Section 702/H.R. 1466 Aff
Notes
Ya’ll prolly know what section 702 is already. HR 1466 Is just a bill that repeals section 702 along with a
small host of other things. More details in the solvency advocate evidence/the actual bill.
1AC
Contention One: The Cyber Surveillance State
Status quo Reforms of Section 702 are Lip Service - NSA Bulk data collection from
Domestic Citizens is still perpetuated by the 702 screw
Laperruque 15 (Updates to section 702 minimization rules still leave loopholes Author Image JAKE
LAPERRUQUE – Political Correspondant and Research Staff Member at the Center for Democracy and
Technology SHARE POST Updates to Section 702 Minimization Rules Still Leave Loopholes FEBRUARY 09,
2015 https://cdt.org/blog/updates-to-section-702-minimization-rules-still-leave-loopholes/ Security &
Surveillance – BRW)
On February 3, 2015, the Administration announced numerous changes to surveillance activities to
protect privacy and civil liberties, including reforms to its Minimization Rules – last updated in July 2014 and released
publicly as part of the announcement – for Section 702, concerning retention and use of communications of or about US persons. Some
of these reforms are significant improvements, but they do not adequately address ongoing problems with
overbroad collection, retention, and use of information pursuant to Section 702. New Restrictions on Use as
Evidence in Criminal Cases: Previously, Section 702 Minimization Guidelines (including the 2009 Guidelines leaked by Edward Snowden, the
2011 Guidelines released by the government in 2013, and the 2014 Guidelines released last week) permitted NSA to retain, share, and use
communications of or about US persons that may constitute evidence of any crime. Under
the new policy announced on February 3,
not be introduced as evidence against that [US] person in any criminal proceeding
except 1) with the approval of the Attorney General, and 2) in criminal cases with national security
implications or certain other serious crimes,” a policy similar to Recommendation 12(2) by the
President’s Review Group. DNI General Counsel Robert Litt specified that “serious crimes” is limited to
crimes involving: 1) death, 2) kidnapping, 3) substantial bodily harm, 4) conduct that constitutes a
criminal offense that is a specified offense against a minor as defined in 42 USC 16911, 5) incapacitation
or destruction of critical infrastructure as defined in 42 USC 5195c(e), 6) cybersecurity, 7) transnational
crimes, and 8) human trafficking. This list is imperfect;notably, “criminal cases with national security
implications” and “crimes involving cybersecurity” are undefined, and could be applied in an overbroad manner.
Further, it does not appear in the Minimization Guidelines themselves, and could be expanded at any time.
such information “will
However, it represents a substantial improvement over current minimization practices, which allows use of information collected under Section
702 for prosecution of any domestic crime, including misdemeanors and non-violent offenses. Continued Overbroad Retention and Use for Law
Enforcement Investigations: Although use as evidence in criminal cases is curtailed as set forth above, the new policy contains a significant
loophole that will permit continued retention, dissemination, and some uses of US persons’’ communications collected under Section 702 that
contain evidence of any crime. While
the new policy restricts use of such communications as evidence in
prosecutions, it does not limit retention or other uses by law enforcement. Therefore,
communications of or about US persons believed to contain evidence of any crime could still be retained for
years, as is currently permitted. While this information could not be used as evidence in criminal proceedings (except for the
serious crimes as set forth above) NSA could still disseminate this information to law enforcement for use in investigations. This is
especially troubling given the DEA’s use of parallel construction to rely on information obtained
through intelligence surveillance, then obscure the source of information provided by the Intelligence
Community so that the defendant is unaware. In 2013 the Department of Justice changed its policy and began providing
defendants notice when information obtained from Section 702 is used, but questions remain as to whether the scope of this notification policy
is sufficient. And even if notification is eventually provided, the
government could still use communications obtained
using Section 702 as the foundation for investigation of minor domestic crimes, so long as it gathers
other evidence for the purpose of prosecution. If the Administration is sincere in its commitment to
limiting the range of crimes that information on US persons obtained through Section 702 can be used
for, it should change the Minimization Guidelines – and support statutory reform – that requires
communications of or about US persons that does not contain evidence of the crimes listed above (or
foreign intelligence information) be immediately purged upon discovery. New Restrictions on US Person Querying: The policies
announced on February 3 also create new restrictions on the NSA’s ability to querying its database of Section 702 communications for the
communications of US persons. This practice is commonly referred to as the “backdoor search loophole” because if the NSA wanted to conduct
the surveillance of the US person directly, it would be a “search” that would require a full FISA court order based on a finding of probable cause
that the US person is a terrorist, spy, or other agent of a foreign power. Previously, minimization procedures vaguely required that querying
construction be “reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information,” effectively allowing NSA to deliberately seek out in a vast
database of content collected under Section 702 Americans’ communications without judicial authorization. Under the new rules, the NSA and
CIA will be permitted to query the database with US person identifiers (a unique identifier associated such as a name, phone number, email
address, etc.) only after developing “a written statement of facts showing that a query is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence
information,” as recommended by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in its report on Section 702. This is a step forward for
preventing some potential abuse posed by the backdoor search loophole, but it is a far cry from requiring a judicial finding of probable cause
that the person whose communications are sought is an agent of a foreign power, as Senator Wyden has proposed to close the backdoor
search loophole. While the NSA will be prohibited from searching the Section 702 database for an American’s communication with the goal of
gathering evidence for domestic criminal investigations that have no national security implications, or simply gathering personal information
that could be used to hold a person in disrepute (troublingly, it is unclear whether the FBI will be similarly restricted), it could still query the
data base — and obtain the contents of the US person’s communications — for broad foreign intelligence purposes, such as when the analyst
thinks the query would disclose information necessary to the conduct of US foreign affairs or US national security. In addition, an NSA
analyst, not a judge, would decide whether obtaining the US person’s communications was proper. The
new restrictions reflect the privacy interest in Americans’ communications being queried, but falls short of providing the protection that privacy
interest is due.
The NSA currently uses Section 702 as an extension the Cyber War on Terror –
frenetic information gathering tactics are unknowingly applied to U.S. Citizens
Walsh 6/10 (From ‘war on terror’ to ‘cyber war’, and why you need a VPN 10 Jun 2015 | Ray Walsh –
political consultant and staff writer for bestvpn.net. https://www.bestvpn.com/20718/from-war-onterror-to-cyber-war-and-why-you-need-a-vpn/ –BRW)
The post 9/11 climate was dominated by an anti-terrorist rhetoric that we have all come to be familiar with. Shortly
after the gruesome, heart-wrenching incident, George W. Bush signed into action a bill called the Authorization for the Use of
Military Force (AUMF). The new legislation gave the US military authority to use all ‘necessary and appropriate force’
against those that were determined to have ‘planned, authorized, committed or aided’ the September 11th
attacks. AUMF allowed the US military to chase down members of Al-Qaeda and its associated forces (an effort largely known by its
moniker the ‘war on terror’ ), and was a piece of legislation that would ultimately be used to go after just about any target the US government
felt stood in its way. ‘Associated
forces’ came to mean any man of a military age in countries that were
deemed to be collaborators with the enemy. Anybody who helped or harbored America’s enemies was instantly deemed a
target, and a new and prolific form of warfare (namely that of drones) meant that these targets could be swiftly dealt a remote and powerful
blow, even when the US government had no real idea who the target was, or whether it was a legitimate target at all. Now, with the US military
firmly positioned in and around the Middle East, in a strategic stronghold that allows them to continue unfettered the mighty will of their
‘military-industrial complex’, it would appear that the
time has come to move mainstream consciousness into a
different reality construct. New Snowden documents published by the New York Times and Pro Publica
reveal that the same kind of mentality which took over after 9/11 in regards to terrorism is now being
assigned to the problem of cybersecurity. High level hacking incidents such as last December’s Sony hack, and the ISIS hack of
US Central Command’s Twitter page, earlier this year, are being used as fodder to get the nation on board for a whole new set of libertyinfringing ideals. When the war on terror was big news, liquids could no longer be brought on planes, and full body scanners were needed in all
airports. Now, in
the very same way, cyber terrorism – the threat that terrorists might have matured into cyber criminals – is
being sold to the world as a reason for the unquestioning advancement of a total loss of online
privacy for everyone. All for our own safety, of course! According to the new documents, in 2012 the NSA was given permission to use
its warrantless surveillance program to target Internet addresses, malware, and other ‘cyber-signatures’ associated with foreign governments
who the NSA feels might be collaborating with their rivals. These documents also reveal, however, that both the
FBI and the
NSA used these extended powers to begin surveillance of ‘signatures’ unassociated with foreign or
terrorist organizations, in order to hone in on domestic targets. As per usual, this was done in absolute
secrecy. The new Snowden revelations show that successful NSA lobbying led the Department of Justice to
secretly extend the NSA’s powers according to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, in particular
allowing the NSA to move away from simply targeting knowledgeable and advanced cyber criminals to
being able to target IP addresses. This allowed for what is now recognized as the ‘bulk’ collection of both
Americans’, and foreigners’ communication assets. According to senior ‘white hat’ hackers, this is not actually a surprise,
mainly because (black hat) hackers often use proxies and computers infected by malware to carry out their crimes, making it incredibly difficult
to investigate malicious cyber activity without also targeting innocent peoples’ machines. With this in mind, and with the level of intensity
which both US and international intelligence agencies appear to be attributing to the need to gain full control over cyberspace, there has never
been a better time to think about protecting your digital presence.
Put Away the Disad - Data Collection Efforts Pursuant to section 702 have no
influence on the prevention of terrorist attacks
Lendman 13. Stephen Lendman. 2013. [Research Associate at the Center for Research on Globalization]
“NSA Chief General Keith Alexander Lies to Congress.” Global Research. June 15, 2013. SWL
In testimony before Senate Appropriations Committee members, NSA Director General Keith Alexander defended the
indefensible. He lied doing so. He falsely claimed NSA spying foiled “dozens” of terror plots. ¶ He “didn’t elaborate
on the attacks that were stopped, other than to tie them to two well-known foiled 2009 plots.” More on them
below. No such plots existed. They were invented. Innocent victims were falsely accused. ¶ No verifiable evidence shows
any plots were foiled on Alexander’s watch. He’s been NSA chief since August 1, 2005. His claims don’t wash. ¶ He committed
perjury. He’s guilty on multiple counts. Don’t expect recrimination against him. Key Senate members are fully briefed. They’re complicit in state
crimes. So are many other congressional members. ¶ Post 9/11, Washington declared war on Islam. Muslims became America’s enemy of
choice. They’ve been wrongfully vilified and dehumanized as terrorists. ¶ So-called
terror plots are fake. None existed earlier.
None exist now. Dozens of innocent men and women were falsely charged, prosecuted, convicted and
given long prison terms. Expect more innocent victims persecuted ahead. ¶ Alexander referred to Najibullah Zazi and
David Coleman Headley. ¶ Justice Department officials claimed Zazi “received bomb-making instructions in
Pakistan, purchased components of improvised explosive devices, and traveled to New York City on
September 10 (2009) in furtherance of his criminal plans.” ¶ No evidence whatever supported government
accusations. Zazi got no bomb-making instructions. He planned no crimes. His so-called ingredients
included hydrogen peroxide, acetone and hydrochloric acid. ¶ He bought them at a beauty shop. He did so
legally. Anyone can buy the same things. Hydrogen peroxide’s a common bleaching agent. It’s a mild disinfectant. ¶
Acetone’s an inflammable organic solvent. It’s used in nail polish remover, plastics and for cleaning
purposes. ¶ Hydrochloric acid’s used in oil production, ore reduction, food processing, pickling, metal
cleaning, and over-the-counter eye lubricants, among other applications. It’s found diluted in stomachs. ¶
Zazi’s alleged plot was fabricated. Authorities claimed he planned to attack New York commuter trains and/or other high-profile New
York targets. No motive was explained. None existed. ¶ No legitimate evidence surfaced. None was presented.
Innocence is no defense. Zazi was declared guilty by accusation. ¶ According to Justice Department
officials, Healy was guilty of “a dozen federal terrorism crimes relating to his role in planning the
November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, and a subsequent proposed attack on a newspaper in
Denmark.” ¶ No verifiable evidence links him to any crimes. CIA, Mossad, India’s Research Analysis Wing
(RAW, and perhaps Pakistan’s ISI were behind twelve coordinated shooting and bombing Mumbai
attacks. They were false flags. ¶ DOJ officials fabricated charges against Healy and others. He’s innocent but guilty as charged.
Thousands of political prisoners rot in America’s gulag. ¶ Media scoundrels pronounce guilt before trial. They do so in the
court of public opinion. They support the worst state crimes. They violate core journalistic ethics. They
[did] it unapologetically. They betray their readers, viewers and listeners in the process. ¶ Post-9/11, dozens of
Muslims were falsely convicted of terrorism and/or conspiracy to commit it. ¶ Alexander’s claims about NSA spying foiling plots
and keeping America safe don’t wash. ¶ On June 12, London’s Guardian headlined “Senators press NSA
director for answers on secret surveillance program.” ¶ It was more show-and-tell than holding Alexander
accountable. Congress is fully briefed on what’s ongoing. Key members know the worst of it. Permitting it
makes them complicit. ¶ FBI Director Robert Mueller lied like Alexander. In testimony before House Judiciary Committee members, he
claimed spying could have foiled 9/11. It will prevent “another Boston,” he said. ¶ Both incidents were state-sponsored false flags. Mueller didn’t
explain. House
members didn’t ask. Perhaps they know and don’t need to. Maybe key House and Senate
members are briefed in advance of US-staged terror plots. ¶ Mueller claims watering down spying leaves America
vulnerable. “If you narrow (the scope of surveillance), you narrow the dots and that might be the dot that prevents the next Boston,” he said. ¶
America has no enemies except ones it invents. Mueller lied to Congress. He committed perjury like Alexander. He remains
unaccountable.
