, in particular, the duty of resistance in ones profession,
maybe first on a national scale, and subsequently at European level, etc.
However, John Q. Citizen unlike Snowden does not know much about the structures and the power of
this so-called empire. The young Columbus travels towards the New World and uses social networks as an
extension of his communicating body. The world vision of the new generation incorporates the benefits
offered be it with respect to the organization of protest movements, to global communication, or to digital
love. From all we can see, the young do not fear being controlled by the system.
An important consequence becomes evident here. How we assess the risk posed by the violation of freedom
rights differs from our assessment of a perhaps health-related violation as a consequence of climate
change. The violation of our freedom does not hurt. We neither feel it, nor do we suffer a disease, a flood, a
lack of opportunities to find a job, and so on. Freedom dies without human beings being physically hurt.
The power and legitimacy of the state are based on the promise of security. Freedom comes or seems
always secondary. Being a sociologist, I am convinced that the freedom risk is the most fragile among the
global risks we have experienced so far.
What should we do? I suggest that we formulate a kind of digital humanism. Let us identify the
fundamental right of data protection and digital freedom as a global human right, which must prevail like
any other human right, if needs be against all odds.
Is a lesser approach feasible? No, there is no lesser goal. Currently we are being told to apply the new
methodologies of encryption in order to protect us from attacks by those who want to track us. This
approach, however, implies the individualization of a problem that is, in fact, a global one. And the true
catastrophe is, as we have seen, that the catastrophe disappears and becomes invisible, because the control
exercised is becoming an increasingly perfect one. This happens to the extent to which our reaction in view
of the imminent death of freedom remains an exclusively technical and individual one.
We lack, indeed, an international body to enforce such claims. In this respect there is no difference between
the freedom risk and the risk posed by climate change. The litany has always been the same: The nationstate cannot do it. There is no international player who can be addressed either. But there is general
concern. The global risk has an enormous power of mobilization that goes far beyond what we have ever
had before, e.g. the working class. A crucial factor would be to politically combine the unrest that has
activated social movements and political parties in different countries to varying degrees, in order to push
them towards the idea mentioned above.
But, is this the way to implement standards on a global scale? The permanent reflection about the dangers
for friend and foe alike could, indeed, trigger the creation and implementation of global norms. The sense
of what is right or wrong with respect to global norms would result ex post from a global public shock
about the violation of these norms. We are bound within a historical development that brings us to this point
time and again: We need a transnational invention of politics and democracy.
K Prior Methodological Nationalism

Domestic focus proves the aff is committed to the nation-state as the starting point
for policy analysis. We need to start with transnational cosmopolitan methods to
break down nationalist frames.
Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, March 2006. Professor of sociology at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University and the
London School of Economics; and professor of sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, Israel. Unpacking
cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda, The British Journal of Sociology 57.1, Wiley InterSciences.
Methodological nationalism takes the following premises for granted: it equates societies with nation-state
societies and sees states and their governments as the primary focus of social-scientific analysis . It assumes
that humanity is naturally divided into a limited number of nations, which organize themselves internally as nation-states and
externally set boundaries to distinguish themselves from other nation-states. And it goes further: this outer delimitation as well as the
competition between nation-states, represent the most fundamental category of political organization. The premises of the social
sciences assume the collapse of social boundaries with state boundaries, believing that social action occurs primarily within and only
secondarily across, these divisions:
[Like] stamp collecting . . . social scientists collected distinctive national social forms. Japanese industrial relations, German
national character, the American constitution, the British class system not to mention the more exotic institutions of tribal societies
were the currency of social research. The core disciplines of the social sciences, whose intellectual traditions are reference points for
each other and for other fields, were therefore domesticated in the sense of being preoccupied not with Western and world
civilization as wholes but with the domestic forms of particular national societies (Shaw 2000: 68).
The critique of methodological nationalism should not be confused with the thesis that the end of the
nation-state has arrived. One does not criticize methodological individualism by proclaiming the end of the individual. Nationstates (as all the research shows see also the different contributions in this volume) will continue to thrive or will be transformed into
transnational states. What, then, is the main point of the critique of methodological nationalism? It adopts categories of practice as
categories of analysis. The decisive point is that national organization as a structuring principle of societal and
political action can no longer serve as the orienting reference point for the social scientific observer . One
cannot even understand the re-nationalization or re-ethnification trend in Western or Eastern Europe
without a cosmopolitan perspective. In this sense, the social sciences can only respond adequately to the
challenge of globalization if they manage to overcome methodological nationalism and to raise empirically
and theoretically fundamental questions within specialized fields of research, and thereby elaborate the
foundations of a newly formulated cosmopolitan social science. As many authors including the ones in this volume
criticize, in the growing discourse on cosmopolitanism there is a danger of fusing the ideal with the real. What cosmopolitanism is
cannot ultimately be separated from what cosmopolitanism should be. But the same is true of nationalism. The small, but important,
difference is that in the case of nationalism the value judgment of the social scientists goes unnoticed because
methodological nationalism includes a naturalized conception of nations as real communities . In the case of the
cosmopolitan Wertbeziehung (Max Weber, value relation), by contrast, this silent commitment to a nation-state
centred outlook of sociology appears problematic. In order to unpack the argument in the two cases it is necessary to
distinguish between the actor perspective and the observer perspective. From this it follows that a sharp distinction should be made
between methodological and normative nationalism. The former is linked to the social-scientific observer perspective, whereas the
latter refers to the negotiation perspectives of political actors. In a normative sense, nationalism means that every nation has
the right to self-determination within the context of its cultural, political and even geographical boundaries
and distinctiveness. Methodological nationalism assumes this normative claim as a socio-ontological
given and simultaneously links it to the most important conflict and organization orientations of society and
politics. These basic tenets have become the main perceptual grid of the social sciences . Indeed, this socialscientific stance is part of the nation-state's own self-understanding. A national view on society and politics, law, justice, memory and
history governs the sociological imagination. To some extent, much of the social sciences has become a prisoner of
the nationstate. That this was not always the case is shown in Bryan Turner's paper in this issue (Turner 2006: 13351). This
does not mean, of course, that a cosmopolitan social science can and should ignore different national
traditions of law, history, politics and memory. These traditions exist and become part of our cosmopolitan methodology.
The comparative analyses of societies, international relations, political theory, and a significant part of
history and law all essentially function on the basis of methodological nationalism . This is valid to the extent that
the majority of positions in the contemporary debates in social and political science over globalization can be systematically
interpreted as transdisciplinary reflexes linked to methodological nationalism. These premises also structure empirical
research, for example, in the choice of statistical indicators, which are almost always exclusively
national. A refutation of methodological nationalism from a strictly empirical viewpoint is therefore
difficult, indeed, almost impossible, because so many statistical categories and research procedures are based on it. It is
therefore of historical importance for the future development of the social sciences that this methodological
nationalism, as well as the related categories of perception and disciplinary organization, be theoretically,
empirically, and organizationally re-assessed and reformed . What is at stake here? Whereas in the case of the nationstate centred perspective there is an historical correspondence between normative and methodological nationalism (and for this reason
this correspondence has mainly remained latent), this does not hold for the relationship between normative and methodological
cosmopolitanism. In fact, the opposite is true: even the re-nationalization or re-ethnification of minds, cultures and institutions has to
be analysed within a cosmopolitan frame of reference. Cosmopolitan social science entails the systematic breaking up
of the process through which the national perspective of politics and society, as well as the methodological
nationalism of political science, sociology, history, and law, confirm and strengthen each other in their
definitions of reality. Thus it also tackles (what had previously been analytically excluded as a sort of conspiracy of silence of
conflicting basic convictions) the various developmental versions of de-bounded politics and society, corresponding research
questions and programmes, the strategic expansions of the national and international political fields, as well as basic transformations
in the domains of state, politics, and society. This paradigmatic de-construction and re-construction of the social
sciences from a national to a cosmopolitan outlook can be understood and methodologically justified as a
positive problem shift (Lakatos 1970), a broadening of horizons for social science research making
visible new realities encouraging new research programmes (Back and Lau 2005 and Beck, Banss and Lau 2003:
135). Against the background of cosmopolitan social science, it suddenly becomes obvious that it is neither possible to distinguish
clearly between the national and the international, nor, correspondingly, to make a convincing contrast between homogeneous units.
National spaces have become de-nationalized, so that the national is no longer national, just as the international is no longer
international. New realities are arising: a new mapping of space and time, new co-ordinates for the social and
the political are emerging which have to be theoretically and empirically researched and elaborated .
Our constitutive theories about what type of world we live in are more important
than the immediate application of problem-solving approaches.
Wesley W. Widmaier, Fall 2004. Department of Political Science, St. Josephs University. Theory as a
Factor and the Theorist as an Actor: The Pragmatist Constructivist Lessons of John Dewey and John
Kenneth Galbraith, International Studies Review 6.3, Ebsco.
This realignment of debate also would contribute to a more engaged IR scholarship if it led scholars to
recognize that they themselves act as agents in such communicative interactions. They might then become
more inclined to acknowledge concerns, not only regarding explanation and research design, but also for
policy relevance and constitutional design. Deliberate reection on constitutional designconfronting and acknowledging the
inevitable implications of any scholarly arguments for policy practicesis necessary because every theoretical and empirical
argument offers a normative or policy lesson. For example, economists have recognized that classical theories
teach students to behave in accord with their precepts. Robert Frank and his colleagues (1993) have argued that
exposure to contemporary economic theory itself constitutes agents to act more selfishly; indeed, they found students enrolled in
economics courses come to behave in an increasingly self-help manner. In the IR context, Wendt (1999:377) himself argues that
problem-solving theory has the practical effect in the real world of helping to reproduce the status
quo and suggests that realism, despite its claim of objectivity is best seen in this light as a normative as
well as scientific theory. In recent decades, the research design-style structuring of questions and cases has come at the
expense of such constitutional concerns. Certainly, scholarly efforts should not be evaluated exclusively in terms of
the correctness of their policy views. Academia would not work if subjective political differences became legitimate grounds for dismissing arguments. However, scholars need to acknowledge that their views inevitably
possess normative and policy implications rather than pretending that such implications do not exist. Consider again that
despite their numerous differences, the constitutive lessons inherent in the analyses of Waltz, Cox, Ashley,
and Campbell are quite similar: that state and societal agents must dene their interests in competitiveas
opposed to collectivefashion. One suspects that this is not the moral that Ashley or Campbell sought to advocate.
Unfortunately, the absence of a broader focus on such constitutive lessons, a neglect rooted in the
structure of IR debate itself, limited their attention to such issues. In contrast, by more persistently asking
questions about the constitutive effects of theoretical or empirical claims, scholars may enable a more
relevant study of international relations. They might reclaim the public space to act as not simply
academics in the narrow sense of the termwithin elite epistemic communities or as participant-advisors in the policy
processbut rather they might aid one another in functioning as public intellectuals, focusing larger
public debates in a more constructive, pragmatic manner. What are the potential benets of such shifts? The
resulting academic contribution to public policy learning might enable not simply materialist-rationalist
styled Bayesian probability updating (Iverson 1984), but rather could promote a kind of social learning.
Such learning, as Albert Bandura (1962, viii) has argued neither casts people into the role of powerless objects controlled by
environmental forces nor free agents who can become whatever they choose, but rather recognizes that both people and their
environments are reciprocal determinants of each other. Such social learning requires an ability to make sense of
intersubjective contexts through a broader dialogue among the public, scholars, and policy agents.
International structures, from this vantage, offer no unambiguous lessons. Con- trary to Kissingers (1979:5455) view
(noted earlier) that the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high ofce are the intellectual capital they will consume
as long as they continue in ofce, possibilities for intersubjective variation require a constant monitoring of the prevailing
intersubjective mood. Just as balance of power rules are learned in a social context, they can be
unlearned if states come to expect cooperation instead of conict. Kissinger-like claims regarding the
irrelevance of ongoing reection to policymaking seem misguided, as does the application of balance of
power lessons in an inappropriate social context that may, in turn, contribute to new policy errors. Put
simply, lessons that are applicable in one setting (for example, Europe in 1914) may be counterproductive in another (for example,
Europe in 1992). Such variation might, perhaps, be more readily recognized by scholars engaged in a more pragmatic, ongoing social
learning. Conclusion Theory constitutes social reality. This realization highlights the need for a pragmatist-
constructivist approach to IR theory, one that involves an ongoing involve- ment in both scholarly and
public debates. Unfortunately, the development of such a perspective in IR scholarship has often been
impeded by the distinction between long-term critical theory and short-run problem-solving theory.
The present essay has called this distinction into question by describing the ways in which John Dewey and John Kenneth Galbraith
engaged in theoretical debates while also pursuing policy agendas. Both Dewey and Galbraith highlighted the importance of socially
constructed understandings in the issue areas of education and economic policy. More broadly, their work itself provided a better sense
of what it means to act as a public intellectual in both guiding and being immersed in public debates. In addressing the
implications for IR scholarship, this essay has, therefore, urged a more explicit stress on both the role of
agency in advancing change and a recognition of the constitutive effects of theory on social reality. In
keeping with the tradition of pragmatist scholarship, let us conclude that distinctions between critical theory and problemsolving theory need to be relaxed considerably to highlight the potential roles of theory as a factor as well
as of theorists themselves as actors in international politics (Edwards 1990).
We must confront the hold that national borders have on our political imaginary.
Surveillance is justified by feelings of collective national belonging.
Katja Franko AAS Criminology & Sociology of Law @ Oslo 11 Crimmigrant bodies and
bona fide travelers: Surveillance, citizenship and global governance Theoretical Criminology 15 (3) p. 334
My point here is not only to accentuate the general importance of sovereignty for surveillance studies, but
more specifically, to focus on the mechanisms which make border surveillance not only a tool of
(externally directed) exclusion, but also a device for internal community building, integration and
governance. Borders are, as Etienne Balibar (2010: 316) reminds us, deeply rooted in collective
identifications and the assumption of a common sense of belonging. In the case of trans-national border
surveillance these assumptions about collective identityus and themreach into the global domain. It
is precisely the concrete formation of this global mapping imaginary (Balibar, 2010: 316) and the novel
forms of defining community and exclusion which are the focus of this analysis.
We should treat mass surveillance as a transnational issue. The practices of security