The Bulk Data Collection Efforts furthered by the NSA perpetuate a system of
pedagological domestic terrorism whereby the normalization of surveillance coincides
with the Normalization of neoliberal structural violence - this perpetuates neoliberal
inequality at the expense of democracy
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
Debates about the meaning and purpose of the public and social good have been co-opted by a
politics of fear, relegating notions of the civic good, public sphere, and even the very word "public" to the status of a
liability, if not a pathology.25 Fear has lost its social connotations and no longer references fear of social
deprivations such as poverty, homelessness, lack of health care, and other fundamental conditions of
agency. Fear is now personalized, reduced to an atomized fear that revolves around crime, safety,
apocalypse, and survival. In this instance, as the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once warned,
modernity now privileges "a disgraceful combination of 'private opulence and public squalor.' "26 This is not surprising given the
basic elements of neoliberal policy, which as Jeremy Gilbert indicates, include the: privatization of public assets, contraction
and centralization of democratic institutions, deregulation of labor markets, reductions in progressive
taxation, restrictions on labor organization, labor market deregulation, active encouragement of
competitive and entrepreneurial modes of relation across the public and commercial sectors.27 Under
the regime of neoliberal capitalism, the expansion of government and corporate surveillance
measures become synonymous with new forms of governance and an intensification of material and
symbolic violence.28 Rather than wage a war on terrorists, the neoliberal security state wages a war
on dissent in the interest of consolidating class power. How else to explain the merging of corporate
and state surveillance systems updated with the most sophisticated shared technologies used in the
last few years to engage in illicit counterintelligence operations, participate in industrial espionage29
and disrupt and attack pro-democracy movements such as Occupy and a range of other nonviolent
social movements protesting a myriad of state and corporate injustices.30 This type of illegal spying in
the interest of stealing industrial secrets and closing down dissent by peaceful protesters has less to
do with national security than it has to do with mimicking the abuses and tactics used by the Stasi in
East Germany during the Cold War. How else to explain why many law-abiding citizens "and those with dissenting views within
the law can be singled out for surveillance and placed on wide-ranging watch lists relating to terrorism."31 Public outrage seems to disappear,
with few exceptions, as the state and its corporate allies do little to protect privacy rights, civil liberties and a culture of critical exchange and
dissent. Even worse,
they shut down a culture of questioning and engage in forms of domestic terrorism.
State violence in this case becomes the preferred antidote to the demanding work of reflection,
analysis, dialogue and imagining the points of views of others. The war against dissent waged by
secret counterintelligence agencies is a mode of domestic terrorism in which, as David Graeber has argued,
violence is "often the preferred weapon of the stupid."32 The war against dissent waged by secret counterintelligence agencies is a mode
of domestic terrorism in which, as David Graeber has argued, violence is "often the preferred weapon of the stupid." Modernity in this
instance has been updated, wired and militarized. No longer content to play out its historical role of a
modernized panopticon, it has become militarized and a multilayered source of insecurity, entertainment
and commerce. In addition, this new stage of modernity is driven not only by the need to watch but also
the will to punish. Phone calls, emails, social networks and almost every other vestige of electronic
communication are now being collected and stored by corporate and government organizations such
as the NSA and numerous other intelligence agencies. Snowden's exposure of the massive reach of the surveillance state
with its biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies, miniature drones, high speed computers, massive data mining capabilities and
other stealth technologies made visible "the stark realities of disappearing privacy and diminishing liberties."33 But the NSA and the other 16
intelligence agencies are not the only threat to privacy, freedom and democracy. Corporations now have their own intelligence agencies and
data mining offices and use these agencies and new surveillance technologies largely to spy on those who question the abuses of corporate
power.
The emergence of fusion centers exemplifies how power is now a mix of corporate, local, federal
and global intelligence agencies, all sharing information that can be used by various agencies to stifle
dissent and punish pro-democracy activists. What is clear is that this combination of gathering and
sharing information often results in a lethal mix of anti-democratic practices in which surveillance now
extends not only to potential terrorists but to all law-abiding citizens. Within this sinister web of secrecy, suspicion,
state-sanctioned violence and illegality, the culture of authoritarianism thrives and poses a dangerous threat to
democratic freedoms and rights. It also poses a threat to those outside the United States who, in the
name of national security, are subject to "a grand international campaign with drones and special operations
forces that is generating potential terrorists at every step."34 Behind this veil of concentrated power and secrecy lies not only a threat to
privacy rights but the very real threat of violence on both a domestic and global level. As Heidi Boghosian argues, the omniscient state "in
George Orwell's 1984 … is represented by a two-way television set installed in each home. In our own modern adaptation, it is symbolized by
the location-tracking cell phones we willingly carry in our pockets and the microchip-embedded clothes we wear on our bodies."35 While such
devices can be used for useful applications, they become dangerous in a society in which corporations and government have increased power
and access over every aspect of the lives of the American public. Put simply, "the ubiquity of such devices threatens a robust democracy."36
What is particularly dangerous, as Boghosian documents in great detail, is that: as
government agencies shift from
investigating criminal activity to preempting it, they have forged close relationships with corporations
honing surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques for use against Americans. By claiming that
anyone who questions authority or engages in undesired political speech is a potential terrorist
threat, this government-corporate partnership makes a mockery of civil liberties. … As the assault by an
alignment of consumer marketing and militarized policing grows, each single act of individual expression or resistance assumes greater
importance.37 The
dynamic of neoliberal modernity, the homogenizing force of the market, a growing
culture of repression and an emerging police state have produced more sophisticated methods for
surveillance and the mass suppression of the most essential tools for dissent and democracy : "the press,
political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse."38
The neoliberal authoritarian culture of modernity also has created a social order in which surveillance
becomes self-generated, aided by a public pedagogy produced and circulated through a machinery of
consumption that encourages transforming dreams into data bits. Such bits then move from the sphere
of entertainment to the deadly serious and integrated spheres of capital accumulation and policing as they
are collected and sold to business and government agencies who track the populace for either
commercial purposes or for fear of a possible threat to the social order and its established institutions
of power. Absorbed in privatized orbits of consumption, commodification and display, Americans vicariously participate in
the toxic pleasures of consumer culture, relentlessly entertained by the spectacle of violence in which, as David
Graeber, suggests, the police “become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture … watching movies or
viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view."39 It is worth repeating that Orwell's vision of surveillance
and the totalitarian state looks tame next to the emergence of a corporate-private-state surveillance system that wants to tap into every
conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast intelligence storage sites around the country
and use those data to repress any vestige of dissent.40 Whistle-blowers are not only punished by the government; their lives are turned upside
down in the process by private surveillance agencies and major corporations who increasingly work in tandem. These institutions share
information with the government and do their own spying and damage control. For instance, Bank of America assembled 15 to 20 bank officials
and retained the law firm of Hunton & Williams to devise various schemes to attack WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald, who they thought was
about to release damaging information about the bank.41 Some of the most dreadful consequences of neoliberal modernity and cultures of
surveillance include the elimination of those public spheres capable of educating the public to hold power accountable, and the dissolution of
all social bonds that entail a sense of responsibility toward others. In this instance, politics has not only become dysfunctional and corrupt in the
face of massive inequalities in wealth and power, it also has been emptied of any substantive meaning. Government
not only has
fallen into the hands of the elite and right-wing extremists, it has embraced a mode of lawlessness
evident in forms of foreign and domestic terrorism that undercuts the obligations of citizenship,
justice and morality. As surveillance and fear become a constant condition of American society, there
is a growing indifference, if not distaste, for politics among large segments of the population. This distaste
is purposely manufactured by the ongoing operations of political repression against intellectuals, artists, nonviolent
protesters and journalists on the left and right. Increasingly, as such populations engage in dissent and the free flow of ideas,
whether online or offline, they are considered dangerous to the state and become subject to the
mechanizations of a massive security apparatuses designed to monitor, control and punish dissenting
populations. For instance, in England, the new head of MI5, the British intelligence service, mimicking the US government's distrust of
journalists, stated that the stories The Guardian published about Snowden's revelations "were a gift to terrorists," reinforcing the notion that
whistle-blowers and journalists might be considered terrorists.42 Similar comments about Snowden have been made in the United States by
members of Congress who have labeled Snowden a traitor, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat; John McCain, an Arizona
Republican; Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican; and House Speaker John Boehner, as well as former Vice President Dick Cheney.43
Greenwald, one of the first journalists to divulge Snowden's revelations about the NSA's secret "unaccountable system of pervasive
surveillance"44 has been accused by Rep. Peter King of New York along with others of being a terrorist.45 More ominously, "Snowden told
German TV ... about reports that U.S. government officials want to assassinate him for leaking secret documents about the NSA's collection of
telephone records and emails."46
There are 2 impacts to this, the first is democratic backsliding
The Loss of the Right to Privacy via the commodification of information by the NSA
destroys the ideological underpinnings of American democracy
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
The revelations of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden about government lawlessness and
corporate spying provide a new meaning if not a revitalized urgency and relevance to George Orwell's dystopian fable 1984. Orwell offered his
readers an image of the modern state that had become dystopian - one in which privacy as a civil virtue and a crucial right was no longer valued
as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving democracy. Orwell was clear that the
right to privacy had come
under egregious assault. But the right to privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation of individual rights. When
ruthlessly transgressed, the
issue of privacy became a moral and political principle by which to assess the
nature, power and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. As important as Orwell's warning was in shedding light on
the horrors of mid-20th century totalitarianism and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on
citizens, the text serves as a brilliant but limited metaphor for mapping the expansive trajectory of global surveillance and authoritarianism
now characteristic of the first decades of the new millennium. As Marjorie Cohn has indicated, "Orwell never could have imagined
that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200
million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read
the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use."1 To read more articles by
Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here. In his videotaped Christmas message, Snowden references
Orwell's warning of "the dangers of microphones, video cameras and TVs that watch us,"2 allowing the state to regulate subjects within the
most intimate spaces of private life. But these
older modes of surveillance, Snowden elaborates, however, are nothing
compared to what is used to infringe on our personal privacy today. For Snowden, the threat posed by the
new surveillance state can be measured by its reach and use of technologies that far outdate anything
Orwell envisioned and pose a much greater threat to the privacy rights of citizens and the reach of sovereign powers. He reiterates this
point by reminding his viewers that "a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all - they will never know what it means to
have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought."3 Snowden is right about the danger to privacy rights but his
analysis fails to go far enough in linking together the question of surveillance with the rise of "networked societies," global flows of power and
the emergence of the totalitarian state.4 In a world devoid of care, compassion and protection, privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated
through its connection to public life, the common good or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. The
democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy under the modernist state in which Orwell lived out his political
imagination has been transformed and mutilated, almost beyond recognition. Just as Orwell's fable has morphed over
time into a combination of "realistic novel," real-life documentary and a form of reality TV, privacy has been altered radically in
an age of permanent, 'nonstop' global exchange and circulation. So, too, and in the current period of historical
amnesia, privacy has been redefined through the material and ideological registers of a neoliberal order in
which the right to privacy has succumbed to the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino
capitalism's unending necessity to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all
aspects of daily life visible and subject to data manipulation.5 In a world devoid of care, compassion
and protection, privacy is no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life,
the common good or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. In a world in
which the worst excesses of capitalism are unchecked, privacy is nurtured in a zone of historical
amnesia, indifferent to its transformation and demise under a "broad set of panoptic practices."6 Consequently,
culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory in a social order where a consumerist-driven
ethic "makes impossible any shared recognition of common interests or goals" and furthers the
collective indifference to the growth of the surveillance state.7 Surveillance has become a growing feature of daily life.