elites illustrate the futility of using national borders to limit activity.
p. 125-126
The potential field of suspicion is massive in the sense that it has no end and spreads through networks. But
it is not massive in terms of global reach or the surveillance of everyone. This is indeed the main argument
made by the different intelligence services. They say that they have objective criteria to restrict their
searches and that they cover only foreign intelligence (cf. US-FISA and FISC, GCHQ requirements, French
internal directives)thus, communications involving a foreigner at one end will be examined, in priority,
in a special circuit. However, it also seems that the system may identify suspicious behaviors of nationals
(and will in those cases have to ask for a warrant in the UK and US jurisdictions). The bulk collection of
data and the visualization through networks makes it impossible to be certain about the difference between
nationals and foreigners.
Legality requirements threaten the functioning of the system and so they presume that the law must adjust,
not the system. To avoid this complication, transnational networking between different services has
enabled a blurring of the boundaries of domestic and foreign jurisdiction. It seems that the different
services in charge of their own national security, working through the gathering and exchange of
information, ask other security services to perform some of their tasks, bypassing limitations on foreign
intelligence by using a citizen privacy shopping to exchange surveillance of their own citizen with
another service. In this way, what is national and what is foreign becomes mostly irrelevant for
transnationally organized operations.
National Security and Digitization of the Reason of State
These ways of gathering and sharing information have paradoxical effects on national security
requirements. National security is no longer national in its acquisition, or even analysis, of data and allies
different national security imperatives may clash, causing trust to disappear. Digitization creates big data
gathered at a transnational scale, blurring the lines of what is national as well as the boundaries between
law enforcement and intelligence. These trends encourage the move from the judicial framework of
criminal policing to preventive, preemptive and predictive approaches and from a high degree of certainty
about a small amount of data to a high degree of uncertainty about a large amount of data. The
hybridization of private and public actors destabilizes socialization through national state interests and
secrecy, opening possibilities for major leaks by persons with different values.
To put this more theoretically, the change and uncertainty surrounding the categories of foreign and
domestic is dispersing them through the webs of connections and transforming the sovereign line that
separated them clearly into a Mobius strip (Bigo 2001). By projecting national security inside out
through a transnational alliance of the professionals of national security and sensitive data, both public and
privatean unexpected outside in effect of suspicion is created for all Internet subjects. Many of these
data subjects react and reject the situation in which all Internet users are treated as potential suspects,
rather than as innocent in principle.
The practices of large-scale surveillance by the NSA and its counterparts must thus be understood, not as
media-driven scandal which will soon pass, but as indicators of a much larger transformation affecting the
way the boundaries of national security function. This is due to the conjunction of three processes that have
become interwoven: transnationalization, digitization, and privatization.
This conjunction creates an overarching effect of dispersion that challenges the very idea of a reason of
state conducted by a state in which the government determines national interests and national security
and asks its own services to operate accordingly. Even if it has always rested on exaggerated claims about
autonomy and self-determination, the concept of reason of state is now less and less encapsulated in the
formula of a national security performed by intelligence services socialized into secrecy and public
responsibility, patriotism, and suspicion of services in other nations. Rather, we see the transformation of a
reason of state through the emergence of a digitized reason of state performed by a heterogeneous complex
of professionals, of sensitive information hybridizing private and public actors. The transnational nature of
gathering information that crosses the boundaries of states dissociates the discursive, homogeneous nature
of national security interests while reconstructing an aggregate of professionals.
These professionals exchange information through digital technologies, produce intelligence according to
their own interests, and despise the idea that the rights of all Internet users can create limitations to their
projects. Consequently these transnational guilds of professionals are directly challenging the authority of
the professionals of politics which, in principle at least, and within the limits of an international order, had
the capacity and authority to define the content of national interests and security (Bigo 2013). They also
challenge the authority of national citizens by reconfiguring the ideas of privacy, secrecy of
communication, presumption of innocence, and even democracy. It may not be going too far to suggest that
what we still call national security has been colonized by a new nobility of intelligence agencies operating
in an increasingly autonomous transnational arena.
Surveillance proves a fundamental shift in the architecture of global society.

National legal protections presume an obsolete framework.
p. 135-136
What is especially interesting about the patterns that might be read into the information released by
Snowden is the potential confirmation of claims that we now live in a world that is organized neither within
states acting within a system of states, nor an embryonic hierarchy of the kind envisaged by theorists of
globalization, global governance, and so on, nor a new kind of empire or concert of great powers.
Moreover, it seems unwise to assume that these patterns can be understood without some grasp on
contemporary shifts toward globalizing markets and corporate wealth as the primary measure of economic
and even political value. Some of the responses to Snowdens revelations suggest that there is still life in
the old national/international model. But many also suggest that something less predictable is occurring.
Some indications of this unpredictability are suggested by the many ways in which the practices of
intelligence agencies, like the NSA, challenge our assumptions about democracy.
In this context, it is important to remember that democracy, along with other forms of political pluralism, is
conventionally something that might be limited, or even sacrificed, to secure the primary order of nationstates in a system of such states. Yet what is especially at issue in recent revelations is not just the
traditional question of when it might be possible to suspend democratic norms in order to mobilize more
effective security operations or to draw a sharp line between a civil arena in which democratic norms are
appropriate and a security arena in which democracy must give way, although many apologetic narratives
certainly reproduce this tradition. It is, rather, the apparent rearticulation of boundaries both between states,
and between the state as the seat of political necessity and civil society as an arena of political and personal
liberty; and thus, in both cases, between the demands of security and the possibilities of liberty or selfdetermination. If this is indeed part of the pattern that is emerging, the meaning both of security and of
democracy, as well as the relation between them, will become radically destabilized, and not obviously for
the better. In addition to the previous discussions of privacy, the rule of law, and various attempts to resist
imperial pretensions, four other lines of analysis are worth emphasizing in this respect. They all concern the
limits of the dichotomies between national and international, state and civil society, liberty and security, and
democracy and knowledge that are invariably reproduced in conventional analysis and public debate. The
uncertain status of sovereignty is apparent in all four cases (for reasons broadly outlined in Walker 2010).
First, our political world is neither national nor international, though the presumption that it is still sustains
widely pervasive political ideals. Snowdens documentation confirms that uncertainties about how we
should understand democracy given the dynamics that are reshaping relations among states, and between
states and civil societies, are rapidly merging with uncertainties about how we ought to be locating the
political orders being structured in relation to new networks of intelligence and security agencies. We are
clearly not talking about the classical image of national security states here. These networks are variously
international and transnational, with cartographies that look more like electrical circuits than territorial
properties. Boundaries have become elusive phenomena, in ways that demand unfamiliar ways of
understanding forms of subordination among various subsystems, conflicted loyalties and divided
citizenships, and dislocations of the spatiotemporal frame within which we know where we are, when we
are, and thus who we are. Yet while they may be elusive, boundaries are not being erased. It may be that the
NSA and other intelligence agencies work through networks that evade many boundaries, but their very
reason for existence is precisely to affirm boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, both familiar and
unfamiliar. Given all the evidence of new patterns of inequality around the world, we should clearly be very
wary of the prospect of novel forms of inclusion and exclusion enacted through new technologies of
population control.
Link Citizenship/Domestic Protection

Using national borders to oppose mass surveillance endorses border surveillance
only those who already belong benefit from the extension of protections.
Katja Franko AAS Criminology & Sociology of Law @ Oslo 11 Crimmigrant bodies and
bona fide travelers: Surveillance, citizenship and global governance Theoretical Criminology 15 (3) p.
340-343
Biometrics and multi-speed citizenship
The concepts of bio- and zoepolitics are useful for distinguishing between the control of national and
foreign risky populations, safe and unsafe citizens, and for the development of what Benjamin Muller
(2010) terms, multi-speed citizenship. However, we need an additional caveat if we are to understand gate
opening forms of surveillance which are afforded to privileged non-citizens. These are exemplified by IRIS
and the Registered Traveler program, which create an internal differentiation in the zoe by letting in life
which, in a sense, should be bare, yet it is not. Termed, in a different context, by Hyndman (2000) as
supracitizens, such individuals enjoy higher forms of mobility and privileged compared to other groups of
foreigners, usually on the basis of the resourceseconomic, educational and culturalwhich they bring
with them (Guild, 2009: 21). This includes not only foreign business, diplomatic and cultural elites,
frequent flyers (from visa white-listed and occasionally also from visa black-listed countries), but also
those humanitarian internationals, such as staff of international relief agencies, academics, consultants,
lobbyists and international human rights workers (Sandvik, 2010: 290). Although their position evades easy
categorization, one might say that they inhabit the global bipolitical rooms which have been carved out of
the zoe. This inclusion into the global bios is, importantly, not primarily connected to citizenship but most
often to private forms of economic, cultural and social capital.
This development has prompted some observes to ask what is left of citizenship (Muller, 2004). The
question suggests a process of decomposition, where the original citizen or sovereign or authority has
decayed (Muller, 2004: 280). According to Muller, in western societies citizenship is being decomposed
into identity management. The shift is exemplified by a change in focus from questions of entitlement and
rights, and attendant cultural and ethnic attributes of citizenship, to questions of verifying/authenticating
identity for the purpose of access to rights, bodies, spaces, and so forth (Muller, 2004: 280). To
understand this development demands a thorough analysis of one of the central techniques for constructing
safe identities in contemporary societies: biometric technology. Biometrics (predominantly fingerprinting,
but also facial and iris recognition) are, with the exception of the PNR and the first edition of the SIS,
employed in all of the databases described above. Biometrics are used both to detect illegal migrants and
so-called asylum shoppers through the EURODAC system, overstayers in the planned Entry/Exit system,
and to speed-up movement and open gates at Automated Border Crossings, for IRIS, FLUX and Registered
Travelers.
Biometrics has become the prime technology for tracing the new globality in both its abject and privileged
forms. Its seeming infallibility tempts the authorities with a promise of security and a solution to one of the
basic problems of modernity, which has acquired a particular salience in a globalizing world: the problem
of suspect identities (Cole, 2001). As Lyon (2010: 607, emphasis added) suggests: Showing a token of
legitimate ID is now a basic condition for the exercise of freedom. This points not only to how biometric
technologies limit movement by producing disqualified bodies (Muller, 2004), but also to the advantages
they can offer to those with the right tokensthe globally mobile kinetic elites (Adey, 2004). The fixity of
biometric identities, their lack of ambiguity and their binary language, are the qualities which facilitate the
speed of movement and automatic verification envisioned by systems such as Automated Border Crossings
and Registered Traveler.
By connecting identity inextricably to the human body, with biometrics [t]he border and the body merge
(Muller, 2010: 86). The body becomes, in a sense, a passport or a password and an unambiguous token of
truth (Aas, 2006). By creating this docile body, biometrics tends to be seen as an exemplary bio-political
technique connecting the individual both to his or her own identity and to the external systems of
governance (Muller, 2010). It may therefore be useful to reflect further on the bodily nature of these
technologies. On the one hand, they produce digital signs which transform ordinary citizens into digital
citizens, or netizens (Muller, 2010) and offer access to high-speed lanes and automated gates. Yet, one
should be wary of focusing exclusively on the digital aspects of surveillance and forget the physical
consequences for those who are not able to produce the right digital tokens. For example, in 2008, the
Norwegian police recorded 280 migrants who had disfigured their finger tips in order to escape recognition
by the Eurodac system and subsequent deportation; 78 of whom were imprisoned for the duration of their
recuperation (Nettavisen, 2009). These experiences show the darker side of the digital body, which is the
physical body in pain. The mirror image of e-borders and the surveillance of digital bodies is therefore
physical corporal surveillance practiced in detention centers, (physical) diversion practices undertaken by
national and transnational border policing agencies and supported by militarized surveillance systems such
as Eurosur, bodily searches by border officials and the like.
These two types of surveillance must be analysed in relation to each other. As Hyndman (2000: 111) points
out, supracitizens and subcitizens are not simply descriptions of two distinct groups but rather represent
linked but unequal identities. Rather than underlining the mundane, socially integrated and organizational
aspects of surveillance practices, the surveillance directed at these two groups brings to our attention its
exceptional qualities. Although a growing strata of the population is captured by this surveillance of
mobility (as evidenced by the sheer potential size of systems such as VIS and Entry/Exit), we should
nevertheless be careful not to normalize the experience and to identify its socially stratified qualities which
are directed only at certain populations. The often heard refrain about the mundane nature of surveillance
and the erosion of citizenship, as well as Agambens (1998) prediction about all life potentially becoming
bare life, should be therefore balanced by taking into account the exceptional exclusionary and inclusionary
nature of surveillance. Rather than exception becoming the norm, and citizenship dissolving into bare life,
the examples discussed in this article show that citizenship is still a highly relevant analytical and political
category, albeit one containing important exceptions. So, while EU surveillance systems are increasingly
directed toward EU citizens (Guild, 2009; Mitsilegas, 2009), these practices are predominantly directed at
specific groups of crimmigrant others who form a class of subcitizens, where crime control objectives
define the terms of their exclusion from the bios. The flip side of this negative exceptionalism is the
positive exceptionalism directed at bona fide foreign citizens who, although treated as potential
crimmigrants in the vetting procedures, are nevertheless empowered by surveillance, to open gates that
remain closed to the vast majority of the worlds less privileged populations.
Conclusion
It is important to consider the actual effects (and effectiveness) of the systems presented in this chapter. It
has been suggested that the expansion of border surveillance is not only an expression of sovereignty but
also an icon of its erosion (Bosworth, 2008; Brown, 2010). Walls function theatrically, in that they stage
sovereign power, at the same time as they reveal the sovereign impotence in stopping the flows of people
from reaching the territory (Brown, 2010). Looking at the visions of the Eurosur system as a system of
systems (COM 2008 68 final) one is inclined to ask whether they should perhaps be read as a surveillance
fantasy rather than a realistic political endeavor. In such an understanding, walls and borders are also
objects of desireharboring fantasies of containment, impermeability, security, innocence and goodness
(Brown, 2010)thus invoking the emotive aspects of sovereignty familiar to students of late-modern crime
politics (Garland, 2001). A vital point, however, is that borders and surveillance are not about complete
closurenot even in their fantastic formsbut are defined by specific conditions of permeability. By
examining these conditions, this article outlined the role that border surveillance, and crime control more
generally, plays in constructing a particular type of a global(ly divided) polity. By seeing borders as forms
of a global mapping imaginary (Balibar, 2010), the object of concern becomes not only the physical
boundaries, but also social boundaries which provide us with particularly revealing windows to analyze
self and other (Donnan and Wilson, 1999). In this context, practices of transnational surveillance
unlike more inward directed national surveillancerevolve around alliances between states like us, and
protecting the public which is no longer defined exclusively as the citizenry of the nation state. On the level
of political discourse, these practices seem to aspire to notions of pan-European and cosmopolitan
citizenship (Aas, 2011b). However, a closer examination reveals that not all European citizens are entitled
to the privileges and that, on the other hand, the privileges are extended to a group of bona fide global
citizens who seem to conform to Calhouns (2003) description of cosmopolitanism as the class
consciousness of frequent travelers. By punctuating the seeming universality of citizenship, bona fide
travelers and crimmigrant others create what Balibar (2010: 321, emphasis in original) terms the
cosmopolitan difficulty: Europe now needs to deal with its double otherness, or its internal otherness and
its external otherness, which now are no longer confronted in absolutely separate spaces.
This article has outlined a series of unequal positions held by various social groups in terms of their
subjection to surveillance: citizens; subcitizens; supracitizens; and non-citizens. These are highly unequal
positions, ranging from extreme deprivation to great social privilege. They reveal the inadequacy of the
traditional liberal subjectivity, and its abstract and universal notion of citizenship, as the springboard
for articulating a discourse of rights. Consequently, it is unclear how well equipped is the critical
surveillance and privacy discourse, built on the language of citizenship, for addressing the unequal social
and geopolitical positions of those subjected to surveillance practices on the global level. The various
surveillance measures described in the article work from different (bio)political objectives and have
markedly different effects on citizens of the global North, crimmigrant others and global bona fide
travelers. For the latter, they have carved out pockets and corridors of protection and mobility. These
practices bring to our attention what Judith Butler (2004: 29) has termed the qualitatively differentiated
value of life and the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability. Biometric technologies may be
experienced by regular EU citizens as an uncomfortable invasion of privacy, with potential for misuse. By
contrast, their use can result in immediate banishment and acute emotional and physical pain for those
registered in the Eurodac system, thus showing the radically inequitable ways in which vulnerability is
distributed globally.
Link Internet-Centrism
Focus on surveillance buys into the myth of internet liberation. Faith in technical
solutions to the political problem of democracy is counterproductive.
Evgeny MOROZOV Senior Editor @ New Republic 12-26-13 The Snowden saga heralds a radical shift
in capitalism Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d2af6426-696d-11e3-aba300144feabdc0.html#axzz3bkUHNlqR
Following his revelations this year about Washingtons spying excesses, Edward Snowden now faces a
growing wave of surveillance fatigue among the public and the reason is that the National Security
Agency contractor turned whistleblower has revealed too many uncomfortable truths about how todays
world works.
Technical infrastructure and geopolitical power; rampant consumerism and ubiquitous surveillance; the
lofty rhetoric of internet freedom and the sober reality of the ever-increasing internet control all these
are interconnected in ways most of us would rather not acknowledge or think about. Instead, we have
focused on just one element in this long chain state spying but have mostly ignored all others.
But the spying debate has quickly turned narrow and unbearably technical; issues such as the soundness of
US foreign policy, the ambivalent future of digital capitalism, the relocation of power from Washington and
Brussels to Silicon Valley have not received due attention. But it is not just the NSA that is broken: the way
we do and pay for our communicating today is broken as well. And it is broken for political and
economic reasons, not just legal and technological ones: too many governments, strapped for cash and low
on infrastructural imagination, have surrendered their communications networks to technology companies a
tad too soon.
Mr Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of
these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the USs surveillance addiction were met with a
rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric tinged with antiAmericanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform has been useless. Many foreign leaders
still cling to the fantasy that, if only the US would promise them a no-spy agreement, or at least stop
monitoring their gadgets, the perversions revealed by Mr Snowden would disappear.
Here the politicians are making the same mistake as Mr Snowden himself, who, in his rare but thoughtful
public remarks, attributes those misdeeds to the over-reach of the intelligence agencies. Ironically, even he
might not be fully aware of what he has uncovered. These are not isolated instances of power abuse that
can be corrected by updating laws, introducing tighter checks on spying, building more privacy tools, or
making state demands to tech companies more transparent.
Of course, all those things must be done: they are the low-hanging policy fruit that we know how to reach
and harvest. At the very least, such measures can create the impression that something is being done. But
what good are these steps to counter the much more disturbing trend whereby our personal information
rather than money becomes the chief way in which we pay for services and soon, perhaps, everyday
objects that we use?
No laws and tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are
rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to
monetise their own data be it information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens
want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it. Now that every piece of data, no matter how trivial, is
also an asset in disguise, they just need to find the right buyer. Or the buyer might find them, offering to
create a convenient service paid for by their data which seems to be Googles model with Gmail, its email
service.
What eludes Mr Snowden along with most of his detractors and supporters is that we might be living
through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data emerging as an alternative payment
regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets
in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities with democracy the main victim. This ongoing
transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken the clout of the NSA; on the contrary, it might create
more and stronger intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession. So to remain relevant and have some
political teeth, the surveillance debate must be linked to debates about capitalism or risk obscurity in the
highly legalistic ghetto of the privacy debate.
Other overlooked dimensions are as crucial. Should we not be more critical of the rationale, advanced by
the NSA and other agencies, that they need this data to engage in pre-emptive problem-solving? We should
not allow the falling costs of pre-emption to crowd out more systemic attempts to pinpoint the origins of
the problems that we are trying to solve. Just because US intelligence agencies hope to one day rank all
Yemeni kids based on their propensity to blow up aircraft does not obviate the need to address the sources
of their discontent one of which might be the excessive use of drones to target their fathers.
Unfortunately, these issues are not on todays agenda, in part because many of us have bought into the
simplistic narrative convenient to both Washington and Silicon Valley that we just need more laws,
more tools, more transparency. What Mr Snowden has revealed is the new tension at the very foundations
of modern-day capitalism and democratic life. A bit more imagination is needed to resolve it.
Internet-centric democratization treats technology as a neutral tool. Political