Democratic Backsliding increases the propensity government decisions that lead to
nuclear war
Marshall, 9 (Andrew, 8/19/9, “Global War and Dying Democracy: The Revolution of the Elites,” Global Power and Global Government:
Part 5, Global Research Centre for Research on Globalization, graduate degree in economics from the University of Chicago, director of the
United States Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, JPL) **Gender modified
Global trends in political economy suggest that “democracy” as we know it, is a fading concept, where
even Western industrialized nations are retreating from the system. Arguably, through party politics and
financial-corporate interests, democracy is something of a façade as it is. However, we are entering into an era in which
even the institutions and image of democracy are in retreat, and the slide into totalitarianism
seems inevitable. The National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2025, stated that many governments will be
“expanding domestic security forces, surveillance capabilities, and the employment of special
operations-type forces.” Counterterrorism measures will increasingly “involve urban operations as a result of greater
urbanization,” and governments “may increasingly erect barricades and fences around their territories to inhibit access. Gated
communities will continue to spring up within many societies as elites seek to insulate themselves from domestic threats.”[1] Essentially,
expect a continued move towards and internationalization of domestic police state measures to
control populations. The nature of totalitarianism is such that it is, “by nature (or rather by definition), a global project that cannot
be fully accomplished in just one community or one country. Being fuelled by the need to suppress any alternative orders and ideas, it has
no natural limits and is bound to aim at totally dominating everything and everyone.” David Lyon explained in
Theorizing Surveillance, that, “The ultimate feature of the totalitarian domination is the absence of exit, which can be achieved temporarily
by closing borders, but permanently only by a truly global reach that would render the very notion of exit meaningless. This in itself justifies
questions about the totalitarian potential of globalization.” The author raises the important question, “Is abolition of borders intrinsically
(morally) good, because they symbolize barriers that needlessly separate and exclude people, or are they potential lines of resistance,
refuge and difference that may save us from the totalitarian abyss?” Further, “if globalization undermines the tested, state-based models
of democracy, the world may be vulnerable to a global totalitarian etatization.”[2] Russia Today, a major Russian media source, published
an article by the Strategic Cultural Fund, in which it stated that, “the
current crisis is being used as a mechanism for
provoking some deepening social upheavals that would make humankind – plunged as it is already into chaos
and frightened by the ghost of an all-out violence – urge of its own free will that a ‘supranational’ arbitrator with
dictatorial powers intervene into the world affairs.” The author pointed out that, “The events are following
the same path as the Great Depression in 1929-1933: a financial crisis, an economic recession, social conflicts, establishing
totalitarian dictatorships, inciting a war to concentrate power, and capital in the hands of a narrow circle.” However, as the author noted,
this time around, it’s different, as this “is the final stage in the ‘global control’ strategy, where a decisive blow should be dealt to the
national state sovereignty institution, followed by a transition to a system of private power of transnational elites.” The author explained
that a global police state is forming, as “Intelligence activities, trade of war, penitentiary system, and information control are passing into
private hands. This is done through so-called outsourcing, a relatively new business phenomenon that consists of trusting certain functions
to private firms that act as contractors and relying on individuals outside an organization to solve its internal tasks.” Further, “the biggest
achievements have been made over the last few years in the area of establishing electronic control over people’s identities, carried out
under the pretext of counterterrorism. Currently, the FBI is creating the world’s biggest database of biometric indexes (fingerprints, retina
scans, face shapes, scar shapes and allocation, speech and gesture patterns, etc.) that now contains 55 million fingerprints.”[3] Global War
Further, the
prospects of war are increasing with the deepening of the economic crisis. It must be noted that historically, as
of restructuring
the entire global political economy may also require and produce a global war to serve as a catalyst
for formation of the New World Order. The National Intelligence Council document, Global Trends 2025, stated that there is a
likely increase in the risk of a nuclear war, or in the very least, the use of a nuclear weapon by 2025, as, “Ongoing lowempires are in decline, international violence increases. The scope of a global depression and the undertaking
intensity clashes between India and Pakistan continue to raise the specter that such events could escalate to a broader conflict between
those nuclear powers.”[4] The report also predicts a resurgence of mercantilist foreign policies of the great powers in competition for
resources, which “could lead to interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources to be essential to
maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime.” In particular, “Central Asia has become an area of intense international
competition for access to energy.”[5] Further, “Sub-Saharan Africa will remain the most vulnerable region on Earth in terms of economic
challenges, population stresses, civil conflict, and political instability. The weakness of states and troubled relations between states and
societies probably will slow major improvements in the region’s prospects over the next 20 years unless there is sustained international
engagement and, at times, intervention. Southern Africa will continue to be the most stable and promising sub-region politically and
economically.” This seems to suggest that there will be many more cases of “humanitarian intervention,” likely under the auspices of a
Western dominated international organization, such as the UN. There
populous African countries, and that, “the region will
will also be a democratic “backslide” in the most
be vulnerable to civil conflict and complex forms of interstate
conflict—with militaries fragmented along ethnic or other divides, limited control of border areas, and insurgents and criminal groups
preying on unarmed civilians in neighboring countries. Central Africa contains the most troubling of these cases, including Congo-Kinshasa,
Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, and Chad.”[6]
Authoritarian control as a principle for power necessitates Sustained Neolberal
violence and Violation of civil liberties - the incalculable violence produced by the
NSA must be rejected
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
Of course it's
true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my
knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that
someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they
choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary
power. It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use
it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary
power.14 The dangers of the surveillance state far exceed the attack on privacy or warrant simply a
discussion about balancing security against civil liberties. The latter argument fails to address how the
growth of the surveillance state is connected to the rise of the punishing state, the militarization of
American society, secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, a growing culture of violence, the
criminalization of social problems, the depoliticization of public memory, and one of the largest prison
systems in the world, all of which "are only the most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse
security regime in which we are all interned and enlisted."15 The authoritarian nature of the
corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system with its "urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and
save every communication of any sort on the planet"16 can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are
connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of
public schools, the rise in super-max prisons, the hyper-militarization of local police forces, the rise of
the military-industrial-academic complex, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism
in the United States.17 The reach of the surveillance culture can also be seen in the use of radio chips and GPS technologies used to
track a person's movements across time and space. The point of no return in the emergence of the corporate-state
surveillance apparatus is not strictly confined to the task of archiving immense pools of data collection
to be used in a number of illegal ways.18 It is in creating a culture in which surveillance becomes
trivialized, celebrated, and legitimated as reasonable and unquestioned behavior. Evidence that
diverse forms of public pedagogy are sanctioning the security state is on full display in post-Orwellian America,
obvious in schools that demand that students wear radio chips so they can be tracked.19 Such anti-democratic
projects are now also funded by billionaires like Bill Gates who push for the use of biometric bracelets to monitor students' attentiveness in
classrooms.20 The normalization of surveillance is also evident in the actions of giant Internet providers who use social messaging to pry
personal information from their users. The reach of the surveillance culture can also be seen in the use of radio chips and GPS technologies
used to track a person's movements across time and space. At the same time, cultures of surveillance work hard to trivialize the importance of
a massive surveillance environment by transforming it into a source of entertainment. This is evident in the popularity of realty TV shows such
as "Big Brother" or "Undercover Boss," which turn the event of constant surveillance into a voyeuristic pleasure.21 The atrophy of democratic
intuitions of culture and governance are evident in popular representations that undermine the meaning of democracy as a collective ethos
that unconditionally stands for social, economic, and political rights.22 One example can be found in Hollywood films that glorify hackers such
as those in the Matrix trilogy, or movies that celebrate professionalized modern spying and the government agents using their omniscient
technological gizmos to fight terrorists and other forces of evil. What
is lost in the culture of surveillance is that spying
and the unwarranted collection of personal information from people who have not broken the law in
the name of national security and for commercial purposes is a procedure often adopted by
totalitarian states. The new modernity and its expanding surveillance net subordinates human needs,
public goods, and justice to the demands of commerce and the accumulation of capital, at all costs.
The surveillance state with its immense data mining capabilities represents a historical rupture from
traditional notions of modernity with its emphasis on enlightenment, reason, and the social contract.
The older modernity held up the ideals of justice, equality, freedom, and democracy, however flawed. The investment in public goods was seen
as central to a social contract that implied that all citizens should have access to those provisions, resources, institutions, and benefits that
expanded their sense of agency and social responsibility. The
new modernity and its expanding surveillance net
subordinates human needs, public goods, and justice to the demands of commerce and the
accumulation of capital, at all costs. The contemporary citizen is primarily a consumer and entrepreneur
wedded to the belief that the most desirable features of human behavior are rooted in a "basic
tendency towards competitive, acquisitive and uniquely self-interested behavior which is the central fact
of human social life."23 Modernity is now driven by the imperatives of a savage neoliberal political and
economic system that embrace what Charles Derber and June Sekera call a "public goods deficit" in which
"budgetary priorities" are relentlessly pushed so as to hollow out the welfare state and drastically reduce
social provisions as part of a larger neoliberal counter revolution to lower the taxes of the rich and
mega-corporations while selling off public good to private interests.24
The Second Impact is Biopolitics
Section 702 has created a digital panopticon of disciplinary control whereby digital
bodies are securitized by the NSA
O’Neill 14 (Timi O'Neill “Foucault predicts NSA’s Cyber Panopticon” professor at
University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Faculty Member Research Interests:Critical
Theory, Samuel Beckett, Practice-Based Research,published in 2014
http://www.academia.edu/9290473/Michel_Foucault_predicts_the_NSAs_cyber_Panop
ticon - BRW)
The first thing we should highlight in our attempt to see the actions of the NSA through the eyes of Foucault should be look at the work of
Jeremy Bentham and his Panopticon prison. This will help us later transfigure this physical prison into something much more ethereal and
cyber; i.e. the Internet. The
utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) created plans to develop a circular prison
that would act as a fairer and more just way of incarcerating prisoners. He was also at the forefront of creating a
system whereby punishment would lead to individuals within society actively altering their behaviour in order to avoid punishment and
imprisonment. In this thought, he developed plans for his Panopticon prison (Fig.1 below). Although he tried to have prisons such
as these built in both Great Britain and Russian, none were erected in the UK. These prisons were designed to maximise surveillance of
prisoners and would led, he argued to “…make prison control safer, more effective, more humane, and efficient by increasing discipline while
reducing staff resources required to maintain it. Prisoners in the panopticon would work rather than sitting idle, and, in the process, would not
only learn the benefits of discipline but also make a profit for the prison itself.” How does this help us understand the current issue of the NSA,
PRISM and the Internet? This requires us to look at the architecture of the Internet. Now granted, the
internet does not have a
centre as envisioned in Bentham’s prison, but it does have ISPs and companies who monitor (albeit they
say loosely) internet traffic and management of metadata. What we saw with the actions of the NSA could be seen as
the prison guards making us aware of the power of surveillance and their ability to watch and direct
our behaviour; i.e. our patterns and content of our internet searches and telephone calls. Unlike, Bentham’s aims however,
the effects of such surveillance do little to promote a fairer society; instead it breeds distrust, paranoia
and panic. This could be seen as far as the Kremlin where President Putin has issued warnings of the power and function of the Internet,
“However Moscow has recently changed its tune, with Mr Putin branding the internet an ongoing "CIA project".” 30 This is mirrored in the
writings of Foucault where he argued that the Panopticon, or in our case the internet was used as a way to change people’s behaviour, ‘the
major effect of the Panopticon [is to] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”. 31 This makes us see how through observation, the body
and mind of the individual is constantly under interrogation. We need only see how users of facebook curtail their
behaviour and body image through the eyes of others. This impacts on the bio-political aspects of surveillance, but also
and perhaps more importantly it impacts on the way we use the Internet to seek questions to issues that perhaps runs the risk of
establishing the dominant vision of society. This link to power is at the heart of the relevancy of Foucault and the actions of the NSA In this way,
we could argue that the NSA
wanted to be seen as being ‘caught out’ so that the panic of observation or surveillance would produce
a radical movement towards ‘self-regulating’ and ‘docile bodies’ – a situation that would in many
ways suit the needs and demands of an elite and their exercise in control, “When one undertakes to correct a
prisoner, someone who has been sentenced, one tries to correct the person according to the risk of relapse, of recidivism, that is to say
according to what will very soon be called dangerousness – that is to say, again, a mechanism of security.” 33 In
this way, we could
see that Foucault warns us to see the controversy as one where that the historically determined subject/self is the real
victim in the cyber attacks. By attempting to mould individuals through surveillance and self-regulation, it is
possible that we are in the middle of a needed ‘reset’ of individuals in a new age. This is supported, perhaps in the following ‘un-sourced’
quotation from a George Bush jnr political aide; In a previous quotation, the use of the word ‘security’ is one overplayed by western politicians.
Whether it be the chemical weapons of Assad or the actions of ISIS, the national security card is played regularly. In this sense, Foucault’s idea
of surveillance help us see the NSA as prison guards watching over a yet undisciplined populace. This is indeed a scary thought and one that
should be seen within the dynamics of a battle for the control of power within society.
The West prides itself on freedoms and
ideas of enlightened thinking, but also politicians know that with such freedoms comes a potential
crisis in control, legitimacy and in many ways, sovereignty; “ Sovereignty is exercised within the
borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a
whole population.” 35 Security here is quite easily be replaced by the adjective ‘power’. When power is exercised over the population,
we find ourselves in a position of seeing the state in many ways as a hidden fascist elite, hell-bent on
controlling the mind, bodies and actions of an enslaved prison populace. Alternative visions of Foucault. Although
his work is highly commendable in this field, it feels at times that his original aversion to Marxist ideas also took him away from key concepts of
class and ideology. He is correct in claiming that Power can be more subtlety employed than many Marxists have argued, but the use of power
from the dominant classes perhaps needed to be more fully laid out by him. Perhaps this is why Foucault in some ways mellowed toward the
Marxism of Louis Althusser. In Althusser, we see Marxist ideas embrace elements of post-structuralism, especially the idea of Jacques Lacan.
For Althusser, the
current NSA debate would need to be framed within the discussion of ideology and its
vehicles of travel, ISAs and RSAs respectively. According to Althusser, ideology ‘has the function (which defines it) of
‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects, ideology being nothing but its functioning in the material
forms of existence of that functioning. 37 What does it mean here to talk of concrete individuals? One reading could be that by
demonstrating the power that the US government has over telecommunications it would create an individual too scared to act and crippled by
fear of ‘big brother So even though your decision to stop looking at that Russia Today pod cast, or Asian Times online article by Pepi Escobar is
of course your choice, ‘freely chosen’, in
reality your choice was ready made by the actions of the dominant class.
The ISAs of the media pump out endless stories about terror and patriotism and makes many people
believe that they are meddling in things that perhaps they should not. Of course add to that the actions of the NSA
and the hounding of both Julian Assange and Ed Snowden and we have a perfect situation where power is maintained with minimal force.
This is best seen perhaps in the debate around terrorism, both home and foreign strands. The NSAs
actions, supported by the government help make the terror issue a live one again and as such is used
to produce tighter controls on freedom. The academic Terry Eagleton points this out when he writes that … Another areas
where perhaps Foucault is less applicable is when we ask the question of how power can be equally employed by a society barely held together
and power wielded by dominant elites? In this sense, could it be argued that his post-structuralist leanings perhaps make political resistance
less viable as he fails to understand the need for collective action? If so, his relevancy to the current question is found more in its analysis, and
less in how to confront and defeat it.
The Securitization of the Digital Body produces a culture of self-incarceration and
social Sorting -- this catalyzes the biopolitical violence of the status quo and should be
rejected
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others.
This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching
corporations, which use it for commercial purposes. Now government is reaching its hand into those
corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.8 Every
human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube, Facebook or some other social network. Social cynicism and societal
indifference accelerate a broken culture in which reason has been replaced by consumer-fed
hallucinatory hopes.9 Surveillance and its accompanying culture of fear now produce subjects that
revel in being watched, turning the practice if not the threat posed by surveillance into just another
condition for performing the self. Every human act and behavior is now potential fodder for YouTube,
Facebook or some other social network. Privacy has become a curse, an impediment that subverts the
endless public display of the self. Zygmunt Bauman echoes this sentiment in arguing that: These days, it is not so much the
possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of privacy turns
into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or
her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to wring out and tear away the secrets from behind
the ramparts of privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody's shared property and a property everybody wishes to
share.10 Everything
that moves is monitored, along with information that is endlessly amassed and
stored by private and government agencies. No one, it seems, can escape the tentacles of the NSA or the
spy agencies that are scouring mobile phone apps for personal data and intercepting computer and
cellphone shipments to plant tracking devices and malware in them.11 Surveillance is now global,
reaching beyond borders that no longer provide an obstacle to collecting information and spying on
governments, individuals, prominent politicians, corporations and pro-democracy protest groups. The
details of our daily lives are not only on full display but are being monitored, collected and stored in databanks waiting to be used for
commercial, security or political purposes. At the same time, the right to privacy is eagerly given up by millions of people for the wonders of
social networking or the varied seductions inspired by consumer fantasies. The
loss of privacy, anonymity and
confidentiality also has had the adverse effect of providing the basis for what Bauman and David
Lyons call the undemocratic process of "social sorting," in which different populations are subject to
differential treatment extending from being protected by the state to being killed by drone attacks
launched under the auspices of global surveillance and state power.12 Privacy is no longer a principled and
cherished civil right. On the contrary, it has been absorbed and transformed within the purview of a celebrity and
market-driven culture in which people publicize themselves and their innermost secrets to promote and advance their personal brand.