context drives internet usage and regulation, not the other way around.
Evgeny MOROZOV Senior Editor @ New Republic 11 The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet
Freedom p. xv-xvi
To be truly effective, the West needs to do more than just cleanse itself of cyber-utopian bias and adopt a
more realist posture. When it comes to concrete steps to promote democracy, cyber-utopian convictions
often give rise to an equally flawed approach that I dub Internetcentrism. Unlike cyber-utopianism,
Internet-centrism is not a set of beliefs; rather, its a philosophy of action that informs how decisions,
including those that deal with democracy promotion, are made and how long-term strategies are crafted.
While cyber-utopianism stipulates what has to be done, Internet-centrism stipulates how it should be done.
Internet-centrists like to answer every question about democratic change by first reframing it in terms of the
Internet rather than the context in which that change is to occur. They are often completely oblivious to the
highly political nature of technology, especially the Internet, and like to come up with strategies that
assume that the logic of the Internet, which, in most cases, they are the only ones to perceive, will shape
every environment than it penetrates rather than vice versa. While most utopians are Internet-centrists, the
latter are not necessarily utopians. In fact, many of them like to think of themselves as pragmatic
individuals who have abandoned grand theorizing about utopia in the name of achieving tangible results.
Sometimes, they are even eager to acknowledge that it takes more than bytes to foster, install, and
consolidate a healthy democratic regime.
Their realistic convictions, however, rarely make up for their flawed methodology, which prioritizes the
tool over the environment, and, as such, is deaf to the social, cultural, and political subtleties and
indeterminacies. Internet-centrism is a highly disorienting drug; it ignores context and entraps policymakers
into believing that they have a useful and powerful ally on their side. Pushed to its extreme, it leads to
hubris, arrogance, and a false sense of confidence, all bolstered by the dangerous illusion of having
established effective command of the Internet. All too often, its practitioners fashion themselves as
possessing full mastery of their favorite tool, treating it as a stable and finalized technology, oblivious to the
numerous forces that are constantly reshaping the Internet not all of them for the better. Treating the
Internet as a constant, they fail to see their own responsibility in preserving its freedom and reining in the
ever-powerful intermediaries, companies like Google and Facebook.
Cyber-democracy treats internet connectivity as a an end in itself. The aff is a rehash of the Bush freedom doctrine.
Freedom p. xii-xv
Its hardly surprising, then, that the only place where the West (especially the United States) is still
unabashedly eager to promote democracy is in cyberspace. The Freedom Agenda is out; the Twitter Agenda
is in. Its deeply symbolic that the only major speech about freedom given by a senior member of the
Obama administration was Hillary Clintons speech on Internet freedom in January 2010. It looks like a
safe bet: Even if the Internet wont bring democracy to China or Iran, it can still make the Obama
administration appear to have the most technologically savvy foreign policy team in history. The best and
the brightest are now also the geekiest. The Google Doctrinethe enthusiastic belief in the liberating
power of technology accompanied by the irresistible urge to enlist Silicon Valley start-ups in the global
fight for freedomis of growing appeal to many policymakers. In fact, many of them are as upbeat about
the revolutionary potential of the Internet as their colleagues in the corporate sector were in the late 1990s.
What could possibly go wrong here?
As it turns out, quite a lot. Once burst, stock bubbles have few lethal consequences; democracy bubbles, on
the other hand, could easily lead to carnage. The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the
oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a nave belief in the emancipatory nature of online
communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside. It stems from the starryeyed
digital fervor of the 1990s, when former hippies, by this time ensconced in some of the most prestigious
universities in the world, went on an argumentative spree to prove that the Internet could deliver what the
1960s couldnt: boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, strengthen
associational life, and serve as a bridge from bowling alone to blogging together. And if it works in Seattle,
it must also work in Shanghai.
Cyber-utopians ambitiously set out to build a new and improved United Nations, only to end up with a
digital Cirque du Soleil. Even if trueand thats a gigantic if their theories proved difficult to adapt to
non-Western and particularly nondemocratic contexts. Democratically elected governments in North
America and Western Europe may, indeed, see an Internet-driven revitalization of their public spheres as a
good thing; logically, they would prefer to keep out of the digital sandboxat least as long as nothing
illegal takes place. Authoritarian governments, on the other hand, have invested so much effort into
suppressing any form of free expression and free assembly that they would never behave in such a civilized
fashion.
The early theorists of the Internets influence on politics failed to make any space for the state, let alone a
brutal authoritarian state with no tolerance for the rule of law or dissenting opinions. Whatever book lay on
the cyber-utopian bedside table in the early 1990s, it was surely not Hobbess Leviathan. Failing to
anticipate how authoritarian governments would respond to the Internet, cyber-utopians did not predict how
useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for
surveillance, and how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become. Instead most
cyber-utopians stuck to a populist account of how technology empowers the people, who, oppressed by
years of authoritarian rule, will inevitably rebel, mobilizing themselves through text messages, Facebook,
Twitter, and whatever new tool comes along next year. (The people, it must be noted, really liked to hear
such theories.) Paradoxically, in their refusal to see the downside of the new digital environment, cyberutopians ended up belittling the role of the Internet, refusing to see that it penetrates and reshapes all walks
of political life, not just the ones conducive to democratization.
I myself was intoxicated with cyber-utopianism until recently. This book is an attempt to come to terms
with this ideology as well as a warning against the pernicious influence that it has had and is likely to
continue to have on democracy promotion. My own story is fairly typical of idealistic young people who
think they are onto something that could change the world. Having watched the deterioration of democratic
freedoms in my native Belarus, I was drawn to a Western NGO that sought to promote democracy and
media reform in the former Soviet bloc with the help of the Internet. Blogs, social networks, wikis: We had
an arsenal of weapons that seemed far more potent than police batons, surveillance cameras, and handcuffs.
Nevertheless, after I spent a few busy years circling the former Soviet region and meeting with activists and
bloggers, I lost my enthusiasm. Not only were our strategies failing, but we also noticed a significant push
back from the governments we sought to challenge. They were beginning to experiment with censorship,
and some went so far as to start aggressively engaging with new media themselves, paying bloggers to
spread propaganda and troll social networking sites looking for new information on those in the opposition.
In the meantime, the Western obsession with the Internet and the monetary support it guaranteed created
numerous hazards typical of such ambitious development projects.
Quite predictably, many of the talented bloggers and new media entrepreneurs preferred to work for the
extremely well-paid but largely ineffective Western-funded projects instead of trying to create more nimble,
sustainable, and, above all, effective projects of their own. Thus, everything we didwith generous
funding from Washington and Brusselsseemed to have produced the results that were the exact opposite
of what my cyber-utopian self wanted.
Internet access empowers authoritarians. Entertainment is more effective than

policing.
Freedom p. 79-80
Mash Em Up!
To borrow a few buzzwords from todays Internet culture, its time to mash up and remix the two visions.
To understand modern authoritarianism (and, some would argue, modern capitalism as well), we need
insights from both thinkers. The rigidity of thought suggested by the Orwell-Huxley coordinate system
leads many an otherwise shrewd observer to overlook the Huxleyan elements in dictatorships and, as
disturbingly, the Orwellian elements in democracies. This is why it has become so easy to miss the fact
that, as the writer Naomi Klein puts it, China is becoming more like [the West] in very visible ways
(Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and [the West is] becoming more like China in
less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese
scale). It seems fairly noncontroversial that most modern dictators would prefer a Huxleyan world to an
Orwellian one, if only because controlling people through entertainment is cheaper and doesnt involve as
much brutality. When the extremely restrictive Burmese government permitsand sometimes even funds
hip-hop performances around the country, its not 1984 that inspires them.
With a few clearly sadistic exceptions, dictators are not in it for the blood; all they want is money and
power. If they can have it simply by distractingrather than spying on, censoring, and arrestingtheir
people, all the better. In the long term, this strategy is far more effective than 24/7 policing, because
policing, as effective as it might be in the short term, tends to politicize people and drive them toward
dissent in the longer run. That Big Brother no longer has to be watching its citizens because they
themselves are watching Big Brother on TV hardly bodes well for the democratic revolution.
Thus, as far as distraction is concerned, the Internet has boosted the power of the Huxley-inspired
dictatorships. YouTube and Facebook, with their bottomless reservoirs of cheap entertainment, allow
individuals to customize the experience to suit their tastes. When Philip Roth was warning the Czechs of
the perils of commercial television, he was also suggesting that it could make a revolution like the one in
1989 impossible. Ironically, the Czechs had been lucky to have such hapless apparatchiks running the
entertainment industry. People got bored easily and turned to politics instead. Where new media and the
Internet truly excel is in suppressing boredom. Previously, boredom was one of the few truly effective ways
to politicize the population denied release valves for channeling their discontent, but this is no longer the
case. In a sense, the Internet has made the entertainment experiences of those living under authoritarianism
and those living in a democracy much alike. Todays Czechs watch the same Hollywood movies as todays
Belarusians many probably even download them from the same illegally run servers somewhere in
Serbia or Ukraine. The only difference is that the Czechs already had a democratic revolution, the results of
which, luckily for them, were made irreversible when the Czech Republic joined the European Union.
Meanwhile, the Belarusians were not as lucky; the prospects of their democratic revolution in the age of
YouTube look very grim.
Impact Violent Borders