Or it is often a principle invoked by conservatives who claim their rights to privacy have been trampled when confronted with ideas or
arguments that unsettle their notions of common sense or their worldviews. It is worth repeating that privacy
has mostly become
synonymous with a form of self-generated, nonstop performance - a type of public relations in which privacy makes
possible the unearthing of secrets, a cult of commodified confessionals and an infusion of narcissistic, selfreferencing narratives, all of which serve to expand the pleasure quotient of surveillance while
normalizing its expanding practices and modes of repression that Orwell could never have imagined.
Where Orwell's characters loathed the intrusion of surveillance, according to Bauman and Lyons, today We seem to experience no joy in having
secrets, unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of researchers and editors of TV talk shows,
tabloid front pages and the....covers of glossy magazines….Everything private is now done, potentially, in public - and is potentially available for
public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet 'can't be made to forget' anything once
recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone
cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people's views about what ought to be public and
what ought to be private.13 Orwell's 1984 looks subdued next to the current parameters, intrusions, technologies and disciplinary apparatuses
wielded by the new corporate-government surveillance state. Surveillance has not only become more pervasive, intruding into the most private
of spaces and activities in order to collect massive amounts of data, it also permeates and inhabits everyday activities so as to be taken-forgranted. Surveillance is not simply pervasive, it has become normalized. Orwell could not have imagined either the intrusive capabilities of the
the new high-powered digital technologies of surveillance and display, nor could he have envisioned the growing web of political, cultural and
economic partnerships between modes of government and corporate sovereignty capable of collecting almost every form of communication in
which human beings engage. What is
new in the post-Orwellian world is not just the emergence of new and
powerful technologies used by governments and corporations to spy on people and assess personal
information as a way to either attract ready-made customers or to sell information to advertising
agencies, but the emergence of a widespread culture of surveillance. Intelligence networks now
inhabit the world of Disney as well as the secret domains of the NSA and the FBI. I think the renowned intellectual
historian Quentin Skinner is right in insisting that surveillance is about more than the violation of privacy rights, however important. Under
the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy,
but the fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary power it no longer seems interested
in contesting. And it is precisely this existence of unchecked power and the wider culture of political
indifference that puts at risk the broader principles of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to
democracy itself. According to Skinner, who is worth quoting at length: The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so
far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy.
Thus the plan: The United States should pass H. R. 1466.
Contention Two: Framing
The plan repeals section 702 and effectively ends the U.S. Surveillence State
H.R. 1466 3/19 (H.R.1466 - Surveillance State Repeal Act 114th Congress (2015-2016) | Get alerts
BILLHide Overview icon-hide Sponsor: Rep. Pocan, Mark [D-WI-2] (Introduced 03/19/2015) Committees:
House - Judiciary; Intelligence (Permanent); Financial Services; Foreign Affairs; Energy and Commerce;
Education and the Workforce; Transportation and Infrastructure; Armed Services Latest Action:
04/21/2015 Referred to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations.
Tracker: This bill has the status IntroducedHere are the steps for Status of Legislation: IntroducedPassed
HousePassed SenateTo PresidentBecame Law More on This Bill Constitutional Authority Statement
Subject — Policy Area: Armed Forces and National Security View subjects Summary (1) Text (1) Actions
(14) Titles (2) Amendments (0) Cosponsors (14) Committees (8) Related Bills (0) Text: H.R.1466 — 114th
Congress (2015-2016)All Bill Information (Except Text) There is one version of the bill. Text available
as:XML/HTMLXML/HTML (new window)TXTPDF Shown Here: Introduced in House (03/19/2015) 114th
CONGRESS 1st Session H. R. 1466 https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1466/text –
BRW)
H. R. 1466 To repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and for other purposes. IN THE HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES March 19, 2015 Mr. Pocan (for himself, Mr. Massie, Mr. Grayson, Mr. McGovern, and Mr. Doggett) introduced the following
bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, and in addition to the Select Committee on Intelligence (Permanent Select),
Financial Services, Foreign Affairs, Energy and Commerce, Education and the Workforce, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Armed
Services, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the
jurisdiction of the committee concerned A BILL To repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT
TITLE. This Act may be cited as the “Surveillance State Repeal Act”. SEC. 2. REPEAL OF USA PATRIOT
ACT. (a) Repeal.—The USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107–56) is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or
repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted. (b) Destruction Of Certain Information.—
The Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General shall destroy any information collected
under the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107–56) and the amendments made by such Act, as in effect the day before
the date of the enactment of this Act, concerning a United States person that is not related to an investigation that is actively ongoing on such
date. SEC.
3. REPEAL OF THE FISA AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2008. (a) Repeal.—The FISA Amendments Act
of 2008 (Public Law 110–261; 122 Stat. 2477) is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such
Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted. (b) Exception.—Subsection (a) of this Act shall not
apply to sections 103 and 110 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (Public Law 110–261; 122 Stat. 2477). (c) Destruction Of Certain
Information.—The Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General shall destroy any
information collected under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C.
1881a), as in effect the day before the date of the enactment of this Act, concerning a United States
person that is not related to an investigation that is actively ongoing on such date. SEC. 4. TERMS OF JUDGES
ON FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE COURT; REAPPOINTMENT; SPECIAL MASTERS. (a) Terms; Reappointment.—Section 103(d) of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1803(d)) is amended— (1) by striking “maximum of seven” and inserting “maximum of
ten”; and (2) by striking “and shall not be eligible for redesignation”. (b) Special Masters.—Section 103(f) of such Act, as amended by section 3
of this Act, is further amended by adding at the end the following new paragraph: “(4)
Special Masters.— “(A) The courts
established pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) may appoint one or more Special Masters to advise the
courts on technical issues raised during proceedings before the courts. “(B) In this paragraph, the term
‘Special Master’ means an individual who has technological expertise in the subject matter of a
proceeding before a court established pursuant to subsection (a) or (b).”. SEC. 5. ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE
OF SPECIFIED PERSONS WITHOUT REGARD TO SPECIFIC DEVICE. Section 105(c)(2)(B) of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1805(c)(2)(B)) is amended to read as follows: “(B) that,
upon the request of the applicant, any person or entity shall furnish the applicant forthwith all
information, facilities, or technical assistance necessary to accomplish the electronic surveillance in such
a manner as will protect its secrecy and produce a minimum of interference with the services that such
carrier, landlord, custodian, or other person is providing that target of electronic surveillance;”. SEC. 6.
ADDITIONAL PROVISIONS FOR COLLECTIONS UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT OF 1978. (a) In General.—Title VII of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.), as amended by section 3 of this Act,
is further amended to read as follows: “TITLE VII—ADDITIONAL PROVISIONS “SEC. 701. WARRANT
REQUIREMENT. “Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, no information relating to a United
States person may be acquired pursuant to this Act without a valid warrant based on probable
cause.”. (b) Table Of Contents Amendments.—The table of contents in the first section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978
(50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.), as amended by section 3 of this Act, is further amended by striking the items relating to title VII and section 701 and
inserting the following new items: “TITLE VII—ADDITIONAL PROVISIONS”. “701. Warrant requirement.”. SEC. 7. ENCRYPTION
AND
PRIVACY TECHNOLOGY OF ELECTRONIC DEVICES AND SOFTWARE. Notwithstanding any other
provision of law, the Federal Government shall not mandate that the manufacturer of an electronic
device or software for an electronic device build into such device or software a mechanism that allows
the Federal Government to bypass the encryption or privacy technology of such device or software.
SEC. 8. GAO COMPLIANCE EVALUATIONS. (a) In General.—The Comptroller General of the United States shall annually evaluate compliance by
the Federal Government with the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.). (b) Report.—The
Comptroller General shall annually submit to Congress a report containing the results of the evaluation conducted under subsection (a). SEC. 9.
WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINTS. (a) Authorization To Report Complaints Or Information.—An employee of or contractor to an element of the
intelligence community that has knowledge of the programs and activities authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50
U.S.C. 1801 et seq.) may submit a covered complaint— (1) to the Comptroller General of the United States; (2) to the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives; (3) to the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate; or (4) in accordance with
the process established under section 103H(k)(5) of the National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. 3033(k)(5)). (b) Investigations And Reports To
Congress.—The Comptroller General shall investigate a covered complaint submitted pursuant to subsection (b)(1) and shall submit to Congress
a report containing the results of the investigation. (c) Covered Complaint Defined.—In this section, the term “covered complaint” means a
complaint or information concerning programs and activities authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et
seq.) that an employee or contractor reasonably believes is evidence of— (1) a violation of any law, rule, or regulation; or (2) gross
mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety. SEC. 10.
PROHIBITION ON INTERFERENCE WITH REPORTING OF WASTE, FRAUD, ABUSE, OR CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR. (a) In General.—Notwithstanding any
other provision of law, no officer or employee of an element of the intelligence community shall take any retaliatory action against an
employee of or contractor to an element of the intelligence community who seeks to disclose or discloses covered information to— (1) the
Comptroller General; (2) the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives; (3) the Select Committee on
Intelligence of the Senate; or (4) the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. (b) Administrative Sanctions.—An officer or
employee of an element of the intelligence community who violates subsection (a) shall be subject to administrative sanctions, up to and
including termination. (c) Definitions.—In this section: (1) COVERED INFORMATION.—The term “covered information” means any information
(including classified or sensitive information) that an employee or contractor reasonably believes is evidence of— (A) a violation of any law,
rule, or regulation; or (B) gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public
health or safety. (2) INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.—The term “intelligence community” has the meaning given the term in section 3 of the
National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. 3003). SEC. 11. PROHIBITION OF TARGETING UNITED STATES PERSONS UNDER EXECUTIVE ORDER 12333
WITHOUT A WARRANT. (a) Prohibition On Targeting Of United States Persons Without A Warrant.—Notwithstanding any other provision of
law, no United States person may be the target of an acquisition under Executive Order 12333 without a valid warrant based on probable
cause. (b) Audit Of Compliance With Prohibition.— (1) AUDIT.—The Comptroller General of the United States shall annually conduct an audit of
intelligence collection under Executive Order 12333 to ensure compliance with the requirement under subsection (a). (2) REPORT.—The
Comptroller General shall annually submit to Congress a report containing the results of each audit conducted under paragraph (1). (c)
Destruction Of Certain Information.—The Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General shall destroy any information collected
under Executive Order 12333 without a valid warrant based on probable cause concerning a United States person that is not related to an
investigation that is actively ongoing on the date of the enactment of this Act.
The Desirability of the plan should be framed through the political pedgagogy of the
1AC – if we win the culture of survallience fostered by the status quo is bad, vote aff
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
In fact, it
is more appropriate to analyze the culture of surveillance, rather than address exclusively the
violations committed by the corporate-surveillance state. In this instance, the surveillance and security
state is one that not only listens, watches and gathers massive amounts of information through data mining necessary for identifying
consumer populations but also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of surveillance technologies
and privatized commodified values into all aspects of their lives. Personal information is willingly given
over to social media and other corporate-based websites and gathered daily as people move from one targeted
web site to the next across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out, “social media users
gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons,” all the while endlessly shopping online
and texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the streets,
commercial establishments and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at the entry points of
airports, stores, sporting events and the like. Yet
the most important transgression may not only be happening
through the unwarranted watching, listening and collecting of information but also in a culture that
normalizes surveillance by upping the pleasure quotient and enticements for consumers who use the
new digital technologies and social networks to simulate false notions of community and to socialize
young people into a culture of security and commodification in which their identities, values and
desires are inextricably tied to a culture of private addictions, self-help and commodification.
Surveillance feeds on the related notions of fear and delusion. Authoritarianism in its contemporary
manifestations, as evidenced so grippingly in Orwell's text, no longer depends on the raw displays of power but instead
has become omniscient in a culture of control in which the most cherished notions of agency collapse into
unabashed narcissistic exhibitions and confessions of the self, serving as willing fodder for the spying
state. The self has become not simply the subject of surveillance but a willing participant and object. Operating off the
assumption that some individuals will not willingly turn their private lives over to the spying state and corporations, the NSA and other
intelligence agencies work hard to create a turnkey authoritarian state in which the "electronic self"
becomes public property. Every space is now enclosed within the purview of an authoritarian society
that attempts to govern the entirety of social life. As Jonathan Schell points out: Thanks to Snowden, we also know that
unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google,
Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist.
They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially
for the already powerful. Our cellphones track our whereabouts. Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept
for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and
entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state.
Voting aff is an intellectual alignment, not just words on a ballot - affirmation is the
only response to the historical trauma of the surveillance state
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
61 There is
no excuse for intellectuals or any other member of the American public to address the existence,
meaning and purpose of the surveillance-security state without placing it in the historical structure of
the times. Or what might be called a historical conjuncture in which the legacy of totalitarianism is once again reasserting itself in new
forms. Historical memory is about more than recovering the past; it is also about imputing history with a
sense of responsibility, treating it with respect rather than with reverence. Historical memory should
always be insurgent, rubbing "taken-for-granted history against the grain so as to revitalize and
rearticulate what one sees as desirable and necessary for an open, just and life sustaining" democracy
and future.62 Historical memory is a crucial battleground for challenging a corporate-surveillance state
that is motivated by the anti-democratic legal, economic and political interests. But if memory is to
function as a witness to injustice and the practice of criticism and renewal, it must embrace the
pedagogical task of connecting the historical, personal and social. It is worth repeating that C.W. Mills was right in
arguing that those without power need to connect personal troubles with public issues and that is as much an educational endeavour and
responsibility as it is a political and cultural task.63 Obama's
recent speech on reforms to the NSA serves as a text that
demands not just close reading but also becomes a model illustrating how history can be manipulated to
legitimate the worst violations of privacy and civil rights, if not state- and corporate-based forms of violence.64 For
Obama, the image of Paul Revere or the Sons of Liberty is referenced to highlight the noble ideals of
surveillance in the interest of freedom and mostly provide a historical rationale for the emergence of
the massive spying behemoths such as the NSA that now threaten the fabric of US democracy and
massive data on everyone, not just terrorists. Of course, what Obama leaves out is that Paul Revere and his accomplices acted
"to curtail government power as the main threat to freedom."65 Obama provides a sanitized reference to history in order to bleach the
surveillance state of its criminal past and convince the American public that, as Michael Ratner states, "Orwellian surveillance is somehow
patriotic."66 Obama's surveillance state does just the opposite, and the politicians such as Rep. Mike Ford and Feinstein are more than willing
to label legitimate whistle-blowers - including, most famously, Snowden, Manning and Hammond - as traitors while keeping silent when highranking government officials, particularly James Clapper Jr., the director of national security, lied before a Senate Intelligence Committee.