Displacing bordered security is a pre-requisite for addressing fundamental dangers
to collective existence.
Stephen GRAHAM School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape @ Newcastle University 12 Digital
Medieval Surveillance & Society 9 (3) p. 326-327
Cosmopolitan Security?
A final, crucial question emerges here. Above all these concerns, caveats, and crises we must consider how
a successful counter-politics of security might be mobilized, which resists and recasts the violent shift
towards a biopolitics of preemption, exception and managing the consequences of extreme polarization.
Such a counterpolitics must seek to challenge not only the mythologies sustaining ubiquitous bordering. It
must also confront the transnational complexes that feed off the way the extending and all-pervasive mantra
of militarized security now works to permeate every crevice of everyday urban life (Parr 2006). In the
current context it is profoundly subversive to ask the simple question: What might a politics of security be
that actually addresses the real risks and threats that humankind faces in a rapidly urbanizing world prone
to resource exhaustion, spiraling food, energy and water insecurity, biodiversity collapse, hyperautomobilisation, financial crises, and global warming and does this from a cosmopolitan rather than
xenophobic and militaristic starting point? Or where it is the human, urban or ecological aspects of security
that are foregrounded, rather than tawdry machinations and imagineering which surrounds constellations of
states and transnational corporations, integrated through the dubious and corrupt relationships with
burgeoning security-industrial-military complexes?
Such a process must clearly begin by contesting the increasingly widespread mobilisation of hard i.e.
profitable borders and security strategies to question whether these actually do anything but exacerbate
vicious circles of fear and isolation, and quests for the holy grail of certainty, through technological
omniscience combined with architectures of withdrawal for the wealthy, mobile, or powerful. The growth
of enclave societies, Bryan Turner (2007) writes, makes the search for cosmopolitan values and
institutions a pressing need, but the current trend towards the erection of walls against the dispossessed and
the underclass appears to be inexorable (301).
Such cosmopolitan notions of urban, human and ecological security must be open to indeed forged
through difference. They must work against the habitual translation of difference into objectification,
Otherness and violence. They must assert the reinstatement of rights within states of reception as means to
overcome the murderous sovereignties which surround the states of exception which increasingly
characterize neoliberal capitalism. Finally, such a counter-politics must reject and reverse tendencies
toward the ubiquitous bordering of mobility, circulation and social life based on ideas of ubiquitous
bordering deployed both within and without the territorial limits of homeland states.
A useful starting point here is provided by the work of philosopher, Adrian Parr. He urges that a viable
counter politics to the ubiquitous border must start by opening up the parameters of this debate in a way
that no longer understands the outside as terrifying and a source of contamination, against which the inside
defensively freezes itself in an effort to contain and ward-off encroachment (2006: 106).
National identity prevents an effective response to global problems --- only articulating a
shared identity can prevent extinction.
Rogers Smith, 2003. Professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania and PhD Harvard University. Stories Of
Peoplehood, The Politics and Morals of Political Membership, p. 166-169.
It is certainly important to oppose such evolutionary doctrines by all intellectually credible means. But many have already been widely
discredited; and today it may well prove salutary, even indispensable, to heighten awareness of human
identity as shared membership in a species engaged in an ages-long process of adapting to often dangerous and
unforgiving natural and man-made environments.20 When we see ourselves in the light of general evolutionary patterns, we become
aware that it is genuinely possible for a species such as ourselves to suffer massive setbacks or even
to become extinct if we pursue certain dangerous courses of ac tion. That outcome does not seem to be in any
human's interest. And when we reflect on the state of our species today, we see or should see at least five major challenges to our
collective survival, much less our collective nourishing, that are in some respects truly unprecedented. These
are all
challenges of our own making, however, and so they can all be met through suitably cooperative human
efforts. The first is our ongoing vulnerability to the extraordinary weapons of mass destruction that we have been building
during the last half century. The tense anticipations of imminent conflagration that characterized the Cold War at its worst are now
behind us, but the nuclear arsenals that were so threatening are largely still with us, and indeed the governments and, perhaps, terrorist
groups possessed of some nuclear weaponry have continued to proliferate. The second great threat is some sort of
environmental disaster, brought on by the by-products of our efforts to achieve ever-accelerating industrial and post-industrial
production and distribution of an incredible range of good and services. Whether it is global warming, the spread of
toxic wastes, biospheric disruptions due to new agricultural techniques, or some combination of
these and other consequences of human interference with the air, water, climate, and plant and animal species that sustain us, any
major environmental disaster can affect all of humanity. Third, as our economic and technological
systems have become ever more interconnected, the danger that major economic or technological
failures in one part of the world might trigger global catastrophes may well increase . Such
interdependencies can, to be sure, be a source of strength as well as weakness, as American and European responses to the East Asian
and Mexican economic crises of the 1990s indicated. Still, if global capitalism were to collapse or a technological disaster comparable
to the imagined Y2K doomsday scenario were to occur, the consequences today would be more far-reaching than they would have
been for comparable developments in previous centuries. Fourth, as advances in food production, medical care, and other technologies have contributed to higher infant survival rates and longer lives, the
world's population has been rapidly

increasing, placing intensifying pressures on our physical and social environments in a great variety of
ways. These demographic trends, necessarily involving all of humanity, threaten to exacerbate all the preceding
problems, generating political and military conflicts, spawning chronic and acute environmental
damages, and straining the capacities of economic systems. The final major challenge we face as a species is a
more novel one, and it is one that may bring consciousness of our shared "species interests" even more to the fore. In the upcoming
century, human beings will increasingly be able to affect their own genetic endowment, in ways that might potentially alter the very
sort of organic species that we are. Here as with modern weapons, economic processes, and population growth, we face risks that our
efforts to improve our condition may go disastrously wrong, potentially endangering the entire human race. Yet the appeal of
endowing our children with greater gifts is sufficiently powerful that organized efforts to create such genetic technologies capable of
"redesigning humans" are already burgeoning, both among reputable academic researchers and less restrained, but well-endowed,
fringe groups.21 To be sure, an awareness of these as well as other potential dangers affecting all human
beings is not enough by itself to foster moral outlooks that reject narrow and invidious
particularistic conceptions of human identity. It is perfectly possible for leaders to feel that to save
the species, policies that run roughshod over the claims of their rivals are not simply justified but
morally demanded. Indeed, like the writers I have examined here, my own more egalitarian and cosmopolitan moral leanings
probably stem originally from religious and Kantian philosophical influences, not from any consciousness of the common "species
interests" of human beings. But the ethically constitutive story which contends that we have such interests, and that we can see them
as moral interests, seems quite realistic, which is of some advantage in any such account. And under the circumstances just sketched, it
is likely that more and more people will become persuaded that today, those shared species interests face more profound challenges
than they have in most of human history. If so, then stressing our shared identity as members of an evolving
species may serve as a highly credible ethically constitutive story that can challenge
particularistic accounts and foster support for novel political arrangements . Many more people
may come to feel that it is no longer safe to conduct their political lives absorbed in their
traditional communities, with disregard for outsiders, without active concern about the issues that affect the whole
species and without practical collaborative efforts to confront those issues. That consciousness of shared interests has the potential to
promote stronger and much more inclusive senses of trust, as people come to realize that the dangers and challenges they face in common matter more than the differences that will doubtless persist. I think this sort of awareness of a shared "species interests" also can
support senses of personal and collective worth, though I acknowledge that this is not obviously the case. Many people find the
spectacle of the human species struggling for survival amidst rival life forms and an unfeeling material world a bleak and dispiriting
one. Many may still feel the need to combine acceptance of an evolutionary constitutive story with religious or philosophical accounts
that supply some stronger sense of moral purpose to human and cosmic existence. But if people are so inclined, then nothing I am
advocating here stands in the way of such combinations. Many persons, moreover, may well find a sustaining sense of moral worth in
a conception of themselves as contributors to a species that has developed unique capacities to deliberate and to act responsibly in
regard to questions no other known species can yet conceive: how should we live? What relationships should we have, individually
and collectively, to other people, other life forms, and the broader universe? In time, I hope that many more people may come to agree
that humanity has shared responsibilities of stewardship for the animate and physical worlds around us as well as ourselves, ultimately
seeking to promote the flourishing of all insofar as we are capable and the finitude of existence permits. But even short of such a grand
sense of species vocation, the idea that we are part of humanity's endeavor to strive and thrive across ever-greater expanses of space
and time may be one that can inspire a deep sense of worth in many if not most human beings. Hence it does not seem unrealistic to
hope that we can encourage increased acceptance of a universalistic sense of human peoplehood that may help rein in popular
impulses to get swept up in more parochial tales of their identities and interests. In the years ahead, this ethical sen -
sibility might foster acceptance of various sorts of transnational political arrangements to deal
with problems like exploitative and wildly fluctuating international financial and labor markets,
destructive environmental and agricultural practices, population control, and the momentous issue
of human genetic modifications. These are, after all, problems that appear to need to be dealt with on a
near-global scale if they are to be dealt with satisfactorily. Greater acceptance of such arrangements would
necessarily entail increased willingness to view existing governments at all levels as at best only "semi-sovereign," authoritative over
some issues and not others, in the manner that acceptance of multiple particularistic constitutive stories would also reinforce. In the
resulting political climate, it might become easier to construct the sorts of systems of interwoven democratic international, regional,
state and local governments that theorists of "cosmopolitan democracy," "liberal multicultural nationalism," and "differentiated
democracy" like David Held, Will Kymlicka, Iris Young, William Connolly, and Jurgen Habermas all envision.
Link Democracy/Democratic Peace Theory