Obama's appeal to the American people to trust those in the highest positions of government and
corporate dominance regarding the use of the mammoth power of the surveillance state makes a
mockery out of the legitimate uses of such power, any vestige of critical thought and historical
memory. The United States has been lying to its people for more than 50 years, and such lies extend from falsifying the reasons for going to
war with Vietnam and Iraq to selling arms to Iran in order to fund the reactionary Nicaraguan Contras. Why should anyone trust a
government that has condoned torture, spied on at least 35 world leaders,67 supports indefinite
detention, places bugs in thousands of computers all over the world, kills innocent people with drone
attacks, promotes the post office to log mail for law enforcement agencies and arbitrarily authorizes
targeted assassinations?68 Or, for that matter, a president that instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get
government employees to spy on each other and "turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches,"69 which includes "any
unauthorized disclosure of anything, not just classified materials."70 The incorrigibility of the politics of surveillance was on
full display when Clapper assailed Snowden before a Senate intelligence committee hearing in late January 2014, insisting that he had done
grave damage to the country and that his leaks not only damaged national security but aided terrorists groups. Clapper provided no evidence to
support such a charge. Of course, what he did not mention was that as a result of Snowden's revelations the American public is now aware that
they are being spied upon by the government, in spite of the fact that they are not suspects in a crime and that governments around the world
have condemned the indiscriminate and illegal spying of U.S. intelligence agencies. In a rather bizarre comment, Clapper also accused Snowden
"of hypocrisy for choosing to live in Russia while making public pronouncements about 'what an Orwellian state he thinks this country is."71
Recklessly, Clapper implied that Snowden is a Russian spy and that he had available to him a wide range of choices regarding where he might
flee following his public revelations of NSA secret illegalities. By suggesting that Snowden's living in Russia somehow serves to cancel out his
critique of the authoritarian practices, polices and modes of governance, Clapper's comments reveal a lack of self-reflection at the agency and
the lies and innuendo the NSA will engage in to deflect or justify acts of criminality that are now a matter of public record. More chillingly, the
NSA's scapegoating mechanisms come into full view when Clapper insinuated that "Snowden is conspiring with journalists, rather then acting as
their source."72 This is a serious accusation designed to ratchet up a climate of fear by suggesting that reporters such as Greenwald and others
working with Snowden were participants in a crime and thus subject to criminal reprisals. In the
end, such arguments, coupled
with the blatant Washington cover-up of the scope and reach of the Orwellian/Panoptic complex,
testify to the degree to which the government will resort to fear mongering to silence dissent. Under
the rubric of battling terrorism, the US government has waged a war on civil liberties, privacy and
democracy while turning a blind eye to the ways in which the police and intelligence agencies
infiltrate and harass groups engaged in peaceful protests, particularly treating those groups
denouncing banking and corporate institutions as criminal activities.73 They also have done nothing to
restrict those corporate interests that turn a profit by selling arms, promoting war and investing
surveillance apparatuses addicted to the mad violence of the war industries. Unfortunately, such legal
illegalities and death-oriented policies are not an Orwellian fiction but an advancement of the world
Orwell prematurely described regarding surveillance and its integration with totalitarian regimes. The
existence of the post-Orwellian state, where subjects participate willingly and surveillance connects to global state and
corporate sovereignty, should muster collective outrage among the American public and generate massive
individual resistance and collective struggles aimed at the development of social movements designed to take back
democracy from the corporate-political-military extremists that now control all the commanding institutions of American society. Putting
trust in a government that makes a mockery of civil liberties is comparable to throwing away the most
basic principles of our constitutional and democratic order. As Johnathan Schell argues: Government officials, it
is true, assure us that they will never pull the edges of the net tight. They tell us that although they could know
everything about us, they won't decide to. They'll let the information sit unexamined in the electronic vaults. But history, whether of our
country or others, teaches that only a fool would place faith in such assurances. What one president refrains from doing the next will do; what
is left undone in peacetime is done when a crisis comes.74 History
offers alternative narratives to those supported by
the new authoritarians. Dangerous counter-memories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly at times
and, in doing so, can challenge to the normalization of various forms of tyranny, including the
mechanisms of a surveillance state defined by a history of illegal and criminal behavior. As the mainstream
press recently noted, the dark shadow of Orwell's dystopian fable was so frightening in the early 1970s that a group of young people broke into
an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole as many records as possible, and leaked them to the press. None of the group was ever caught.75
Their actions were not only deeply rooted in an era when dissent against the Vietnam war, racism and corporate corruption was running high
but also was suggestive of an era in which the politics of fear was not a general condition of society and large groups of people were mobilizing
in numerous sites to make power accountable on a number of fronts, extending from college campuses to the shaping of foreign policy. The
1971 burglary made clear that the FBI was engaging in illegal and criminal acts aimed primarily against anti-war dissenters and the AfricanAmerican community, which was giving voice in some cities to the Black Power movement. What the American people learned as a result of the
leaked FBI documents was that many people were being illegally tapped, bugged, and that anti-war groups were being infiltrated. Moreover,
the leaked files revealed that the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King Jr. and a number of other prominent politicians and activists. A couple of
years later Carl Stern, an NBC reporter, followed up on the information that had been leaked and revealed a program called COINTELPRO,
which stands for Counterintelligence Program, that documented how the FBI and CIA not only were secretly harassing, disrupting, infiltrating
and neutralizing leftist organizations but also were attempting to assassinate those considered domestic and foreign enemies.76 COINTELPRO
was about more than spying, it was an illegally sanctioned machinery of violence and assassination.77 In one of the most notorious cases, the
FBI worked with the Chicago Police to set up the conditions for the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two members of the Black
Panther Party. Noam Chomsky has called COINTELPRO, which went on from the 1950s to the '70s, when it was stopped, "the worst systematic
and extended violation of basic civil rights by the federal government," and "compares with Wilson's Red Scare."78 As a result of these
revelations, Sen. Frank Church conducted Senate hearings that exposed the illegalities the FBI was engaged in and helped to put in place polices
that provided oversight to prevent such illegalities from happening again. Needless to say, over time these oversights and restrictions were
dismantled, especially after the tragic events of 9/11. What these young people were doing in 1971 is not unlike what Snowden and other
whistle-blowers are doing today by making sure that dissent is not suppressed by governments who believe that power should reside only in
the hands of government and financial elites and that all attempts to make authoritarian power accountable should be repressed at almost any
cost. Many of these young protesters were influenced by the ongoing struggles of the civil rights movement and one of them, John Raines, was
heavily influenced by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazis. What is crucial about this incident is that it not only
revealed the long historical reach of government surveillance and criminal activity designed to squash dissent, it also provides a model of civic
courage by young people who acted on their principles in a nonviolent way to stop what they considered to be machineries of civil and social
death.
What
is clear is that the corporate-security state provides an honorable place for intellectuals who are
willing to live in a culture of conformity. In this case as Arthur Koestler said some years ago, conformity becomes "a
form of betrayal which can be carried out with a clear conscience."83 At the same time, it imposes its
wrath on those who reject subordinating their consciences to the dictates of authoritarian rule. If the
first task of resistance is to make dominant power clear by addressing critically and meaningfully the
abuses perpetrated by the corporate surveillance state and how such transgressions affect the daily lives of people in
different ways, the second step is to move from understanding and critique to the hard work of building
popular movements that integrate rather than get stuck and fixated in single-issue politics. The left
has been fragmented for too long, and the time has come to build national and international movements
capable of dismantling the political, economic and cultural architecture put in place by the new
authoritarianism and its post-Orwellian surveillance industries. This is not a call to reject identity and
special-issue politics as much as it is a call to build broad-based alliances and movements, especially
among workers, labor unions, educators, youth groups, artists, intellectuals, students, the
unemployed and others relegated, marginalized and harassed by the political and financial elite. At best,
such groups should form a vigorous and broad-based third party for the defense of public goods and the establishment of a radical democracy.
This is not a call for a party based on traditional hierarchical structures but a party consisting of a set of alliances among different groups that
would democratically decide its tactics and strategies. Modern history is replete with such struggles, and the arch of that history has to be
carried forward before it is too late. In a time of tyranny, thoughtful and organized resistance is not a choice; it is a necessity.
In the
struggle to dismantle the authoritarian state, reform is only partially acceptable. Surely, as Fred Branfman
argues, rolling back the surveillance state can take the form of fighting: to end bulk collection of
information; demand Congressional oversight; indict executive-branch officials when they commit
perjury; give Congress the capacity to genuinely oversee executive agency; provide strong whistleblower protection; and restructure the present system of classification.84 These are important
reforms worth fighting for, but they do not go far enough. What is needed is a radical restructuring of
our understanding of democracy and what it means to bring it into being. The words of Zygmunt Bauman are
useful in understanding what is at stake in such a struggle. He writes: "Democracy expresses itself in continuous and
relentless critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside the political
system; essential, as a force of dissent and change. One can best recognize a democratic society by its constant
complaints that it is not democratic enough."85 What cannot be emphasized enough is that only through collective struggles
can change take place against modern-day authoritarianism. If the first order of authoritarianism is unchecked secrecy,
the first moment of resistance to such an order is widespread critical awareness of state and
corporate power and its threat to democracy, coupled with a desire for radical change rather than
reformist corrections. Democracy involves a sharing of political existence, an embrace of the
commons and the demand for a future that cannot arrive quickly enough. In short, politics needs a
jump start, because democracy is much too important to be left to the whims, secrecy and power of
those who have turned the principles of self-government against themselves.
The
Evans and Giroux
Evans and Giroux 15 ( Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the School of
Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, UK. Henry A. Giroux currently
holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for
Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning.Evans and Giroux Disposable Futures": Critique of
Violence Wednesday, 06 May 2015 00:00 By Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, City Lights Books | Book
Excerpt http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30589-disposable-futures-critique-of-violence
- BRW)
At the same time, under
the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power, violence appears so arbitrary and
thoughtless that it lacks the need for any justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability. It is truly as limitless as it
appears banal. All that matters instead is to re-create the very conditions to further and deepen the crises of neoliberal rule. Violence,
with its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no longer merely a side effect of police
brutality, war, or criminal behavior; it has become fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage
facet of capitalism. And in doing so it has turned out to be central to legitimating those social relations in which the political and
pedagogical are redefined in order to undercut possibilities for authentic democracy. Under such circumstances, the social becomes retrograde,
emptied of any democratic values, and organized around a culture of shared anxieties rather than shared responsibilities. The contemporary
world, then - the world of neoliberalism - creates the most monstrous of illusions, one that functions by hiding things in plain sight. We see this
most troublingly played out as its simulated spectacles of destruction are scripted in such a way as to support the narrative that violence itself is
enjoying a veritable decline as a result of liberal influence and pacification. Howard Zinn understood this perversion better than most: I start
from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of
jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in
such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don't have
to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down.[1]
There is no greater task today than to develop a critique of violence adequate to our deeply unjust, inequitable, and violent times. Only then
might we grasp the magnitude and depths of suffering endured on a daily basis by many of the world's citizens. Only then might we move
beyond the conceit of a neoliberal project, which has normalized violence such that its worst manifestations become part of our cultural
"pastimes." And only then might we reignite a radical imagination that is capable of diagnosing the violence of the present in such a manner
that we have the confidence to rethink the meaning of global citizenship in the twenty-first century. Following on from the enduring legacy and
inspiration of Zinn and other cautionary voices of political concern such as Paulo Freire, our critique begins from the supposition that mass
violence today must be understood by comprehending the ways in which systemic cruelty is
transformed into questions of individual pathology. What is more, with the burden of guilt placed on the
shoulders of the already condemned, those whose lives are rendered disposable, we must question
more rigorously the imaginaries of violence, which instigate a forced partaking in a system that
encourages the subjugated to embrace their oppression as though it were their liberation. Nowhere is
this more apparent today than in the doctrine of "resilience" which, as critiqued elsewhere, forces us to accept our
vulnerabilities without providing us with the tools for genuine transformation of those systematic processes that render us insecure in the first
place.[2] Neoliberalism's culture
of violence is reinforced by what Zsuza Ferge calls the "individualization of
the social,"[3] in which all traces of the broader structural forces producing a range of social problems
such as widening inequality and mass poverty disappear. Under the regime of neoliberalism, individual responsibility
becomes the only politics that matters and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are
not of their own making, neoliberalism's discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak
character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This
makes it easier for its advocates to argue that "poverty is a
deserved condition."[4] Systematic violence has never been "exceptional" in the history of capitalistic
development. How might we explain David Harvey's apt description of capitalist expansion as "accumulation by dispossession,"[5] if the
rise of capitalism did not signal the advent of a truly predatory social formation? Indeed, even the
contemporary advocates of neoliberal markets recognize that their notion of a "just world" depends on
coercion and violence as a way to enforce capitalism's uneven distribution of wealth and
impoverishment. As the Oxford economic historian Avner Offer explained to Chris Hedges, "those who
suffer deserve to suffer."[6] The neoliberal model is, after all, "a warrant for inflicting pain."[7] The
regime of neoliberalism is precisely organized for the production of violence. Such violence is more
than symbolic. Instead of waging a war on poverty it wages a war on the poor - and does so removed
from any concern for social costs or ethical violations. Such a brutal diagnosis argues in favor of a
neoliberal model despite its perverse outcomes: "It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society
that elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the
very largest penal systems in the world relative to its population. It also inflicts violence all over the
world. It tolerates a great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large numbers of
people."[8] Its effects in the United States are evident in the incarceration of more than 2.3 million
people, mostly people of color. Not only are 77 percent of all inmates people of color, but, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, as of 2012
"more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year
the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis
of race."[9] The necropolitics of neoliberal policies is evident in the unnecessary deaths of up to 17,000
more Americans each year because partisan ideologues opted out of the expansion of the Medicare
program offered by the Obama administration.[10] Across the globe, violence creeps into almost all of the commanding institutions of
public life, extending from public schools to health care apparatuses. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano knew the impacts of neoliberalism's
theater of cruelty better than most: "Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by
nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap
metal and food into poison."[11] Zygmunt Bauman has taken this further by showing us how the most appalling acts of mass slaughter have
been perfectly in keeping with the modern compulsion to destroy lives for more progressive times to come.[12] Acts of non-violence, in fact,
are the exceptional moments of our more recent history. They also confirm Hannah Arendt's insistence that power and violence are
qualitatively different.[13] There is no doubt something truly powerful, truly exceptional, to the examples set by Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa
Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, and indigenous movements such as the Zapatistas of Mexico, whose choice of non-violence as an insurgent strategy
reveals more fully the violence of oppressive contemporary regimes. Violence easily deals with violence on its own terms. Carlos Marighella was
wrong to suggest otherwise.[14] What
violence, however, cannot deal with, except by issuing more violence,
remains the power of a dignified response and movements of collective resistance by those who
refuse to get caught up in a cycle of cruelty that corrupts every good intention. Frantz Fanon was most
clear in this respect.[15] Who are the "wretched," after all, if not those who fail to see that their
recourse to violence only produces a mirror image of that which was once deemed intolerable? Our
history - the history of our present - is a history of violence. Beneath the surface of every semblance of peace, it is possible to
identify all too easily the scars of sacrifice and the bloodshed of victims whose only error was often to be born in a cruel age. There are many
ways in which we could try to make sense of this burden of sacrificial history. Why do so many continue to die for the sake of the living? Why
do we continue to protect inhuman conditions through the endless wars fought in the name of humanity? Why is killing so often presented as
necessary? How is it that the police in the United States can kill blacks at a rate twenty-one times higher than whites and not only act with
impunity but respond to protests by the larger public almost exclusively with massive militarized responses, as if the use of violence is the only
legitimate form of mediation to any problem that emerges in the larger society? While all these questions are important, it is precisely the
spectacle that most perturbs us here. For it is through the spectacle of violence that we begin to uncover the abilities to strip life of any
political, ethical, and human claim. Violence seeks to
curate who and what is human even though the physical
body might still be in existence. When violence becomes normalized and decentered, the disposability
of entire populations becomes integral to the functioning, the profiteering, and the entrenchment of the
prevailing rationalities of the dominant culture. Such violence, in other words, offers the most potent
diagnosis of any political project by revealing what is deemed culturally acceptable and socially
normalized. There is an important point to stress here regarding the logics of brutality. Violence is easily
condemned when it appears exceptional. This also unfortunately precludes more searching and
uncomfortable questions. Normalized violence, by contrast, represents a more formidable challenge,
requiring a more sophisticated and learned response. Exposing more fully how these normalized
cultures of cruelty shape the historic moment is the main purpose of this work, as it is integral to the
critical imagination and those forms of political agency necessary for successfully living in a nonviolent
and civilian future. Our motivation for writing this book is driven by a commitment to the value of
critical pedagogy in countering mechanisms of dehumanization and domination at play in neoliberal
societies and beyond. We have no time whatsoever for those who reason that violence may be studied
in an "objective" or "rational" way. There are no neutral pedagogies indifferent to matters of politics,
power, and ideology. Pedagogy is, in part, always about both struggle and vision—struggles over
identities, modes of agency, values, desires, and visions of the possible. Not only does the apologetics of
neutrality lead to the most remiss intellectualism when the personal experience of violence is reduced
to emotionless inquiry, but it also announces complicity in the rationalizations of violence that depend
upon the degradation of those qualities that constitute what is essential to the human condition. Thus,
education is by definition a form of political intervention. It is always disentangling itself from particular
regimes of power that attempt to authenticate and disqualify certain ways of perceiving and thinking
about the world. The larger issue is that not only only is education central to politics, but the educative
nature of politics begins with the assumption that how people think, critically engage the world, and are
self-reflective about the shaping of their own experiences and relations to others marks the beginning of
a viable and oppositional politics.