Otherization and culture of militarization turns democratic peace into liberaldemocratic war.
Ana GEIS Project director @ Peace Research Institute Frankfurt AND Wolfgang WAGNER Research
Fellow @ Peace Research Inst. Frankfurt 8 CLPE RESEARCH PAPER 39/2008 VOL. 04 NO. 08 (2008)
p. 19-21
Liberal democratic institutions and political cultures build on assets of different strands of liberal thought,
as has often been demonstrated at the example of the US political culture which contains normative
structures that foster interventionist, missionary driving forces as well as a selfrestrained, isolationist
approach to the outside world, restricting itself to regard the own country as a shining example but not
attempting to convert others (cf. Desch 2007/8). This pluralisation (or at times: polarization) of political
culture is no distinct feature of the United States since several Western political cultures exhibit pluralist
normative structures rooted in different traditions of liberal thought (Muller 2004; Muller/Wolff 2006).
Since cultures provide and circumscribe the universe of acceptable justifications for the use of force in a
society, much depends on the interpretations of the ruling political coalitions. Left-liberal, liberal,
conservative or socialist parties can cite quite different legacies of the own culture and can refer to quite
different norms rendering the use of force appropriate or inappropriate for their own country (cf.
MacMillan 2004). Hence it is crucial for Democratic Peace and Democratic War research to scrutinize the
ambivalent norms of a political culture and the (controversial) references to these norms by elites in order
to establish whether the cultural structuration follows predominantly pacifist or militant lines (Muller
2004). Political cultures can also be read in terms of dominant self-images and images of an other in a
liberal society, the fiction of a nations unity and a distinct identity has to be permanently constructed and
reproduced. With regard to the peace- or war-proneness of a democracy it is revealing to study such
constructions of self and other more closely since the existence of strong enemy images lends more
legitimacy to a countrys militancy. Such analyses of othering and identity politics abound in critical and
postmodern security studies21 and should be acknowledged by Democratic Peace research since they
provide a counterpart to overly optimistic Democratic Peace accounts about a rational and peaceful
democratic public (Geis 2006). Liberal thought has dealt with the enemies of progress and civilianization
from the very beginning, a recent rediscovery of Kants figure of the unjust enemy reminds of these seeds
of illiberalism and self-empowerment to interventionism contained within liberalism itself (Muller 2006;
Desch 2007/8). For such interpretations of Kant the logical distance from Knigsberg to Kandahar is not
too far since democratic peace between civilized lawful regimes and democratic war against evil terrorists
in Afghanistan root in the same liberal thinking. To be sure, Kants hostis iniustus as foe of humankind is
one extreme representation of a liberals other, but the tendency to denigrate nonliberal others has been
a notorious trait of liberal imperialism throughout history. In the past as well as in the present, liberalism
has often been criticized for an inherent imperialism (cf. Barkawi/Laffey 2001; Jahn 2005) which manifests
itself not only in a sense of superiority towards other cultures and regimes but also in the violent
civilianization of others in the name of democracy, freedom and progress. Under the cover of
universalism Western democracies seek to impose their concepts of the political, economic and cultural
organization of life upon the illiberal other. The recent Iraq war which the US and Great Britain have also
justified with the aim of regime change underlines that such liberal ordering claims are no remains of the
past. From this perspective, rogue states impede the progress of civilianization, they pose a threat to other
states physical and normative security and must be forced to change their regime. Since the end of the
Cold War, Western democracies usually have not conducted their military missions (be it full-fledged wars,
peace enforcement or other missions involving armed forces) on their own, but rely on the contribution of
NATO, coalitions of the willing or most recently, the European Union. The integration of democracies
military capabilities within international security organizations has raised the issue whether their
development into security communities with a shared collective identity is contingent upon the existence or
construction of a dangerous other outside (Risse-Kappen 1995; cf. Dembinski/Hasenclever/Wagner
2004). Dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and the search for (new) threats in order to stabilize and
discipline the inside can aggravate international conflicts instead of defusing them (cf.
Williams/Neumann 2000; Williams 2001).
Methodology of democracy theorists rigs the game. Using liberal standards and
methods to judge democracy is anti-democratic.
Christopher HOBSON International Politics @ Aberystwyth 8 Democracy as Civilization Global
Society 22 (1) p.91-93
One of the greatest strengths of the DPT lies in its claims to objectivity, with almost all studies being firmly
based on rigorous social scientific methodology.100 From this perspective, the accounts of zones of peace
and war that emerge are merely corresponding to empirical realities. As Bowden astutely notes, however,
on another level there is a normative side to the story that promotes the West as the gatekeeper of liberal
international order.101 This is reflected in the definitions of the key concepts of war, peace and
democracy that underpin the empirical results of the DPT.102 War is understood so narrowly as to exclude
important instances of aggression and violence by democracies. Conceiving of peace, meanwhile, in
relation to the absence of war removes from sight the structural violence caused by democracies in
situations such as tough sanction regimes, or, less obviously, in the harsh neoliberal economic reform
packages imposed on states transiting to democracy. Democracy, of course, is a highly contested concept.
In almost all studies on the democratic peace, however, this contestation and mutability is removed, and
democracy is defined in a very fixed and specific manner. The understanding taken is liberal and
procedural, tending to reflect a certain configuration of American values, institutions and experiences.103
Representative is the definition provided in Russetts influential study: For modern states, democracy (or
polyarchy, following Dahl 1971) is usually identified with a voting franchise for a substantial fraction of
citizens, a government brought to power in contested elections, and an executive either popularly elected or
responsible to an elected legislature, often also with requirements for civil liberties such as free speech.104
The core liberal democracies become exemplars of the model that perpetual peace necessitates. Peace is
bought at the price of difference. Liberal democracy becomes the required condition, as this is the type of
regime that offers a possible end to interstate warfare. And who does not like peace? The logic of the DPT
is thus twofold. First, it creates and encourages a clear separation between the two worlds inhabited by
democracies and nondemocracies. The former are recognised as more legitimate due to their supposedly
peaceful behaviour, the latter are trapped in a cycle of war and violence, temporally and morally behind the
civilised liberal democracies that have progressed towards peaceful relations. History is used to highlight
the failings of non-democracies and to vindicate the virtuousness of democracies. At the same stage, the
division that emerges between the two worlds is not a fixed or immutable one. Rather, the narrative told
is distinctly teleological, with the global expansion of democracy being accompanied by a gradual spread
of more peaceful interstate relations. This leads to the second point, namely that within the DPT there lies a
clear and persuasive invitation to expand the zone of peace and civilisation. Through transiting to the model
of democracy found in the zone of peace, an escape route is offered from the zone of war. And if there is an
unwillingness or inability to make this movewhich is most likely to be perceived as a result of temporal
backwardnessliberal democracies may be willing to speed up history and bring democracy forcibly.
Thus, in the DPT lie the seeds of a new mission civilisatrice. With democratic peace scholars holding out
the possibility that a preponderance of democracies will transform the entire system of international
relations,105 confident liberal democratic states are faced with the temptation of accelerating the arrival of
a perpetual peace by actively bringing civilisation to the uncivilised, democracy to the non-democratic.
Seen in this light, the war in Iraq is the clearest manifestation of amore basic logic of attempting to extend
the zone of peace through distinctly non-democratic means.106 As Ivie notes, the DPT contains within in it
a troublesome tendency toward perfectionthe quest for perfect peacewhich becomes itself a potential
motive for war.107 So in the words of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the best, and in
some cases, the only defense, is a good offense.108
Impact Biopolitics
The freedom to connect represents the triumph of liberal biopolitics. Security now
operates primarily through liberty instead of repression.
p. 1138-140
What is often represented as a significant generational shift reflects the individual self-revealing all, not just
to friends and family, but potentially to all customers using social network vehicles. The overriding
assumption of those who communicate in this manner, especially those in liberal democratic societies, but
certainly not confined to these, is one of sovereign control, a sovereignty of selfhood understood in terms of
the freedom to express, communicate, and mobilize on deterritorialized terrain that can potentially defy
structures of power and domination. The defiance of distance is here somehow equated with the defiance
of territorially bound authority, so that even where such authority seeks to assert presence, the imaginary
is one of possibility, and even of transgression.
This was the narrative that fed interpretations of the so-called Arab Spring, the London riots, the antiglobalization movement, and other expressions of protest and resistance across the world (see, for example,
Gerbaudo 2012). Here was, and we might say is, the instantiation of a global public sphere (Castells 2008),
the communicative practices within which could variously hold authority to account, mobilize within and
across territorial boundaries, and in so doing come to constitute an altogether other space, a cosmopolitan
interconnected world, where the cosmopolitan is at once of difference and homogeneity.
However, it is this precise blurring of boundaries, this limitless terrain of the possiblewhere difference
can inhabit the familiar, the homogeneousthat calls forth, that challenges, a security apparatus which, as
Foucault (2007) tells us, does not function along the model of repression, but rather one of production, of
allowance and license. This is the triumph that is liberalism, for here any repressive practice is a regressive
practice. It is a letting down of the side in all its sophisticated achievement, all its distinguishing hallmarks
that this is neither Mugabes Zimbabwe nor Communist China. The liberal example is one of security
through liberty, not security at the expense of liberty. Cyberspace had come to represent the technological
manifestation of a transformative liberty where communicative practicesof the political, sociocultural,
pedagogical, and economic kindcould take place. The question for political authority, and we are
focusing here on liberal political authority, was how to regulate this terrain of unbridled communication,
what technologies of control could be mobilized that in themselves were not subject to the limits of state
boundaries and statedefined sovereign authority. If such technologies could be created, they too had to be
of the network kind, digitally defined, of software and not hardware, hidden from view and yet
transnational and global in their reach.
Informatics is now the discipline of choice for liberal power. Yet despite the focus on software, on
codification expertise rendered in digital form, the hardware too is important in the materiality of
technologies designed to control this space of the limitless. From computer storage disks to undersea
cables, these are the technological, engineering elements of a machinery that services the freedom to
communicate and the capacity to monitor and control. Within these frameworks of disciplinary knowledge,
as with all knowledge systems and the discursive formations that ensure their reproduction, the epistemic
subject steers an uneasy terrain, between politics and government, resistance (we might think of groups
such as Anonymous or Hacked-Off; see Coleman 2011) and employment, to service the digital market or
the state. The difficulty is that there is no dualism or opposition between these, for each draws on the other.
Thus, the world of the resisting hacker, an expertise developed in the intimacy of the study, is drawn upon
and perhaps perfected by the resources available to the service providers or the state. Rarely is the move
made from the world of the state to the individual resister. Power comes to permeate knowledge, and the
subject produced in this complex matrix is always already complicit, involved somehow, in its
reproduction. To trace these connections, to map out not just the networks and their nodes, but these
intricate imbrications of power, knowledge and subjectivities is the task of any critical intervention on
cyberspace, its everyday constitution through practices and frameworks of knowledge, and its constitutive
power in subjectivization.
Aff
Perm
Perm using legal restrictions on national surveillance authorities complements
ethical critique of broader surveillance.
David LYON Surveillance Studies Centre, Professor of Sociology & Law Queens Research Chair @
Queen's University (Ontario) 14 Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, consequences,
critique Big Data & Society 1 p. 9-11
Critique
The question of Big Data, understood in relation to the Snowden disclosures, has generated unprecedented
public interest in surveillance in many countries around the world. While technical and legal responses
have been made and while at the level of civil society much activity is evident, particularly demanding
accountability and, where appropriate, abolition of some programs from the NSA and its cognate
agencies, less progress has been made on what might be called a broad ethical front. Yet the questions
raised are profound ones for which there are no ready answers and thus, I suggest that an ethical turn
becomes more urgent as a mode of critique. This is so at several levels, but particularly in the kinds of ways
that Snowden himself indicates through his repeated questions about what kind of society do we want?
We began with the question of capacity which is reflected in the popular metaphors used about Big Data,
notably the handily alliterating data deluge. The metaphors associated with Big Data are revealing for
the hopes and fears associated with Big Data. As Deborah Lupton (2013) has observed, many are
associated with liquidity. Unlike the metaphors first adopted for computer technologies, that invoke a
natural world of the web, cloud, bug, virus, mouse, and spider, Big Data tropes relate to streams, flows,
leaks, rivers, oceans, waves but also to floods or tsunamis that may seem to threaten to swamp or drown
us. They are potentially uncontained, out-of-control. But there is more to the liquidity issue than metaphors
such as the data deluge.
Under the heading liquid surveillance I discussed with Zygmunt Bauman the ways in which data flow
increasingly freely within and between containers and in particular the ways that digital surveillance has a
seemingly symbiotic relationship with the kind of liquidity visible in contemporary social, political, and
economic arrangements, that are often short-term, fissiparous (Bauman and Lyon, 2013). They also query
the kinds of blockages and resistances, the solidities that may impede the fluid circulation of data
(Lupton, 2013) that tend to be omitted from the free-flow-of-data accounts. The liquidity of surveillance is
as significant in the social and political realm as at the level of data-flows.
One theme of Liquid Surveillance is the need for properly ethical practices. Big Data is currently
dominated by commercial and governmental criteria and these are often met with technical demands (for
better encryption for example) or legal demands (for legislation relevant to todays technologies). Privacy
advocates and internet activists also try to promote new political approaches to emergent tendencies such as
Big Data. But a key reason why those commercial and governmental criteria are so imbricated with Big
Data is the strong affinity between the two, particularly in relation to surveillance. Big Data represents a
confluence of commercial and governmental interests; its political economy resonates with neo-liberalism.
National security is a business goal as much as a political one and there is a revolving door between the two
in the world of surveillance practices (Ball and Snider, 2013).
Properly ethical practices are at a relative disadvantage for several other reasons as well. Not many ethicists
spend time thinking about the complexities of the internet, social media, or Big Data and many of those at
the forefront of the Big Data field seem to have little time for ethics except as a minor, residual concern
(see Narayanan and Vallor, 2014). The imperatives for Big Data approaches come from a belief in the
immense power of technology can Google really track and predict the spread of flu faster than centers for
disease control? (Ginsberg et al., 2009; Lazer et al., 2014) along with the capacity to analyze vast
quantities of data at steadily shrinking unit costs. But just as in the Google flu example, questions must be
asked about how good are the surveillance data and the modes of analysis? How data are generated and
framed always has decisive effects on the final outcomes of analysis. As Lisa Gitelman reminds us, raw
data is an oxymoron (2013); data have always been cooked as Geoff Bowker says in the conclusion of
Gitelmans book.
Terms such as metadata, so crucial to Big Data surveillance, lack clear definition, even though it can
generally be distinguished from data such as the content of phone calls or emails. Yet those ill-defined
metadata are used, constantly, by security and intelligence agencies, and the patterns revealed by the
algorithms used to filter them relate back to the purposes that shape the data in the first place and forward
to those affected by the designation of groups that may contain persons of interest. The range of ethical
issues relating to Big Data surveillance is considerable, but from what has been discussed in the foregoing,
may be clustered as privacy, social sorting, and preemption. Given the reliance on western liberal legal
traditions it is hardly surprising that public debate generally commences around the question of privacy.
Understood as a human right, it underlies aspects of democratic polity, such as freedom of expression.
Often understood in the post-Snowden era as relating to control of communications about oneself, it is
clearly a threatened value if not according to some a forlorn hope. Following the above argument,
though, it is vital that an ethics of Big Data practices be found that deals with the problem of the increasing
gap between data and individuals (Amoore, 2014; Stoddart, 2014). But as privacy is still the preeminent
mobilizing concept for opposition to inappropriate, disproportionate or illegal surveillance, the efforts of
those who propose technical limits such as encryption or de-identification or who would re-infuse the
concept with content appropriate to a Big Data world are certainly welcome.
As far as social sorting is concerned, this is a concept that alerts us to several related practices that produce
uneven and unequal outcomes when the supposedly neutral and illuminating techniques of Big Data
especially predictive profiling are applied to perceived social and political problems. This connects
surveillance both with modern bureaucratic practices and also, under the sign of security, with insurance
logics that see security as procurable through intelligence gathering, identification, and tracking (Lyon,
2007; Zedner, 2009). Its outcomes amplified in Big Data contexts are above all the growth of
categorical suspicion (the parallel in consumer surveillance, is what I term categorical seduction Lyon,
2007). This in turn encourages a consequentialism that departs from earlier notions of proportionate
punishment to deterrence and incapacitation. Together with a penal populism that calls for public
protection, reinforced by mediaenhanced perceptions of risk, time-honored commitments to the
presumption of innocence, or proof beyond reasonable doubt are eroded (Zedner, 2009: 80).
Thirdly, an emphasis on preemption takes the actuarial logic one stage further, connecting with what was
said above about how Big Data fosters an anticipatory, future tense approach to surveillance. Again this is
not a new development in surveillance. Risk-management in particular has encouraged such anticipatory
governance for several decades. But the availability of Big Data techniques encourages an intensified
future-orientation in practice. So the possibility that, because of certain data fragments, the data-body may
be thought to have a propensity to certain behaviors that are not yet evident, leads to some action. The data
have effects; they are, as Rita Raley says, performative. Following Haggerty and Ericsons (2000)
Deleuzian discussion of the surveillant assemblage, Raley points out that, the composition of flecks and bits
of data into a profile of a terror suspect, the re-grounding of abstract data in the targeting of an actual life,
will have the effect of producing that life, that body, as a terror suspect. (Raley, 2013: 128)
Conclusion
The main question addressed in this article is in two parts: One, in what ways and to what extent do the
Snowden disclosures indicate that Big Data practices are becoming increasingly important to surveillance?
The answer, clearly, is yes, they are. Many of the major Snowden revelations, especially those in which
metadata feature prominently, indicate a reliance upon Big Data practices. The second question, following
on from the first, is how far does this indicate changes in the politics and practices of surveillance? Are new
trends, or the augmentation of older ones, visible here? Again, the evidence discussed here suggests
strongly that Big Data practices are skewing surveillance even more towards a reliance on technological
solutions, and that this both privileges organizations, large and small, whether public or private,
reinforces the shift in emphasis towards control rather than discipline and relies increasingly on predictive
analytics to anticipate and preempt. These questions were explored in respect to the capacities of Big Data,
their social-political consequences and the kinds of critique that may be appropriate for assessing and
responding to these developments. For the first, I argue that size is not directly the issue but rather that,
taken together, the loose cluster of attributes of Big Data make a difference in ways that are hard to
generalize. Big Data practices echo several key surveillance trends but in several respects they point to
realities that have perhaps been underestimated.
One is that, within surveillance studies there has been a general tendency to analyze multiple forms of
surveillance that are not directly linked with state-based, top-down surveillance of the kind epitomized in
George Orwells Nineteen-Eighty-Four. If this was understood by some to mean that more generalized or,
following Gilles Deleuze, rhizomic surveillance spells less state surveillance activity, the Snowden
revelations are rapidly dispelling that illusion. However, those revelations, which as I show above, indicate
an increasing dependence on Big Data practices, also lay bare in ways that were known only hazily before
just how far security and intelligence agencies depend on data obtained from the commercial realm. These
are consequences that cry out for careful consideration. In a sense, this means that Orwells bleak vision of
what tendencies in post-war liberal democratic polities could lead to authoritarian surveillance regimes
were not mistaken so much as standing in need of complementary analyses, such as that of his
contemporary, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World. Big Data practices in consumer surveillance are (now
literally!) co-travelers with those of state surveillance and together produce the kinds of outcomes around
which ethical debates should now revolve. Indeed, not only are they co-travelers, they also cooperate
extensively, the one taking methods from the other, with, as discussed above, potentially pernicious results
as the successful methods in one area are applied in ways deleterious of human rights in another. Sadly,
little time seems to be spent on such matters in typical computing studies departments in todays
universities, where all too often notions like privacy and civil liberties are regarded as a nuisance that slows
research development (Narayanan and Vallor, 2014).
It is these matters in particular that attract critique, especially in relation to anticipatory and preemptive
approaches common to Big Data mindsets and activities and amplifying what is a long-term surveillance
trend. These fit neatly, of course, with currently intensifying political styles of neo-liberalism that, with
regard to national security, are seen in a list towards actuarialism and a consequentialist concern with
managing disorder and crime rather than seeking its causes and attempting to eradicate them (Agamben,
2013). Let me give two examples. Critically, certain time-honored legal protections such as a presumption
of innocence or proof beyond reasonable doubt are being eroded within a number of western societies
precisely due to the developing reliance on big-data-led beliefs that suspects can be isolated by category
and algorithm. Even if onetime suspects have their names cleared by judicial process, the fact that Big
Data practices exemplified in the collect-it-all slogan include retaining data indefinitely, it can be hard for
persons with a record ever to make a fresh start. Data in the Canadian Police Information Centre, for
example, remain there permanently. And when police include mental health problems in their records these
can lead to denial of entry to Canadians trying to cross the border into the US. Attempted suicide calls, for
example, have been uploaded to international databases with just this outcome (CBC, 2014).
Snowdens revelations have done good service in showing how far state-based surveillance extends but also
how much it depends on Big Data practices that implicate corporate bodies and connect directly with
everyday practices of ordinary internet and cellphone users. Ethically, he frequently, and wisely, asks what
kind of society we want to live in. Is it one marked by fear and mutual suspicion, where data are collected
promiscuously and kept forever, in systems that never forget, making forgiveness obsolete and creating
much to fear even though you have nothing to hide? Is it one where vulnerability is amplified, democracy
diminished and where ordinary people are more exposed to organizations that are themselves more opaque?
These are questions that Big Data surveillance obliges us to confront.
Perm National Citizenship/Global Advocacy Compatible

Perm solves --- adoption of a global identity does not require rejection of a national identity
Darren J. OByrne, 2003. Lecturer in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Surrey
Roehampton, UK. World Citizenship, The Dimensions of Global Citizenship: Political Identity beyond
the Nation-State, p. 167-8.
We have discussed at length the ways in which the discourse of world citizenship is constructed by those
who claim to practise it as a matter of course. We have also seen how these practitioners develop the
discourse for use in documentation, such as the World Passport, which are aimed at assisting people (such
as refugees) in their daily lives. Central to this understanding of global citizenship are globality and
political identity. Citizenship, I have stated, contains no inherent properties which necessarily associate it
solely with the nation-state, and, indeed, the nation-state has never been the only source of political
identity. Political identities are fluent, socially-and pragmatically-constructed labels which draw on, and
between, a variety of experiences which operate at the level of the individual lifeworld. In this respect, we
can follow Giddens in understanding how, in a late modernity characterized by increasing reflexivity, the
politicization of identity (an identity which is constructed through the various choices made available to the
individual) takes place within the post-traditional, globalized realm of life politics. Accordingly, global
citizenship need not be restricted to those who dedicate their lives to such movements. Individuals can and
do practise it on a daily basis. However, this does not mean that a self-conscious acceptance or advocacy
of some form of world or global citizenship excludes any other identification , such as with the nationstate or with a transnational cultural community. It is not at all true to say that, in the everyday lives of
people, a conscious decision must be made by each individual which sets national identity against some
kind of global, transnational or postnational identity. Instead, we must realize that, pragmatically if nothing
else, such individuals do retain some kind of nation-state citizenship. As Calhoun, Miller and others have
stated, political identity is constructed through a variety of group affiliations and cultural categories, which
include gender, religion, ethnicity, occupation, and that national identity is itself constructed through such
contested sources as language and territory. 2 The same must be said for world citizenship: it is
constructed through a variety of strategies, which of course include the national and local levels. This is
even more significant when we discuss what I have termed global citizenship, given that this must, and
does, reject homogenizing assumptions in favour of appreciating diversity and difference in a multicultural
world. If we have learned anything from the postmodern critique of social science, it is surely that there is
no one, universal explanation for such contested and diverse phenomena as identity. So even the
construction of the most local, or national, of political identities is itself a rich source of information about
the emergence of a new form of world citizenship.
AT: Law/National Focus Links