\AT pinker
Evans and Giroux 15 ( Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the School of
Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, UK. Henry A. Giroux currently
holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for
Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning.Evans and Giroux Disposable Futures": Critique of
Violence Wednesday, 06 May 2015 00:00 By Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, City Lights Books | Book
Excerpt http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30589-disposable-futures-critique-of-violence
- BRW)
Hence, while authors
like Steven Pinker cloud our perception by claiming the current era is the least violent
era in human history, relying upon crude per capita human death rates etc.,[20] it takes only a slightly different angle of
vision to see the current social order's full range of preventable violence: impoverishment, financial
predation, malnutrition, mass incarceration, and rapidly accelerating deforestation, ecological
degradation, and irreversible biocide. Pinker would do well to acknowledge that political violence is
poorly understood if it simply refers to a failure of liberal modernity. Political violence cannot be
reduced to such a crude and reductionist metric. Indeed, conventional demarcations between times of war and times of peace, zones
of security and zones of crises, friends and enemies, have long since evaporated. We live in complex and radically interconnected
societies, whose social morphology has radically altered our sense of the world such that we are
taught to accept insecurity as the natural order of things.[21] This is fully in keeping with the
proliferation of media output, factual and fictional, that bombards us continuously with images of
violence and catastrophe for subtle political gain. Indeed, what is new about the current historical
conjuncture is not only a commodified popular culture that trades in extreme violence, greed, and
narcissism as a source of entertainment, but the emergence of a predatory society in which the
suffering and death of others becomes a reason to rejoice rather than mourn. Extreme violence has
become not only a commodified spectacle, but one of the few popular resources available through
which people can bump up their pleasure quotient. Our critique begins from the realization that
violence has become ubiquitous, "settling like some all-enveloping excremental mist ... that has permeated every nook of any institution or
being that has real influence on the way we live now."[22] We cannot escape its spectre. Its presence is everywhere. It is
hardwired into the fabric of our digital DNA. Capitalism in fact has always thrived on its consumption.
There is, after all, no profit in peace. We are not calling here for the censoring of all representations of
violence as if we could retreat into some sheltered protectorate. That would be foolish and intellectually dangerous. Our
claim is both that the violence we are exposed to is heavily mediated, and that as such we are witness to various spectacles that serve a distinct political function,
especially as they either work to demonize political resistance or simply extract from its occurrence (fictional and actual) any sense of political context and critical
insight. Moving beyond the spectacle by making visible the reality of violence in all of its modes is both necessary and politically important. What we need then is an
ethical approach to the problem of violence such that its occurrence is intolerable to witness.
2AC
2AC: Sat K - Violence
Legitimating violence as “collateral damage” in an attempt to forstall unknown future
consiquences reifies an understanding of politics that is complacent with the impacts
they claim to prevent
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
As Greenwald argues, COINTELPRO
makes clear that governments have no qualms about "targeting citizens
for their disfavored political views and trying to turn them into criminals through infiltration,
entrapment and the like" and that such actions are "alive and well today in the United States."79
Governments that elevate lawlessness to one of the highest principles of social order reproduce and
legitimate violence as an acceptable mode of action throughout a society. Violence in American society has
become its heartbeat and nervous system, paralyzing ideology, policy and governance, if not the very
idea of politics. Under such circumstances, the corporate and surveillance state become symptomatic of a form
of tyranny and authoritarianism that has corrupted and disavowed the ideals and reality of a
substantive democracy. "Violence in American society has become both its heartbeat and nervous
system, paralyzing ideology, policy, and governance, if not the very idea of politics." Dissent is crucial
to any viable notion of democracy and provides a powerful counterforce to the dystopian imagination
that has descended like a plague on American society; but dissent is not enough. In a time of surging
authoritarianism, it is crucial for everyone to find the courage to translate critique into the building of
popular movements dedicated to making education central to any viable notion of politics. This is a
politics that does the difficult work of assembling critical formative cultures by developing alternative
media, educational organizations, cultural apparatuses, infrastructures and new sites through which to
address the range of injustices plaguing the United States and the forces that reproduce them. The rise of
cultures of surveillance along with the defunding of public and higher education, the attack on the welfare state and the militarization of
everyday life can be addressed in ways that not only allow people to see how such issues are interrelated to casino capitalism and the racialsecurity state but also what it might mean to make such issues meaningful to make them critical and transformative. As Charlie Derber has
written, "How to express possibilities and convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially important" if any viable notion of
resistance is to take place.80 Nothing will change unless the left and progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in
the United States. Nothing will change unless the left and progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United
States. The power of the imagination, dissent, and the willingness to hold power accountable constitute a major threat to authoritarian
regimes. Snowden's disclosures made clear that the authoritarian state is deeply fearful of those intellectuals, critics, journalists and others who
dare to question authority, expose the crimes of corrupt politicians and question the carcinogenic nature of a corporate state that has hijacked
democracy: This is most evident in the insults and patriotic gore heaped on Manning and Snowden. How else to explain, in light of Snowden's
initial disclosures about the NSA, the concern on the part of government and intelligence agencies that his "disclosures have renewed a
longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyber defense sometimes bring
an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy."81 Joel F. Brenner, a former inspector general of the NSA made it very clear
that the real challenge Snowden revealed was to make sure that a generation of young people were not taught to think critically or question
authority. As Brenner put it, young people who were brought into the national security apparatus were not only selling their brains but also
their consciences. In other words, they have to "adjust to the culture" by endorsing a regime of one that just happened to be engaging in a
range of illegalities that threatened the foundations of democracy.82
2AC: Impact – Structural Violence
The surviellence state has a disperate impact on raced, poor, and minority individuals
– this should be rejected at all costs
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
America is not simply in harm's way, it stands at the end of precipice about to fall into what Hannah Arendt
once called "dark times." As memory recedes so does political consciousness, particularly the danger that
the surveillance state has posed to poor and working-class Americans who have been monitored for
years and as Virginia Eubanks points out "already live in the surveillance future."59 She writes: The practice of
surveillance is both separate and unequal. ... Welfare recipients ... are more vulnerable to surveillance
because they are members of a group that is seen as an appropriate target for intrusive programs.
Persistent stereotypes of poor women, especially women of color, as inherently suspicious,
fraudulent, and wasteful provide ideological support for invasive welfare programs that track their
financial and social behavior. Immigrant communities are more likely to be the site of biometric data
collection than native-born communities because they have less political power to resist it. ...
Marginalized people are subject to some of the most technologically sophisticated and comprehensive
forms of scrutiny and observation in law enforcement, the welfare system, and the low-wage
workplace. They also endure higher levels of direct forms of surveillance, such as stop-and-frisk in New York
City.60 The corporate-surveillance state collects troves of data, but the groups often targeted by
traditional and new forms of digital surveillance are more often than not those who fall within the
parameters of either being a threat to authority, reject the consumer culture or are simply considered
disposable under the regime of neoliberal capitalism. The political, class and racial nature of
suppression has a long history in the United States and cannot be ignored by whitewashing the issue of
surveillance as a form of state violence by making an appeal to the necessity of safety and security.
Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of
government.
2AC: Impact – Thought Colonization
The colonization of thought by neoliberal security apparatuses make all neg impacts
non-unique
Grahm 11 (Cities under siege: The New Military Urbanism – Stephan Grahm STEPHEN GRAHAM is
Professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University and previously taught at Durham and MIT, among
other universities. http://keats.kcl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/812227/mod_resource/content/1/Graham%20%20Cities_Under_Siege.pdf First published by Verso 2010 This paperback edition first published by
Verso 2011 ©Stephen Graham 2011 – BRW)
Turning to our third key starting point - the new military urbanism's political economy - it is important to stress that the
colonization of
and practice by militarized ideas of 'security' does not have a single source. In fact, it emanates
from a complex range of sources. These encompass sprawling, transnational industrial complexes that stretch
beyond the military and security sectors to span the technology, surveillance and entertainment industries; a wide
range of consultants, research labs and corporate universities who sell security solutions as silver
bullets to solve complex social problems; and a complex mass of security and military thinkers who now
argue that war and political violence centre overwhelmingly on the everyday spaces and circuits of
urban life. Though vague and all-encompassing, ideas about security infect virtually all aspects of public
policy and social life,'9 so these emerging industrial-security complexes work together on the highly lucrative
challenges of perpetually targeting everyday activities, spaces and behaviours in cities , as well as the conduits that
link conurbations. Amid global economic collapse, markets for security services and technologies are
booming like never before. Crucially, as the Raytheon example again demonstrates, the same constellations of security companies
urban thinking
are often involved in selling, establishing and overseeing the techniques and practices of the new military urbanism in both war-zone and
homeland cities. Often, as with the EU's new Europe-wide security policies, states or supranational blocks are not necessarily bringing in hightech and militarized means of tracking illegal immigrants because they are the best means to address their security concerns. Rather, many
such policies are intended to help build local industrial champions by developing their own defence, security or technology companies so they
can compete in booming global markets for security technology. In this lucrative export market, the Israeli experience of locking down cities
and turning the Occupied Territories into permanent, urban prison camps is proving especially influential. It is the ultimate source of 'combatproven' techniques and technology. The new high-tech border fence between the United States and Mexico, for example, is being built by a
consortium linking 19 See Giorgio Agamben, 'Security and Terror; Theory and Event, 5 : 4, 2002, 1-2. INTRODUCTION: ' TARGET INTERCEPT .. :
XXIII Boeing to the Israeli company Elbit, whose radar and targeting technologies have been developed in the permanent lockdown of
Palestinian urban life. It is also startling how much US counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq have explicitly been based on efforts to emulate the
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians during the Second Intifada. The political economies sustaining the new military urbanism inevitably focus
on the role of an elite group of so-called 'global' cities as the centres of neoliberal capitalism as well as the main arenas and markets for rolling
out the new security solutions. The world's major financial centres, in particular, orchestrate global processes of militarization and
securitization. They house the headquarters of global security, technology and military corporations, provide the locations for the world's
biggest corporate universities - which dominate research and development in new security technologies - and support the global network of
financial institutions which so often work to erase or appropriate cities and resources in colonized lands in the name of neoliberal economics
and 'free trade: The network of global cities through which neoliberal capitalism is primarily orchestrated - London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt,
and so on - thus helps to produce new logics of aggressive colonial acquisition and dispossession by multinational capital, which works closely
with state militaries and private military contractors. With
the easing of state monopolies on violence and the
proliferation of acquisitive private military and mercenary corporations, the brutal 'urbicidal' violence
and dispossession that so often helps bolster the parasitic aspects of Western city economies, as well
as feeding contemporary corporate capitalism, is more apparent than ever.10 In a world increasingly haunted
by the spectre of imminent resource exhaustion, the new military urbanism is thus linked intimately
with the neocolonial exploitation of distant resources in an effort sustain the richer cities and wealthy
urban lifestyles. New York and London provide the financial and corporate power through which Iraqi oil reserves have been
appropriated by Western oil companies since the 2003 invasion. Neocolonial land-grabs to grow biofuels for cars or food for increasingly
precarious urban populations of the rich North are also organized through global commodity markets centred on the world's big financial cities.
Finally,
the rapid global growth in markets for high-tech security is itself providing a major boost to
these cities in a time of global economic meltdown
2AC: Impact – Democracy
Extinction
Diamond, 95 (Larry, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, “1. Why Promote Democracy?” wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm )
OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former
Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through
increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly
corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons continue to
proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly
endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or
aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular
sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons.
Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one
another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic
governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic
insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of
mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and
enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are
more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who
organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties
since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely
because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies
the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and
prosperity can be built.
are
2AC: Solvency - Giroux
The NSA is the key internal link to the US surveillance state and the aff provides a
sufficient curtail of its powers to solve
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
As the line collapses between authoritarian power and democratic governance, state and corporate
repression intensifies and increasingly engulfs the nation in a toxic climate of fear and self-censorship
in which free speech, if not critical thought, itself is viewed as too dangerous in which to engage. The
NSA, alone, has become what Scott Shane has called an "electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities,
eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their
secrets, all while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends
as well as foes."47 Intelligence benefits are far outweighed by the illegal use of the Internet,
telecommunication companies and stealth malware for data collection and government interventions
that erode civil liberties and target individuals and groups that pose no threat whatsoever to national
security. New technologies that range from webcams and spycams to biometrics and Internet drilling reinforce not only the
fear of being watched, monitored and investigated but also a propensity toward confessing one's
intimate thoughts and sharing the most personal of information. What is profoundly disturbing and worth
repeating in this case is the new intimacy between digital technologies and cultures of surveillance in which
there exists a profound an unseen intimate connection into the most personal and private areas as
subjects publish and document their interests, identities, hopes and fears online in massive quantities.48
Surveillance propped up as the new face of intimacy becomes the order of the day, eradicating free
expression and, to some degree, even thinking itself. In the age of the self-absorbed self and its mirror
image, the selfie, intimacy becomes its opposite and the exit from privacy becomes symptomatic of a society that gave up
on the social and historical memory. One of the most serious conditions that enable the expansion of the
corporate-state surveillance apparatus is the erasure of public memory. One of the most serious conditions that
enable the expansion of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus is the erasure of public memory. The renowned anthropologist David Price
rightly argues that historical memory is one of the primary weapons to be used against the abuse of power and that is why "those
who
have power create a 'desert of organized forgetting.' "49 For Price, it is crucial to reclaim America's
battered public memories as a political and pedagogical task as part of the broader struggle to regain
lost privacy and civil liberties."50 Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America has succumbed to a form
of historical amnesia fed by a culture of fear, militarization and precarity. Relegated to the dustbin of
organized forgetting were the long-standing abuses carried out by America's intelligence agencies and
the public's long-standing distrust of the FBI, government wiretaps and police actions that threatened privacy
rights, civil liberties and those freedoms fundamental to a democracy. In the present historical
moment, it is almost impossible to imagine that wiretapping was once denounced by the FBI or that
legislation was passed in the early part of the 20th century that criminalized and outlawed the federal
use of wiretaps.51 Nor has much been written about the Church and Pike committees, which in the 1970s exposed a wave of illegal
surveillance and disruption campaigns carried out by the FBI and local police forces, most of which were aimed at anti-war demonstrators, the
leaders of the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers.
2AC: AT – Inherency
Domestic Bulk Data Collection still occurs in the US – 702 reforms are/will fail and
repeal is key
Laperruque 15 (Updates to section 702 minimization rules still leave loopholes Author Image JAKE
LAPERRUQUE – Political Correspondant and Research Staff Member at the Center for Democracy and
Technology SHARE POST Updates to Section 702 Minimization Rules Still Leave Loopholes FEBRUARY 09,
2015 https://cdt.org/blog/updates-to-section-702-minimization-rules-still-leave-loopholes/ Security &
Surveillance – BRW)
In 2013 the Department of Justice changed its policy and began providing defendants notice when information obtained from Section 702 is
used, but questions remain as to whether the scope of this notification policy is sufficient. And even if notification is eventually provided, the
government could still use communications obtained using Section 702 as the foundation for
investigation of minor domestic crimes, so long as it gathers other evidence for the purpose of
prosecution. If the Administration is sincere in its commitment to limiting the range of crimes that
information on US persons obtained through Section 702 can be used for, it should change the
Minimization Guidelines – and support statutory reform – that requires communications of or about
US persons that does not contain evidence of the crimes listed above (or foreign intelligence information) be
immediately purged upon discovery. New Restrictions on US Person Querying: The policies announced on February 3 also create
new restrictions on the NSA’s ability to querying its database of Section 702 communications for the communications of US persons. This
practice is commonly referred to as the “backdoor search loophole” because if the NSA wanted to conduct the surveillance of the US person
directly, it would be a “search” that would require a full FISA court order based on a finding of probable cause that the US person is a terrorist,
spy, or other agent of a foreign power. Previously, minimization procedures vaguely required that querying construction be “reasonably likely
to return foreign intelligence information,” effectively allowing NSA to deliberately seek out in a vast database of content collected under
Section 702 Americans’ communications without judicial authorization. Under the new rules, the NSA and CIA will be permitted to query the
database with US person identifiers (a unique identifier associated such as a name, phone number, email address, etc.) only after developing “a
written statement of facts showing that a query is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information,” as recommended by the Privacy
and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in its report on Section 702. This is a step forward for preventing some potential abuse posed by the
backdoor search loophole, but it is a far cry from requiring a judicial finding of probable cause that the person whose communications are
sought is an agent of a foreign power, as Senator Wyden has proposed to close the backdoor search loophole. While the NSA will be prohibited
from searching the Section 702 database for an American’s communication with the goal of gathering evidence for domestic criminal
investigations that have no national security implications, or simply gathering personal information that could be used to hold a person in
disrepute (troublingly, it is unclear whether the FBI will be similarly restricted), it could still query the data base — and obtain the contents of
the US person’s communications — for broad foreign intelligence purposes, such as when the analyst thinks the query would disclose
information necessary to the conduct of US foreign affairs or US national security. In addition, an NSA
analyst, not a judge, would
decide whether obtaining the US person’s communications was proper. The new restrictions reflect the privacy
interest in Americans’ communications being queried, but falls short of providing the protection that privacy interest is due.
2AC: AT – No Violence Impact
Their metric of violence is purely based off of death and is an unreliable statistic – our
author’s assume pinkers studies (the leader in the field of world suffering
determinations)
Evans and Giroux 15 ( Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the School of
Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, UK. Henry A. Giroux currently
holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for
Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning.Evans and Giroux Disposable Futures": Critique of
Violence Wednesday, 06 May 2015 00:00 By Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, City Lights Books | Book
Excerpt http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30589-disposable-futures-critique-of-violence
- BRW)
Hence, while authors
like Steven Pinker cloud our perception by claiming the current era is the least violent
era in human history, relying upon crude per capita human death rates etc.,[20] it takes only a slightly different angle of
vision to see the current social order's full range of preventable violence: impoverishment, financial
predation, malnutrition, mass incarceration, and rapidly accelerating deforestation, ecological
degradation, and irreversible biocide. Pinker would do well to acknowledge that political violence is
poorly understood if it simply refers to a failure of liberal modernity. Political violence cannot be
reduced to such a crude and reductionist metric. Indeed, conventional demarcations between times of war and times of peace, zones
of security and zones of crises, friends and enemies, have long since evaporated. We live in complex and radically interconnected
societies, whose social morphology has radically altered our sense of the world such that we are
taught to accept insecurity as the natural order of things.[21] This is fully in keeping with the
proliferation of media output, factual and fictional, that bombards us continuously with images of
violence and catastrophe for subtle political gain. Indeed, what is new about the current historical
conjuncture is not only a commodified popular culture that trades in extreme violence, greed, and
narcissism as a source of entertainment, but the emergence of a predatory society in which the
suffering and death of others becomes a reason to rejoice rather than mourn. Extreme violence has
become not only a commodified spectacle, but one of the few popular resources available through
which people can bump up their pleasure quotient. Our critique begins from the realization that
violence has become ubiquitous, "settling like some all-enveloping excremental mist ... that has permeated every nook of any institution or
being that has real influence on the way we live now."[22] We cannot escape its spectre. Its presence is everywhere. It is
hardwired into the fabric of our digital DNA. Capitalism in fact has always thrived on its consumption.
There is, after all, no profit in peace. We are not calling here for the censoring of all representations of
violence as if we could retreat into some sheltered protectorate. That would be foolish and intellectually dangerous. Our
claim is both that the violence we are exposed to is heavily mediated, and that as such we are witness to various spectacles that serve a distinct political function,
especially as they either work to demonize political resistance or simply extract from its occurrence (fictional and actual) any sense of political context and critical
insight. Moving beyond the spectacle by making visible the reality of violence in all of its modes is both necessary and politically important. What we need then is an
ethical approach to the problem of violence such that its occurrence is intolerable to witness.
2AC: AT: Neolib
The neoliberal culture of structural violence requires an individualization of the social
to render poverty a pre-determined condition – the status quo NSA data probes
function as a violent upholding of the system of social individualization that re-enforce
neoliberal violence
Evans and Giroux 15 ( Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the School of
Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, UK. Henry A. Giroux currently
holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for
Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning.Evans and Giroux Disposable Futures": Critique of
Violence Wednesday, 06 May 2015 00:00 By Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, City Lights Books | Book
Excerpt http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30589-disposable-futures-critique-of-violence
- BRW)
At the same time, under
the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power, violence appears so arbitrary and
thoughtless that it lacks the need for any justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability. It is truly as limitless as it
appears banal. All that matters instead is to re-create the very conditions to further and deepen the crises of neoliberal rule. Violence,
with its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no longer merely a side effect of police
brutality, war, or criminal behavior; it has become fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage
facet of capitalism. And in doing so it has turned out to be central to legitimating those social relations in which the political and
pedagogical are redefined in order to undercut possibilities for authentic democracy. Under such circumstances, the social becomes retrograde,
emptied of any democratic values, and organized around a culture of shared anxieties rather than shared responsibilities. The contemporary
world, then - the world of neoliberalism - creates the most monstrous of illusions, one that functions by hiding things in plain sight. We see this
most troublingly played out as its simulated spectacles of destruction are scripted in such a way as to support the narrative that violence itself is
enjoying a veritable decline as a result of liberal influence and pacification. Howard Zinn understood this perversion better than most: I start
from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of
jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in
such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don't have
to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down.[1]
There is no greater task today than to develop a critique of violence adequate to our deeply unjust, inequitable, and violent times. Only then
might we grasp the magnitude and depths of suffering endured on a daily basis by many of the world's citizens. Only then might we move
beyond the conceit of a neoliberal project, which has normalized violence such that its worst manifestations become part of our cultural
"pastimes." And only then might we reignite a radical imagination that is capable of diagnosing the violence of the present in such a manner
that we have the confidence to rethink the meaning of global citizenship in the twenty-first century. Following on from the enduring legacy and
inspiration of Zinn and other cautionary voices of political concern such as Paulo Freire, our critique begins from the supposition that mass
violence today must be understood by comprehending the ways in which systemic cruelty is
transformed into questions of individual pathology. What is more, with the burden of guilt placed on the
shoulders of the already condemned, those whose lives are rendered disposable, we must question
more rigorously the imaginaries of violence, which instigate a forced partaking in a system that
encourages the subjugated to embrace their oppression as though it were their liberation. Nowhere is
this more apparent today than in the doctrine of "resilience" which, as critiqued elsewhere, forces us to accept our
vulnerabilities without providing us with the tools for genuine transformation of those systematic processes that render us insecure in the first
place.[2] Neoliberalism's culture
of violence is reinforced by what Zsuza Ferge calls the "individualization of
the social,"[3] in which all traces of the broader structural forces producing a range of social problems
such as widening inequality and mass poverty disappear. Under the regime of neoliberalism, individual responsibility
becomes the only politics that matters and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are
not of their own making, neoliberalism's discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak
character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This
makes it easier for its advocates to argue that "poverty is a
deserved condition."[4] Systematic violence has never been "exceptional" in the history of capitalistic
development. How might we explain David Harvey's apt description of capitalist expansion as "accumulation by dispossession,"[5] if the
rise of capitalism did not signal the advent of a truly predatory social formation? Indeed, even the
contemporary advocates of neoliberal markets recognize that their notion of a "just world" depends on
coercion and violence as a way to enforce capitalism's uneven distribution of wealth and
impoverishment. As the Oxford economic historian Avner Offer explained to Chris Hedges, "those who
suffer deserve to suffer."[6] The neoliberal model is, after all, "a warrant for inflicting pain."[7] The
regime of neoliberalism is precisely organized for the production of violence. Such violence is more
than symbolic. Instead of waging a war on poverty it wages a war on the poor - and does so removed
from any concern for social costs or ethical violations. Such a brutal diagnosis argues in favor of a
neoliberal model despite its perverse outcomes: "It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society
that elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the
very largest penal systems in the world relative to its population. It also inflicts violence all over the
world. It tolerates a great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large numbers of
people."[8] Its effects in the United States are evident in the incarceration of more than 2.3 million
people, mostly people of color. Not only are 77 percent of all inmates people of color, but, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, as of 2012
"more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year
the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis
of race."[9] The necropolitics of neoliberal policies is evident in the unnecessary deaths of up to 17,000
more Americans each year because partisan ideologues opted out of the expansion of the Medicare
program offered by the Obama administration.[10] Across the globe, violence creeps into almost all of the commanding institutions of
public life, extending from public schools to health care apparatuses. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano knew the impacts of neoliberalism's
theater of cruelty better than most: "Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by
nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap
metal and food into poison."[11] Zygmunt Bauman has taken this further by showing us how the most appalling acts of mass slaughter have
been perfectly in keeping with the modern compulsion to destroy lives for more progressive times to come.[12] Acts of non-violence, in fact,
are the exceptional moments of our more recent history. They also confirm Hannah Arendt's insistence that power and violence are
qualitatively different.[13] There is no doubt something truly powerful, truly exceptional, to the examples set by Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa
Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, and indigenous movements such as the Zapatistas of Mexico, whose choice of non-violence as an insurgent strategy
reveals more fully the violence of oppressive contemporary regimes. Violence easily deals with violence on its own terms. Carlos Marighella was
wrong to suggest otherwise.[14] What
violence, however, cannot deal with, except by issuing more violence,
remains the power of a dignified response and movements of collective resistance by those who
refuse to get caught up in a cycle of cruelty that corrupts every good intention. Frantz Fanon was most
clear in this respect.[15] Who are the "wretched," after all, if not those who fail to see that their
recourse to violence only produces a mirror image of that which was once deemed intolerable? Our
history - the history of our present - is a history of violence. Beneath the surface of every semblance of peace, it is possible to
identify all too easily the scars of sacrifice and the bloodshed of victims whose only error was often to be born in a cruel age. There are many
ways in which we could try to make sense of this burden of sacrificial history. Why do so many continue to die for the sake of the living? Why
do we continue to protect inhuman conditions through the endless wars fought in the name of humanity? Why is killing so often presented as
necessary? How is it that the police in the United States can kill blacks at a rate twenty-one times higher than whites and not only act with
impunity but respond to protests by the larger public almost exclusively with massive militarized responses, as if the use of violence is the only
legitimate form of mediation to any problem that emerges in the larger society? While all these questions are important, it is precisely the
spectacle that most perturbs us here. For it is through the spectacle of violence that we begin to uncover the abilities to strip life of any
political, ethical, and human claim. Violence seeks to
curate who and what is human even though the physical
body might still be in existence. When violence becomes normalized and decentered, the disposability
of entire populations becomes integral to the functioning, the profiteering, and the entrenchment of the
prevailing rationalities of the dominant culture. Such violence, in other words, offers the most potent
diagnosis of any political project by revealing what is deemed culturally acceptable and socially
normalized. There is an important point to stress here regarding the logics of brutality. Violence is easily
condemned when it appears exceptional. This also unfortunately precludes more searching and
uncomfortable questions. Normalized violence, by contrast, represents a more formidable challenge,
requiring a more sophisticated and learned response. Exposing more fully how these normalized
cultures of cruelty shape the historic moment is the main purpose of this work, as it is integral to the
critical imagination and those forms of political agency necessary for successfully living in a nonviolent
and civilian future. Our motivation for writing this book is driven by a commitment to the value of
critical pedagogy in countering mechanisms of dehumanization and domination at play in neoliberal
societies and beyond. We have no time whatsoever for those who reason that violence may be studied
in an "objective" or "rational" way. There are no neutral pedagogies indifferent to matters of politics,
power, and ideology. Pedagogy is, in part, always about both struggle and vision—struggles over
identities, modes of agency, values, desires, and visions of the possible. Not only does the apologetics of
neutrality lead to the most remiss intellectualism when the personal experience of violence is reduced
to emotionless inquiry, but it also announces complicity in the rationalizations of violence that depend
upon the degradation of those qualities that constitute what is essential to the human condition. Thus,
education is by definition a form of political intervention. It is always disentangling itself from particular
regimes of power that attempt to authenticate and disqualify certain ways of perceiving and thinking
about the world. The larger issue is that not only only is education central to politics, but the educative
nature of politics begins with the assumption that how people think, critically engage the world, and are
self-reflective about the shaping of their own experiences and relations to others marks the beginning of
a viable and oppositional politics.