Legal rights and restrictions on surveillance are crucial tools. Belief in politics
unmediated by existing law aids totalitarianism.
Rebecca SANDERS PhD Candidate Poli Sci @ Toronto 8 Norms of Exception? Intelligence Agencies,
Human Rights, and the Rule of Law http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Sanders.pdf p. 10-14
Nor is a single exceptional decision about the law synonymous with what practices are actually employed.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were doubtlessly illegal, and were prosecuted as such, but they were not
independent of administration policy. In this sense, focusing on the Schmittian exception as a temporal cut,
as a momentary existential decision doesn;t tell us much about how these exceptions are in fact made, how
they come to seem legitimate, and how they manage to destroy liberties they are supposed to secure notes
Walker (2007). Excessive focus on the exception neglects a specific account of how limits, borders,
citizens, aliens, administrative procedures, legal protocols, military deployments, policing, surveillance,
classification and cultural valorization are generated and in turn shape identities, agencies, and institutions
(pp. 78-79). Torture for instance is not an ad hoc one off decision, but a practice that becomes habitual and
institutionalized (Luban, 2005, p. 1445). Exceptional outcomes often result from decentred and diffuse
processes, emerging from a long series of political choices and exclusions before any official decision is
enacted (Doty, 2007, p.116). Rather than posit the lager as the matrix of modernity, we need to look more
specifically at the concrete ways in which exceptionalism creeps into politics, the slow institutionalization
of practices, the incremental change in security that exclude, marginalize and control along a gradation
(Huysmans, 2004, p. 1337). This is important, argues Huysmans (2008), as the jargon of exception has
served to dehistoricize and depoliticize theoretical analysis by excluding the social - the various mediations
of class, technology, property, knowledge, institutions, and law which make up the political world (p. 177).
So where does this leave law? Critical theorists of the state of exception view law as fundamentally bound
to sovereign power. For Agamben (2005) this necessitates abandonment of the concept of law as a tool of
emancipation in favor of Benjamins pure violence where justice is severed from the juridical (p. 64) and
politics is severed from law (pp. 87-88). In addition to the utter abstractness and non-tangibility of what this
actually means, there is reason to reject this move to purity. As Kohn (2007) notes the belief in justice
unmediated by law was one of the characteristics of totalitarianism (p. 11). The first essential step on the
road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man warned Arendt (1973, p. 447). Finally, in
positing a stark distinction between sovereign power and pure violence, little room is left in between. This
fails to capture the reality that law and its meaning remains highly contested. As long as this is the case,
exception is not the inevitable political space of modernity (Gregory, 2006, p. 421). There is no doubt that
law is part of and shaped by power. But there is a reason the Bush administration is disdainful of law. There
is a potential for an anti-imperialist egalitarianism within international law that should be pursued, not
rejected. Law can be a weapon of the weak (Bartholomew, 2006, p. 178). While recognizing the unilateral
violence of empires law that is derivative of its own will as the global sovereign (p. 162) we should also
remain committed to Dworkins laws empire, where human rights and international law regimes forge a
democratic cosmopolitan order (p. 164). The aspirational view of law, devoted to a substantive rule of law
as opposed to lawless legal black holes and procedural positivistic legality or rule by law, suggests there are
moral resources in the law available to deal with crises without producing exceptions (Dyzenhaus, 2007).
Finally, it should be noted that unlike domestic law, the absence of a 14 unified international sovereign
negates the possibility of pure sovereign suspension. Breaches of international law are just that they break
rather than remake the law. This is not to say the law alone provides some sort of antidote to the abuses of
the powerful. In this sense international human rights campaigners would do well to examine the debates
over the role of law in achieving minority rights in the domestic context. For instance Stuart Scheingold
(2004) has argued that the myth of rights should be supplanted with a politics of rights in which rights
are treated as contingent resources which impact on public policy indirectly-in the measure, that is, that
they can aid the altering balance of the political forces (p. 148). In this view, law is a resource in a larger
political struggle that takes place not only in the courts, but through various channels of social action. In
acknowledging the role of power relations in shaping law, the excluded should not be obliged to renounce
the possibility of rights. Instead, oppressed people can contribute to the generation of new norms that
reflect their experience. As Matsuda (1987) asks How could anyone believe both of the following
statements? (1) I have a right to participate equally in society with any other person. (2) Rights are
whatever people in power say they are...the experience of the bottom is that one can believe in both of
those statements simultaneously, and that it may well be necessary to do so (p. 138). Rather than painting
a black and white portrait, the ambiguities and contingencies inherent in the relationship between law and
power demand examination and engagement in their historically specific configurations.
AT: Violent Borders Impacts

Aff is the best middle-ground for coping with borders. Their alternative cant
succeed the aff is a step away from the strict territorial paradigm.
Liam ODOWD Sociology @ Queens (Belfast) 10 From a borderless world to a world of borders:
bringing history back in Environment and Planning D Advanced Online Publication 3-1-2010 p. 3-49-11
Ethical discomfort
Prozorov touches in passing on an abiding and pervasive discomfort among liberal and radical social
scientists in acknowledging how integral borders are to human behaviour. They ascribe negative
connotations to borders as dividers of humanity and as expressions of particularisms which serve to
undermine the universalising agenda of liberal Western social science. The continued links between social
science and the institutions and agenda of particular powerful Western states are part of this intellectual
context. The discomfort with borders arises from their role as limits, barriers, instruments of control set up
to dominate, exclude, and exploit. State borders, in particular, carry with them a legacy of congealed
coercion and violence that must be forgotten, however uneasily, for liberal representative democracy to
flourish (Connolly, 1994). The progressive or `civilizing missions' of imperial Western states in spreading
liberty, democracy, and prosperity involves a partial occlusion of the violence and repression which has
accompanied such `missions'. Moreover it involves `forgetting' the wars, ethnic cleansing, and exploitation
which were constitutive of the `model' states of Europe and North America in the first place. Here we begin
to see some of the reasons for avoiding historical analysis of state and border creation. The eruption of
violent revolutionary or secessionist demands to establish new states or resurrect old ones (eg in Northern
Ireland or the Balkans) challenges this collective amnesia. They are a reminder of the violence and coercion
inherent in all state borders and of the need for a more persuasive and empirically grounded historical
analysis For liberal social scientists, the unwelcome spectre in the background is the absence of any
universal or consensual rules for specifying where, or how, state borders might be drawn, or how many
states might ideally comprise the world system (see Buchanan and Moore, 2003, on the ethics of making
and unmaking state boundaries). There is no possibility of appealing to an àutomatic' mechanism, the
equivalent of the neoliberal market, that might promise an optimal number of states and a peaceful global
equili- brium. Exaggerating the decline or transcendence of state borders, and stressing the ubiquity of
borders, help obscure the violence enshrined in actual state borders, the historic role of coercion as the
``dark side of democracy'' (Mann, 2005), and the role of territory as a ``repository of congealed identity,
emotion and power'' (Berezin, 2003, page 27). From structural determinism to bordering processes and
`boundary work' Of course, at one level, the tendency of contemporary students of borders to downplay
history, empire, and state may be read as a praiseworthy attempt to distance themselves from the politics
and perspectives of Ratzel, Curzon, Haushofer, and Mackinder. Interwoven in the writings of these early
border theorists is a combination of structural determinism, imperialism, organicism, state centrism, and a
denigration of borderlands as arenas where civilisation confronted barbarism (Beck, 2008, page 375). As
border studies have developed, there has been a significant shift in focus from fixed physical and
geographical borders to bordering or `border work' (Rumford, 2008, pages 61 ^ 63; Van Houtum, 2005).
More commonly, this tendency is captured under the labels `bordering', `debordering', and `rebordering'.
Critiques of state centrism and methodological nationalism, so pervasive in contemporary studies of
borders and globalisation, reject the normalisation or naturalisation of fixed territorial units. Such critiques
not only reflect the cultural turn in the social sciences but also the spread of constructivism across the
disciplines. As in the study of ethnicity or nation building, it heralds a shift from structural determinism to
approaches which stress agency (Wimmer, 2008, page 1027). Here, too, state borders tend to lose their
privileged status and become treated in the same manner as a host of symbolic (conceptual) or social
(objectified) boundaries (Lamont and Molnar, 2002). State borders may not be dissolved entirely in this
perspective, but they become more contingent, fluid, mobile, and capable of being frequently changed or
reconfigured by a variety of social agents. There is a sense, however, in which an exclusive focus on
agency can make the state as such disappear from the analysis altogether. States do not act in the way that
individuals, governments, political parties, or corporations do. They are outcomes rather than a set of
practices the work of many hands, including long-dead generations constituted by their place in an evolving
inter-state system. As emergent structural and territorial frameworks, they can be acted on or, alternatively,
can enable or disable various forms of action. Excessive focus on agency tends to subjectify the state,
ironically enhancing its cognitive and `taken for granted' status. Cultural approaches allow borders to be
seen as multiple and diffused, as linked to choice rather than determinism. They also help convey the
ambivalent and equivocal nature of borders as expressions or symbols of identity. Culturalist approaches
have little difficulty in demonstrating that the `container state' does not easily map on to cultural forms in a
world where the lack of congruence between state and nation is becoming more problematical, and where
the communications revolutions render them more permeable. Of course, such analyses beg the question of
whether state borders ever were self-contained cultural containers in the first place. Moreover, they rather
under- estimate the ways in which contemporary states enable the creation of banal forms of national
identity and nationalism. Exclusively cultural approaches highlight the multiplicity rather than singularity
of borders, and can obscure the fact that some perspectives on borders are far more powerful than
othersand indeed that some borders are far more significant than others. Some consequences of `process'
approaches The focus on bordering processes and boundary work has certainly advanced the study of
borders. While often ahistorical, and heedless of power differentials, in practice it has the potential at least
to make spatial analysis more historically sensitive by recognising that state borders are the product of
many agents, that their functions and meanings may change over time, as may their number and location. In
the words of the geographer Paasi (2006, pages 1 ^ 2), there are many agents (ethnic, religious, economic,
military) who challenge the deeply rooted images of the `fixed essences' of territory, territoriality, and
boundaries. Thus the sociospatial units of the global territorial system are, as ``historical and social
processes, in a perpetual state of becoming and transformation''. Paasi's empirical work (1996; Paasi and
Prokkola, 2008) nevertheless fully recognises the durability of state structures by emphasising the
resilience of the national state form and state territoriality. When taken to extremes, however, the `process
approach' risks dissolving states and their borders altogether. The durable concentrations of power within
the territories of large prosperous states, and in the hands of their governments, are obscured in this
postmodern world, as are the capacities of some governments to project their power beyond their own
territories. A tendency to dissolve structure into process and agency implies a world of proliferating and
fluid borders characterised by voluntarism, choice, mutable states, and mobile borders a perspective which
obscures inherited structures which enable, constrain, or channel contemporary boundary work. The rules,
functions, and meanings of state borders vary a lot (Paasi and Prokkola, 2008, page 14). It is perhaps no
accident that social science perspectives linked to the more powerful states are more prone to emphasise
agency, subjectivity, border mutability, and bordercrossing, than are perspectives from weaker states. The
governments and populations of the latter are òbjects' rather than `subjects', and are forced to
accommodate themselves to the economic and military control wielded by the more powerful states and
their capacity to regulate the movement of peoples, goods, and capital across the borders of the interstate
system.
We dont claim borders are natural and inevitable they must be used productively
to improve policy.
bringing history back in Environment and Planning D Advanced Online Publication 3-1-2010 p. 3-46
To assert the distinctiveness and global primacy of state borders, therefore, is not to imply that they are
natural, immutable, or entirely distinct from other borders. But it is to recognise that there are few signs of
systematic alternatives to an interstate system which sustain state borders as the global borders par
excellence. Certainly, there are proliferating spatial networks and organisations spanning state borders
encompassing such entities as ethnic groups, multinational corporations, religious organisations, cities,
regions, nongovernmental organisations, and social movements. Although these networks are alternative
ways of dividing and connecting global society, they have produced no systematic global system of
mutually institutionalised power, recognition, or communication to match that of the interstate system. In
fact, these nonstate entities typically operate through, and with, the state system. Networks of activity may
transgress state borders, temporarily suspending them, but hardly negating their existence.(10) Border
studies remain overinfluenced by merely cartographic representations of borders as lines drawn on the map
of the world. (Cartographical representations remain important of course, but in themselves they reveal
little of the historical process of state and nation formation, of its variability, incompleteness, and even
failures). This excessive spatiality has generated a sometimes implicit characterisation of social
transformation that obscures the `where' and `when' of state and nation formation, and the great variability
in the provenance, size, population, and power of actual national states (see Walby, 2003). There is a sense
in which merely mapping the world's states conveys a false equivalence among them which obscures their
differential power and status, the significance of their borders, and their differential capacity to shape the
functions and status of their own borders and those of others.
We cant escape the importance of national borders they are a legitimate starting
point.
bringing history back in Environment and Planning D Advanced Online Publication 3-1-2010 p. 3-4
Devaluing state borders in contemporary border studies Influential studies of globalisation and critiques of
`the container state', èmbedded statism', methodological nationalism, and the `state as territorial trap' (for
an early overview, see Brenner, 1999) have found a receptive audience, especially in European border
studies. These critiques, allied to accounts of the demise of the `Westphalian' or `Weberian' state, have
become part of the conventional wisdom underlying studies of borders and globalisation. Europe and its
borders are represented as the main exemplar and source of the new globalised, postnational, even
cosmopolitan, world order (Balibar, 2004; Beck and Grande, 2007). Implicit in much of this commentary is
that Europe, successively the progenitor of the great modern empires and the national state system, is once
again accorded a vanguard role in postnational geopolitical change. In this vision, although state borders
remain, albeit in reconfigured form, their status is in secular decline, not least because their functions have
been diffused among other territorial and nonterritorial entities. Despite the diminishing role accorded to
state borders in the emerging global order, they are retained, implicitly at least, as the hinge or fulcrum of
contemporary border studies (and, indeed, of globalisation studies as such). The territorially bounded state
remains an abiding reference point for the study of border change of the measur- ing stick by which
contemporary social change is assessed, even among those who are most critical of state-centric
approaches. State borders continue to be deeply constitutive of the way in which contemporary social
scientists think about social change, mobility and immobility, inclusion and exclusion, domestic and
foreign, national and international, internal and external, us and them. For the critics of statism, it was only
by the end of the 20th century that the social sciences had been able to break decisively with the statecentric epistemology which dominated the modern social sciences since their inception in the late 19th
century (Brenner, 1999, page 46). Even in Europe, however, the sternest critics of statism continue to think
with state borders if not always about the historical ways in which they have come into being and how they
continue to change. At one level, the extent to which states implicitly frame social science thinking is
scarcely surprising given the heavy institutional dependence of the specialised social sciences on
(particular) national states (Wimmer and Glick Shiller, 2002). Much contemporary analysis of borders and
globalisation insists that escaping from the state-centric thinking is the sine qua non for grasping the
novelty and the promise of the new world order. Yet, èscape' is far more difficult than such observers
imagine. Contemporary social science (especially in Europe and the USA) remains symbiotically tied to
particular states and groups of states. Proclaiming the advent of a new world `beyond the nation-state',
where the significance of state borders is in absolute decline, is less convincing when social science
practice is so tied to the world view emanating from (the dominant Western) states. In privileging spatial
analysis, that is, space over time, much contemporary border study lacks an adequate historical analysis of
state and nation formation; they over- emphasise the novelty of contemporary forms of border change and
globalisation and, in the process, fail to register the extent to which we continue to live in a `world of
diverse states', shot through with the legacy of empires, past and present.
AT: Internet Links

Limitations on surveillance and maximization of democratic internet technologies
generate new modes of political appearance. This counters elite power.
Xavier MARQUEZ Lecturer Poli Sci @ Victoria (New Zealand) 12 Spaces of Appearance and Spaces
of Surveillance Polity 44 (1) p. 27-31
Read this way, Arendts views on the social converge with Foucaults views on the expansion of
biopower,74 in which the concern with the management of life is accompanied by disciplinary techniques
and objects of surveillance (like populations) that produce an intricate ecology of spaces of surveillance.
Foucault finds problematic the way in which more-or-less unregimented areas of human life come to be
regulated by infra-legal mechanisms.75 In response, at times he seems to recommend a strategy of pure
resistance that can be easily misunderstood as a kind of nihilism because of his inability or unwillingness to
articulate an alternative vision of power.76 An Arendtian perspective perhaps better illuminates what has
been lost and what sorts of political action might make things better. Arendt contends that spaces of
appearance, where people can express their individuality, have been replaced by spaces where conformity
reigns. In other words, visibility has become an instrument of control or regulation, including selfregulation. Moreover, public spaces are being reduced to those mediated spaces of modern democracy in
which only a few political leaders can appear and act. These actors are now too much in control of their
own visibility to be accountable to their publics. The publics surveillance no longer suffices to undermine
the hierarchical structure of the modern state. In other words, not only are spectators more surveilled and
normalized than before, but the space of appearances is colonized by a few people who have too much
control over their own visibility and who are less and less controlled by the gaze of surrounding spectators.
A solution to such problems involves at minimum the expansion of spaces of appearance and the
reduction of spaces of surveillance. Arendts apparently utopian proposal for a council system (in lieu
of representative democracy) can be understood as an attempt to describe what a society would look like if
its spaces of appearance were greatly expanded, even though she never systematically describes the
potential connections between these new spaces of appearance and the myriad other spaces that would still
remain in society.77 She does not argue that spaces of surveillance can or should be eliminated wholesale.
Any moderately complex society that aspires to material security will contain a large number of spaces of
surveillance.78 Still, the number of activities that take place in spaces of surveillance can be decreased, and
the number of activities that take place in spaces of appearance can be increased. Spaces of appearance can
also be generated within spaces that are otherwise characterized by surveillance. Witness, for example, the
many activists in the Middle East who during the early twenty-first century have used social-media
technologies to enter the public space and mobilize collective action through their stories of resistance to
oppression, even though the same technologies enabled governments to monitor the citizens activities. As
had occurred in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, the activists courage to appear subverted the purpose of the
apparatus of surveillance without rendering it completely ineffective.79
Indeed, spaces of appearance have repeatedly emerged within disciplinary organizations as a result of what
Foucault calls resistance. As Arendt notes, during the twentieth century, labor movements time and again
attempted to create spaces of appearance and to engage in political action where, in our terms, only spaces
of surveillance had existed. According to Arendt, such political action by the working class eventually
provided workers with an unprecedented amount of economic security and political power (now under
threat in various ways, to be sure). But the significance of the working-class action lay not in its economic
success (which, arguably, simply integrated the working class into the apparatuses of the state, with all its
spaces of surveillance), but in its ability to force open the public realm to a whole new segment of the
population that appeared in public for the first time.80 These movements of resistance to disciplinary
power (both in labor movements and more recently in Egypt and Syria) illustrate the Arendtian notion of
action. Human beings generate counterpower by means of their joint action, disrupt the instrumentalization
imposed on them by disciplinary organization, and create, at least momentarily, spaces of appearance where
peoples individual stories can be articulated.
Perhaps Foucaults notion of resistance could be enriched through the Arendtian notion of a space of
appearance. Foucault values the rejection of imposed identities, but when discussing the possibility of such
rejection, he seems to consider only the evasion of visibility. He does not consider the establishment of new
spaces of appearance where the disclosure of individual identity and the generation of power go hand in
hand. Arendt, in contrast, proposes changing the way in which visibility operates. Her goal is to make
visibility function less as a lever of control and more as an opportunity to express individuality, less as an
experience that separates people and more as one that enables collective action, less as a weapon with
which to impose norms and more as a springboard from which to launch new experiments in collective
self-regulationnew modes and orders, in the Machiavellian phrase that Arendt was fond of quoting.81
The creation of spaces of appearances may well involve providing opportunities for individuals to escape
visibility, but it is not reducible to such an escape.
Late in life, Foucault also came to the conclusion that we need to expand the spaces where self-creation is
possible.82 He tended to understand these spaces as places where one can make the self as one might
make a thing. Although his aesthetic of existence is not devoid of a collective dimension,83 it misses
Arendts important points about how the human condition of plurality prevents us from making ourselves
as we make other things. At best, we can disclose ourselves as individuals (in spaces of appearance) or as
types or roles (in spaces of surveillance), or as a mixture of both (in most spaces).
Finally, it may be possible to harness the power of surveillance to control those commanding heights of
public space in modern democracies. As Green has argued, because the structural features of modern states
have restricted access to enduring and significant public spaces to a small elite, the actors in these spaces
should be prevented as far as possible from fully controlling the conditions of their visibility. One might,
for example, increase the number of opportunities where relatively spontaneous and sometimes hostile
challenges of the visible leader can occurperhaps through the use of press conferences and parliamentary
question time.84 When political leaders cannot control the conditions of their visibility, they are both
more subject to the surveillance of the public (which compensates, to some extent, for its normal lack of
power), and more likely to engage in genuine action, which is unpredictable and incalculable and capable
of generating new modes and orders. A space of surveillance can thus work in tandem with the maintenance
of a genuine space of appearance.
AT: Democratic Imperialism Links

Alternative understandings of democracy cant be translated into institutional
success. Our priority should be core democratic demands.
Richard YOUNGS Director of FRIDE and Associate Professor @ Warwick 11 Misunderstanding the
maladies of liberal democracy promotion
http://www.fride.org/download/WP106_Liberal_Democracy2_jan11.pdf p. 14-15
Critical theorists skate a thin line: they issue pleas for a rethinking of democracy, but scratch beneath the
surface and what they really lionise is undemocratic state-led development; theirs is in fact not a genuine
concern with reconceptualising democracy so much as a pretty wholesale questioning of the democracy
agenda, dressed up in softened discourse. A central pivot of many such critiques is the criticism of
liberalisms teleological arrogance. But this centres too much on one influential book published at one
rather distinctive moment in time24; liberalism more broadly and properly understood is not teleology.
Moreover, many writers argue against teleology and prescription but then in the next breath confidently
assert that social democracy must be a superior and more acceptable form of democracy outside the West
and one which has a more sustainable long-term future. This may be the case, but they have no
philosophical justification for saying so without replicating the very same methodological features they
profess to dislike in liberal tenets and thus contradicting themselves. Clearly, more debate about
different forms of political representation would be healthy. Allowing space for a plurality of routes to and
types of political reform would sit well with the core spirit of democracy. However, while more flexibility
and open mindedness are still required in democracy promotion, there is a risk of being unduly defensive
about the virtues of liberal democracys core tenets. The problem in many places of the world is the
absence of liberalisms core values, not their excess. Vigilance in the need for democracys
reconceptualisation is indeed merited. But it would be a muddled reasoning that took this to provide a case
for the wholesale pull back from the (already anaemic) support for liberal democracys notion of
fundamental political rights. We need more fully to understand local demands. But there is an automatic
assumption routinely made that such demands are for more diverse, anti-liberal political forms. This may in
many places be the case, but the evidence must be assembled. One cannot simply assert this as if it were
axiomatic to the emerging world order; there is no reason for supposing a priori that this is a natural
outcome of the rebalancing of international order. The evidence that exists points, again, to a more nuanced
conclusion: a demand for the essential tenets of liberal universalism, made relevant to and expressed
through the language and concepts of local cultures and histories. A growing focus within political
philosophy has been on capabilities: negative liberal freedoms need to be deepened but also combined
with the locally-rooted capabilities that ensure their effective realisation.25 The central thrust of Lockes
liberalism was anti-dogmatism and prudence. The irony and, for anyone concerned over democracys
health, the tragedy is that international support for a supposedly liberal democratic agenda is today
associated with exactly the opposite of these values. It is the non-dogmatic spirit that liberalism must work
to recover: liberal democracy as a system that (simply) creates space for a variety of different local choices.
Advocates and opponents of liberalism are trapped in a circular debate over this matter: while core liberal
freedoms are required to make such local choices, critics insist that those very liberal rights are themselves
a corruption of local autonomy. The imperative is not for liberalism to cede to other creeds, but to work
towards squaring the circle that has always existed at its heart: that is, liberalism is in its very essence the
rejection of utopian political design, yet, if not pursued with care, it can appear as an unbending utopia.
This defines its challenge: can liberalism stand convincingly as an anti-utopian creed whose own
propulsion requires courageous normative conviction? Can it strike the Rawlsian balance of deepening a
plurality of values without descent into relativism?
Support for democratic peace opens space for different forms of governance.
Roland PARIS Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies and Prf. @ Graduate School of
Public and International Affairs @ Ottawa 10 Saving Liberal Peacebuilding Review of Intl Studies 36 p.
357-359
In fact, there seems to be no viable alternative to some version of liberal peacebuilding. Consider, first, the
question of whether international peacebuilding should be continued at all. As we saw, some commentators
including Jeffrey Herbst and Jeremy Weinstein have suggested that conflicts should sometimes be allowed
to burn themselves out, and that large-scale impartial intervention (even after a ceasefire agreement) risks
locking in conditions that are not sustainable or compatible with long-term peace. There is some logic to
this approach, since wars ending in military victory may produce longer-lasting peace than those ending in
negotiated settlements. But this strategy could also involve huge risks and costs: The victors might
decimate the losers, or alternatively some wars might grind on for years or decades without resolution, all
the while producing humanitarian crises before one side finally achieves victory. In the meantime, conflicts
could spread to neighbouring territories, as several have done in Africa in recent years. On balance, then,
failing to provide assistance when it is possible to do so, and when it is requested by local parties, would
seem a short-sighted and dangerous solution to the shortcomings of these operations; just as suspending the
practice of postconflict peacebuilding would be a significant overreaction to the various problems that these
missions have experienced and caused. Nor is there any sign of declining demand for new operations, given
the increased trend for civil conflicts to end in negotiated settlements in recent years.96 But why, in this
case, must peacebuilding be liberal? The simple answer is that alternative strategies that is, strategies not
rooted in liberal principles would likely create more problems than they would solve. One approach, for
example, might be for international agencies to establish permanent trusteeships over war-torn states that
is, externally run governments that have no intention of ceding their authority to local actors. This option is
not unlike the formula proposed by Stephen Krasner, who called for direct international governance of
dangerously fragile states for an indefinite period of time.97 The main problem with this approach is that
it would come very close to colonial-type control indeed, much more so than even the most long-lasting
and interventionist post-settlement missions that have been conducted to date. Maintaining such an
arrangement over the long term would likely require permanent suppression of domestic political activity
within the host state. As David Edelstein points out, even when foreign military deployments are made at
the invitation of local parties, they face a problem of an obsolescing welcome whereby elements of the
local population tend to grow increasingly resentful of a powerful external presence in their society.98
Continuing to embrace the objective of transferring full sovereign powers to local actors may thus be the
single most important strategy for addressing this problem and for widening the window of time available
for peacebuilders to assist in strengthening domestic institutions within the host state. By contrast,
establishing permanent foreign rule would reduce the time available for peacebuilders to do their work
before local resentment begins to build and the peacebuilding mission becomes an obstacle to, rather than a
facilitator of, consolidating a stable peace. A second alternative to liberal peacebuilding might be for
international agencies to identify local leaders who could rule as undemocratic strongmen over their
society. This would, at least, provide a means for peacebuilders to scale back their presence quickly, as long
as they continued to offer various types of support (financial, material, etc.) to the ruling person or party.
Indeed, this was roughly that strategy that the US and Soviet Union pursued with their respective patrons in
many parts of the world during the Cold War. However, one of the practical problems with this approach is
that authoritarian regimes created and sustained by external parties have often turned out to be more fragile
than they appear, in part because they tend to lack domestic legitimacy and therefore remain in power only
by repressing or buying off their internal rivals. This was one of the lessons learned at the end of the Cold
War, when a reduction or cessation of immense flows of superpower assistance led to the collapse of
authoritarian regimes in Somalia, Zaire/Congo and elsewhere, followed by a violent scramble for power.
Furthermore, in a country just emerging from civil war, where two or more factions were engaged in largescale killing, a postconflict strongman strategy would risk alienating unrepresented groups that might
choose to resume violence rather than living under the new regime. Some measure of power-sharing, or at
least a reasonable prospect of gaining power through an unrigged political process, generally helps to
mitigate this danger.99 A third alternative to liberal peacebuilding might be to rely on traditional or
indigenous practices of peace-making and governance, rather than elections and other accoutrements of
liberal democracy. Roger MacGuinty has usefully highlighted the limited space provided for such
approaches in existing peacebuilding models, which tend to be highly standardized and rooted in a sense
of the superiority of Western approaches to peace-making.100 In contrast to the more formalistic and
legalistic approaches, traditional and indigenous methods tend to focus on consensus decision-making, a
restoration of the human/resource balance, and compensation or gift exchange designed to ensure
reciprocal and ongoing harmonious relations between groups.101 Because they reflect local customs, he
adds, these techniques may hold the potential to achieve a grass-roots legitimacy that may be lacking from
more technocratic alien forms of dispute resolution that form the mainstay of Western-funded and
designed peace-support programs and projects.102 While MacGuinty makes a strong case for adapting
policies to local conditions and traditions (using examples such as Afghanistans Loya Jirgas, or tribal
assemblies, which played an important role in that countrys initial transition from Taliban rule), he does
not recommend relying exclusively on such techniques. On the contrary, he wisely warns of the danger of
romanticising traditional or indigenous practices not least because they may serve to reinforce the
authority of existing power-holders and to impose social conformity, sometimes in brutal ways.103
Tanja Chopras analysis of local peacebuilding initiatives in Kenya offers cautionary tale illustrating these
dangers. Efforts to tap into traditional conflictresolution techniques through community-level peace
committees in Keyna have shown some success, but in some cases they have also served to deepen
existing rifts between communities and reinforce divisions while also undermining concurrent efforts to
strengthen respect for the rule of law at the national level.104 Traditional and bottom-up approaches, in
other words, should be part of peacebuilding, but they are no panacea. There are other reasons to be
cautious before embracing traditional governance methods. Those who believe that doing so will eliminate
or reduce the intrusion of foreign peacebuilders in the domestic affairs of the host state fail to recognise that
peacebuilders will still need to make crucial choices, whether they wish to do so or not. No society has a
single, unambiguous set of governance structures (traditional or otherwise) that can be automatically
activated. Consequential decisions must therefore be made to privilege some structures and not others
and, as much as peacebuilders might view themselves as referees in such decisions, in fact they will always
be players simply by virtue of their relative power in the domestic setting of a war-torn state.105 In any
event, some measure of external influence may be necessary and desirable: if the post-conflict society
could organise its own governance arrangements without international assistance, there would have been no
need or demand for peacebuilding in the first place. Given all this, consider the implications if international
agencies were to adopt a general policy of relying on indigenous governance structures in post-conflict
countries. Very likely, any political outcomes of this process would be questioned and contested due to
perceived international interference, no matter how well-meaning and diligent the peacebuilders were in
seeking to remain neutral. Further, in cases where one individual or group dominated such a process, the
result could be the equivalent of the second alternative to liberal peacebuilding discussed above
strongman rule with all the problems associated with that option. These are all real concerns that counsel
caution. Yet in spite of these risks and complexities, experience in Afghanistan, Cambodia and elsewhere
suggests that more research attention needs to be devoted to the topic of hybrid arrangements in countries
recovering from conflict, or approaches those that blend formal, informal, modern and customary methods
of governance and conflict resolution.106 It is also interesting that MacGuinty argues that one of the
benefits of customary arrangements could be to enhance political participation, while he also warns
against the dangers of authoritarianism. Such arguments suggest that MacGuinty, like other commentators
discussed above, is less concerned with the liberal orientation of current peacebuilding approaches than he
is with their relative rigidity and lack of adaptability to local conditions. In fact, there is nothing in the idea
of the liberal peace or liberal peacebuilding that mandates such inflexibility. Liberal polities come in
many different styles and forms, from group-based consociational proportional representation
arrangements to Anglo-American-style plurality systems, and there is nothing to prevent liberalism from
accommodating new models. Nor does support for liberal political principles stand in the way of
pursuing any number of complementary initiatives and goals, including those focusing on post-conflict
reconciliation,107 social welfare and justice,108 extensive public deliberations at the national and local
levels,109 or the empowerment and inclusion of women and other marginalised groups.110 The key
principles of liberalism individual freedoms, representative government, and constitutional limits on
arbitrary power offer a broad canvas for institutional design and creative policymaking. Without clear
alternatives, some version of liberalism therefore remains the most sensible foundation for post-conflict
peacebuilding. The overarching goal of such missions should be to create the conditions for representative
self-government, not only because such an outcome is the least morally objectionable goal for
peacebuilding, but also for the practical purpose of facilitating the eventual departure of peacebuilders
through the restoration of domestic sovereignty over the territory. Further, while the importance of
elections alone should not be exaggerated, they remain a crucial tool for populations to constitute their
own governments, not only during the period of peacebuilding, but on an ongoing basis.111 While it is
true that encouraging elections itself involves an external intrusion in the internal affairs of the host state,
surely we can differentiate between more and less acceptable intrusions including the fact that elections
are meant to facilitate the societys ability to shape its own destiny and exercise self-government, so that
the peacebuilders themselves can leave. Elections alone cannot achieve this goal; nor do elections equal
democracy. But of all the possible ways in which international actors can influence the domestic politics of
a country, the idea of promoting selfgovernment is one of the least troubling and, from the standpoint of
not overstaying an obsolescing welcome, it may be a pragmatic necessity.
AT: Cosmopolitanism Alt

Turn: Cosmopolitan attempts to transcend national borders re-produce violent
identities.
Ronald NIEZEN Anthro @ McGill 7 Postcolonialism and the Utopian Imagination Israel Affairs 13 (4)
p. informa
The idea of a diasporic or self-exiled intelligentsia possessing the only legitimate way to transcend the
imperialist power interests in social knowledge is not an attractive solution to many of those who see
themselves as oppressed colonial subjects. To them, knowledge must have more than the blunt edges of
detached humanist contemplation; it must be a source of self-discovery and liberation. Said himself was not
immune to the attractions of nationalist identification and commitment. It is possible to see the tension
between the ideal discomforts of exile and the politically tangible consolations of nationalism manifested in
Said's own engagement in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, in which he emphasized only the selfaffirmation that emerges from oppression, while overlooking the violent realities of their political struggle all the while extolling the virtues of cosmopolitan self-criticism. There is a sense in which he was
profoundly oblivious to the dangers that follow from subjection. Although rejecting nationalism, Said failed
to consistently recognize that one of the worst possible consequences of political oppression is the political
disfigurement of the oppressed, bringing out in them malignant forms of collective self-discovery and
counter-hatred. The irony of a cosmopolitan humanism that develops its own versions of cultural
essentialism and self-stereotyping has become a wider feature of the postcolonial critique of Western
cultural imperialism. In this literature, nationalist contentions follow almost naturally from the emphasis on
cultural incommensurability. If the research agendas of Western scholarly traditions are inevitably
associated with power and interests in dominated societies, it follows (or at least has followed for some of
Said's postcolonial acolytes) that the only legitimate form of cultural description is cultural self-affirmation.
Insofar as postcolonial theory advocates cultural research, it pursues a methodology intended to be
empowering, rooted in cultural sensitivity and affirmation, survival struggles, the maintenance of
difference, using research practices that are sympathetic, that recover, redefine and recreate the realities of
distinct peoples, free from the positional superiority of Western knowledge and the legacies of cultural
imperialism.4 But if this approach is made exclusive, if any uninvited, uncomfortable assertion, observation
or judgement is to be excoriated from the scholarly agendas of the Occident (or its sympathizers), then all
that remains is the kind of research that has always been implicated in the foundation myths of nations,
which have long included themes of liberation from oppression, uncovering a peoples' innermost being,
defining one's own citizenship, becoming self-determining in a distilled and pure sense, tinged with
political love. And if, as is now widely recognized, nationalism begins with ethnography and history, then
imagine how much more likely it is that uncritical auto-ethnography and auto-history will contribute to
bounded, xenophobic forms of collective imagination. More ominously, the sense of collective discovery is
also often part of an essentialism of the oppressive 'other', including those within one's own self-defined
ranks who are seen as refusers or apostates of the national faith. Postcolonialism, in other words, has
difficulty reconciling its sweeping critique of Western cultural imperialism with its encouragement of the
tendency towards collective self-affirmation that follows from counter-imperialist rediscovery.
Journalism/Dissent Turn
Restricting domestic surveillance is a pre-requisite for building communities of
resistance, new identities, and forms of activism.
Heidi BOGHOSIAN Executive Director of the Natl Lawyers Guild 13 Spying on Democracy:
Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance p. 265-273
In describing the National Security Agency's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), bestselling author James Bamford, whose reporting in the 1980s revealed the existence of the NSA, calls the
database used to store names gathered from the federal eavesdropping programs a disaster. The advent of
digital communications and mass storage, he says, coupled with a failure of law and policy to keep abreast
of technological advancements, and an NSA "where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single
word understood,"2 yields "the capacity to make tyranny total in America."3 Much of the information in
government databases such as TIDE is collected with the cooperation of corporations. Although the U.S.
surveillance state is colossal in scope, Americans need not be complicit in sustaining it. Tethered to
electronic gadgets, under watchful corporate and government command, Americans have a choice about the
amount of information afforded to authorities. We can embrace the positive aspects of technology while
electing to actively resist and dismantle its invasive and anti-democratic aspects.
To do so, it is essential to reject outright the premise on which a domestic surveillance grid has been
erected: that it makes us safer. Comprehensive monitoring, and the targeting of certain individuals and
social networks for greater observation, is demonstrably ineffective in its purported function of making
Americans more secure.
Surveillance Does Not Make Us Safer
As illustrated in this book's examples-FBI targeting of environmentalists, animal rights advocates, lawyers
representing politically active clients, and members of the press-a great deal of the bureau's focus is not on
investigating specific acts of violence or plans for violent attacks, but rather on monitoring communities
and individuals holding particular political and religious ideologies. This approach is ineffective, and likely
makes the nation less secure by deflecting attention from legitimate law enforcement.
Aside from the impractical scope of monitoring all religious and ideological adherents for prospective acts
of violence, this strategy encourages stereotyping that di- verts intelligence agencies from uncovering
actual threats that may not fit a particular law enforcement paradigm. In Terrorism and the Constitution,
David Cole and James X. Dempsey argue that stifling dissent-a basic vehicle by which we question
authority and bring about social change-may encourage individuals who don't value peaceful change.4 And
when entire communities are targeted as enemies, stigmatized groups become less likely to cooperate with
law enforcement in pursuing real leads. In addition to possibly making the country more vulnerable to
terrorist acts, the fixation of the FBI and other intelligence agencies on fighting terrorism has worsened an
already compromised economy. Indeed, a direct correlation can be found between a focus on high-profile
counterterrorism initiatives and the quality of life for Americans, civil liberties concerns notwithstanding.
Describing an unforeseen consequence of the bureau's antiterrorism agenda, Tim Weiner, winner of the
Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for his work on national security and intelligence issues, wrote,
"The investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime plummeted, a boon to the Wall Street plunderings
that helped create the greatest economic crisis in America since the 1930s."5 With resources diverted to the
so-called war on terror, staffing for such white-collar crimes as predatory lending and mortgage fraud
investigations was slashed to 2 6 percent of 2 001 levels, a loss of 62 5 agents as of 2008.6 Prosecutions
against financial institution fraud dropped 48 percent from 2000 to 2007, insurance fraud cases dropped 7 5
percent, and securities fraud cases declined 117 percent.7 Syracuse University estimates that the number of
FBI white-collar crimes fell by 50 percent. 8 While thousands of Americans have gone to jail for protesting
that banks must be held accountable for causing massive national economic damage and loss, not a single
banker has been arrested for defrauding, evicting, and repossessing the homes of millions of American
families.9 In light of the devastation brought on by the plunder, it's only reasonable to ask what has posed
the greater material threat to our national security, freedom, and liberties: predatory bankers or the
protesters who have camped out to insist that these predatory bankers be held accountable? That the U.S.
government and its corporate partners have overwhelmingly chosen to act as if the latter, and not the
former, have harmed the nation speaks volumes about the real priorities and alliances of those in power
today.
In addition to diverting resources from prosecuting white-collar crime, huge sums spent on surveillance
gadgets contribute little, if anything, to public safety. As cities invest hundreds of millions of dollars in
surveillance cameras, no evidence exists that they deter crime. A New York University study analyzing data
from 2002 to 2005 of two large housing complexes in Manhattan concluded that no persuasive evidence
existed that cameras reduced crime in the two complexes. 10 A 2008 San Francisco study concluded that
public surveillance cameras served no deterrent function whatsoever. 11 In addition to the NYU study, as of
2009, four additional studies had been conducted to determine if closed-circuit televisions were effective in
deterring crime. Only one case showed success, a study of East Orange, New Jersey, where a multipronged
approach involving cameras, instant police reports, and electronic listening devices saw a crime reduction
of 50 percent from 2003 to 2006_12 Despite this, New York City has devoted millions of dollars to installing a "Ring of Steel," modeled after London's system by the same name, in midtown and lower Manhattan
with cameras, license plate readers, explosive-trace detection systems, and armed officers.
Four Minutes to Redefine Values
Much of the modern surveillance state can be traced back to World War I propaganda, when the Committee
on Public Information (created by President Woodrow Wilson to influence public opinion about U.S.
participation in the war), deployed volunteer "Four Minute Men" to deliver short pro-war propaganda to
captive audiences in movies, churches, labor union halls, and other venues. Pointers on how to frame the
short speeches advised sparseness of words, with fifteen-second openings and final appeals. Speakers were
encouraged to look for new slogans and ideas to continuously perfect their speeches. Later, Edward L.
Bernays would fu rther refine techniques of propaganda. Acknowledging the deceptive nature of public
relations campaigns, Bernays himself said, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."13 Political and social
strategies that helped define the course of history have relied on many of Bernays's techniques. One of the
best-known public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton, was instrumental in molding public opinion through
its representations of several influential industries, including tobacco, steel, and aviation. It would be
refreshing if Americans could offer their own four-minute versions on how individuals can reclaim free
speech, community, personal autonomy, liberty, and happiness. Some modern-day equivalents already
exist, as described below: the pupils who resisted carrying RFIDembedded student identification cards, or
those who refused to have their biometrics gathered in palm scans at the school cafeteria. They are the
modern-day equivalents of"Four Minute Men." Each time these women, children, and families take a
principled stand against intrusive surveillance, they make it easier for others to do so.
Just as public relations firms and corporate marketing departments know the power of online
advertisements and thirty-second television spots, so should Americans become independent and outspoken
experts in redefining- rebranding-our core values. We can shift from state and corporate propaganda to
publicly created narratives. Articulating social realities and delivering the message with care and creativity
helps counter the coercion and control we are subjected to daily and builds a diverse culture of resistance.
Instead of the "conscious and intelligent manipulation" of the public by state authorities and corporations,
nonprofit efforts to improve society can work with the powerful real-life stories of people overcoming
adversity, of confronting corporate and government authority, and of mobilizing vibrant communities.
Doing so would counter the numbing daily barrage of commercial messages. The act of sharing of facts,
art, creative interpretations, dramatizations, and stories of community and humanity is a far more
interesting reflection of society than are the profit-obsessed messages of corporate America. Community
narratives that are spontaneous, emotional, and unvarnished should be readily available for others to hear
and emulate.
When armed with the facts, and when unafraid to speak out against governmental and corporate authorities,
people in the United States have been able to organize to resist and reverse policies and practices that
infringe on civil liberties, freedom, and democracy. Americans interested in staving off a cyber-surveillance
state should familiarize themselves with the initiatives of organizations and individuals actively working to
protect civil liberties across the country. Many have made noteworthy progress in holding government and
corporate intelligence agencies accountable for constitutional infractions. Litigation by the American Civil
Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the National
Lawyers Guild, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in Washington, D.C., the People's Law Office in
Chicago, and other organizations exposes and challenges government policies that infringe on First and
Fourth Amendment rights. In the case of surveillance, these organizations go a long way ttoward holding
federal intelligence agencies accountable and reminding the judiciary and legislators that they have not kept
pace with technology that changes day to day. The very act of bringing litigation serves an important
function in drawing attention to injustices and educating the public about issues that impact their privacy.
Because these individuals and groups defend the most precious elements of our society-our basic rights and
liberties-they are literally the custodians of democracy.

Challenging National Borders in Debates Over Surveillance

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Challenging National Borders in Debates Over Surveillance

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FYI

Explanation of the argument:

National opposition to transnational surveillance reproduces the conditions for

Our alternative We must develop transnational cosmopolitan opposition to

K Prior Methodological Nationalism

We should treat mass surveillance as a transnational issue. The practices of security

Surveillance proves a fundamental shift in the architecture of global society.

Link Citizenship/Domestic Protection

Internet-centric democratization treats technology as a neutral tool. Political

Internet access empowers authoritarians. Entertainment is more effective than

Impact Violent Borders

world's population has been rapidly

Link Democracy/Democratic Peace Theory

Perm National Citizenship/Global Advocacy Compatible

AT: Law/National Focus Links

AT: Violent Borders Impacts

AT: Internet Links

AT: Democratic Imperialism Links

AT: Cosmopolitanism Alt

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