2AC: AT – Reform CP
Their Counterplan is a description of the squo – reform fails and the pedagogy of the
1ac is key
Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux | Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State Henry A.
Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English
and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
Monday, 10 February 2014 09:15 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoiain-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed – BRW)
In the struggle to dismantle the authoritarian state, reform is only partially acceptable. Surely, as Fred
Branfman argues, rolling back the surveillance state can take the form of fighting: to end bulk collection of
information; demand Congressional oversight; indict executive-branch officials when they commit
perjury; give Congress the capacity to genuinely oversee executive agency; provide strong whistleblower protection; and restructure the present system of classification.84 These are important
reforms worth fighting for, but they do not go far enough. What is needed is a radical restructuring of
our understanding of democracy and what it means to bring it into being. The words of Zygmunt Bauman are
useful in understanding what is at stake in such a struggle. He writes: "Democracy expresses itself in continuous and
relentless critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside the political
system; essential, as a force of dissent and change. One can best recognize a democratic society by its constant
complaints that it is not democratic enough."85 What cannot be emphasized enough is that only through collective struggles
can change take place against modern-day authoritarianism. If the first order of authoritarianism is unchecked secrecy,
the first moment of resistance to such an order is widespread critical awareness of state and
corporate power and its threat to democracy, coupled with a desire for radical change rather than
reformist corrections. Democracy involves a sharing of political existence, an embrace of the
commons and the demand for a future that cannot arrive quickly enough. In short, politics needs a
jump start, because democracy is much too important to be left to the whims, secrecy and power of
those who have turned the principles of self-government against themselves.
***Case Neg***
Bio-p K2 Democracy
Democratic biopolitics is useful- avoids the pitfalls of totalitarianism
Dickinson 4 Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity”
Edward Ross Dickinson,
Central European History / Volume 37 / Issue 01 / March 2004, pp 1-48,
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4547381?uid=3739920&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=
3739256&sid=21104037568077
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical dis- course and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are
instances of the "disciplinary society" and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more author- itarian states,
including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to
view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading , because it obfuscates the profoundly
different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic
welfare state is not only for- mally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all,
again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the
psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a
discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce "health," such a system can — and
there are political and policy potentials and con- straints
in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany.
Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally
incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship
historically does — create compulsory pro- grams to enforce it. But again,
does appear, his- torically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a "logic" or imperative of increasing liberalization.
Despite lim- itations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive
waves of leg- 90 islative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany. Of course it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such
systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of peo- ple
that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strate- gic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of
"liberty," just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppres- sion, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole ori- entation point for
our understanding of biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian)
theory. Democratic
welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems
are not "opposites," in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of
organizing it. The concept "power" should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipu- lation, and entrapment, in which all political and
social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively "the same." Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy
and effective subjec- tivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, "tactically polyvalent." Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be
combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the demo- cratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in
a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern soci- eties create "multiple modernities," modern societies with quite
radically dif- 91 fering potentials.
Status quo's improving by all measures- they have no impact uniqueness
Ridley 10 visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, former science editor of The Economist,
and award-winning science writer, 2010, Matt, The Rational Optimist, pg. 13-15
If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since
1800, the population of the world has multiplied six
times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine
times . Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned
nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third
as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer . She was less likely to die as a result of
war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria,
diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer,
heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school . She was more
likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when
the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the
goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded . It is, by any standard, an astonishing human
achievement. Averages conceal a lot. But even if you break down the world into bits, it is hard to find any
region that was worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955. Over that half-century, real income per head ended a little lower in only six
countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia), life expectancy in three (Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and infant survival in none. In
the rest they have rocketed upward. Africa’s rate of improvement has been distressingly slow and patchy compared with the rest of the world, and many southern
African countries saw life expectancy plunge in the 1990s as the AIDS epidemic took hold (before recovering in recent years). There were also moments in the halfcentury when you could have caught countries in episodes of dreadful deterioration of living standards or life chances – China in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s,
Ethiopia in the 1980s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Congo in the 2000s, North Korea throughout. Argentina had a disappointingly stagnant twentieth century. But
overall, after fifty years, the outcome for the world is remarkably, astonishingly, dramatically positive . The average South
Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen times as much as his North Korean
counter part). The
average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. The average
Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than
it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90
per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better. The
poor in the developing world grew their consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between
1980 and 2000. The Chinese are ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-lived than they were fifty years ago. Even Nigerians
are twice as rich, 25 per cent less fecund and nine years longer-lived than they were in 1955. Despite a doubling of the world population,
even the raw number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the
1950s. The percentage living in such absolute poverty has dropped by more than half – to less than 18 per cent.
That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the trend is hardly a cause for despair: at the current rate of decline, it
would hit zero around 2035 – though it probably won’t. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in
the previous 500.
Liberalism checks the worst excesses of biopower
Hussain and Ptacek 00 Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred, Review by: Nasser Hussain and Melissa
Ptacek, Law & Society Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2000), pp. 495-515, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115091
Here once again we
are forced to question Agamben's teleo- logical mode of thought. Is this sovereign power represented in
the concentration camps really a constitutive feature of sover- eignty tout court? Even limiting ouselves to the remarks above, we can imagine a liberal critique of
this position that asks from where come the limitations that Agamben concedes previous Weimar governments had observed. Surely, one
does not have
to accept in its entirety a normative liberal conception of sovereign power in order to appreciate that the
demand for a factual ac- counting for the decision on the exception, and institutional checks upon the
totalization of the space of exception, can none- theless-at least in certain instances- be effective . Indeed, one could go
further and suggest that a
liberal theory of sovereign power understands full well the paradoxical relation
between law and fact, norm and exception; and, precisely in light of such an understanding constructs an
institutional system that cannot re- solve the paradox but nonetheless attempts to prevent it from reaching an
intensified and catastrophic conclusion . Given that Agamben is a nuanced and fair-minded thinker, one must won- der about why he largely
ignores such a system. We think that one possible answer is that,just as for Agamben the source of the problem is not the institutional operation of sovereign
power, but its object-bare life-so too the solution is not a prolifera- tion of institutional safeguards but a rethinking of that mode of being. In this regard, we find his
concluding musings on Heidig- ger to be suggestive.
Bio-P Inev
Bio-power is inevitable- liberal democracy utilizes it in the best way
Dean 4 Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death, Mitchell Dean, December 2004,
http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf
Second Thesis: It
is not merely the succession or addition of the modern powers over life to the ancient right of
death but their very combination within modern states that is of significance. How these powers are
combined accounts for whether they are malign or benign . According to this view, it is not the moment that life became a political
object in the eighteenth century that defined the disturbing features of modern states. Rather, the different ways in which bio-politics is
combined with sovereign power decide their character . Certain passages from Foucaultʼs lectures and from the History of Sexuality
can be interpreted in this way. In a passage from the latter, Foucault shows that the genocidal character of National Socialism
did not simply arise from its extension of bio-power.16 Nazism was concerned with the total
administration of the life , of the family, of marriage, procreation, education and with the intensification of disciplinary
micro-powers. But it articulated this with another set of features concerned with “the oneiric exaltation of a superior
blood,” of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race. In other words, if we are to understand how the most dramatic
forces of life and death were unleashed in the twentieth century, we have to understand how bio-power
was articulated with elements of sovereignty and its symbolics. Pace Bauman, it is not simply the development
of instrumental rationality in the form of modern bio-power, or a bureaucratic power applied to life that makes the
Holocaust possible. It is the system of linkages , re-codings and re-inscriptions of sovereign notions of fatherland,
territory, and blood within the new bio-political discourses of eugenics and racial hygiene that makes
the unthinkable thinkable. The fact that all modern states must articulate elements of sovereignty with
bio-politics also allows for a virtuous combination . The virtue of liberal and democratic forms of
government is that they deploy two instruments to check the unfettered imperatives of bio-power, one drawn
from political economy and the other from sovereignty itself.17 Liberalism seeks to review the imperative to govern too much by pointing to the quasi- natural
processes of the market or of the exchanges of commercial society that are external to government. To govern economically means to govern through economic
and other social processes external to government and also to govern in an efficient, cost-effective way. Liberalism also invokes
the freedom
and rights of a new subject—the sovereign individual. By ʻgoverning through freedomʼ and in relation to freedom, advanced
liberal democracies are able to differentiate their bio-politics from that of modern totalitarian states and
older police states.
AT: Structural Violence
Structural violence is an obscure metaphor. Its use cannot lead to positive changes because it
conflates distinct and generally unrelated problems of violence and poverty.
Boulding ’77
(Kenneth, Faculty – U. Colorado Boulder, Former Pres. American Economic Association, Society for General Systems
Research, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, Journal of Peace Research, “Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan
Galtung”, 14:1, JSTOR)
Finally, we
come to the great Galtung metaphors of 'structural violence' 'and 'posi- tive peace'. They are
metaphors rather than models, and for that very reason are suspect. Metaphors always imply models and metaphors have much more persuasive power than models do, for models tend to be the preserve of the specialist. But when
a meta- phor implies a bad model it can be very dangerous, for it is both persuasive and wrong. The
metaphor of structural violence I would argue falls right into this category. The metaphor is that poverty,
deprivation, ill health, low expectations of life, a condi- tion in which more than half the human race lives, is 'like' a thug
beating up the victim and 'taking his money away from him in the street, or it is 'like' a conqueror stealing the land of the people and
reducing them to slavery. The implication is that poverty and its associated ills are the fault of the thug or the
conqueror and the solution is to do away with thugs and conquerors. While there is some truth in the
metaphor, in the modern world at least there is not very much. Vio- lence, whether of the streets and the home,
or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the armed forces, is a very different phenome- non from poverty. The
processes which create and sustain poverty are not at all like the processes which create and sustain
violence, although like everything else in 'the world, everything is somewhat related to every- thing else. There is a very
real problem of the struc- tures which lead to violence, but unfortu- nately Galitung's metaphor of
structural vio- lence as he has used it has diverted atten- tion from this problem. Violence in the be- havioral
sense, that is, somebody actually doing damage to somebody else and trying to make them worse off, is a 'threshold' phenomenon, rather like
the boiling over of a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise for a long time without its boiling over, but at some 'threshold boiling over will
take place. The study of the structures which un- derlie violence are a very important and much neglected part of peace research and indeed of
social science in general. Thresh- old phenomena like violence are difficult to study because they represent 'breaks' in the systenm rather than
uniformities. Violence, whether between persons or organizations, occurs when the 'strain' on a system is too great for its 'strength'. The
metaphor here is that violence is like what happens when we break a piece of chalk. Strength and strain, however, especially in social systems,
are so interwoven historically that it is very difficult to separate them. The diminution of violence involves two possible strategies, or a mixture
of the two; one is Ithe increase in the strength of the sys- tem, 'the other is the diminution of the strain. The strength of systems involves habit,
cul- ture, taboos, and sanctions, all these 'things which enable a system to stand lincreasing strain without breaking down into violence. The
strains on the system 'are largely dy- namic in character, such as arms races, mu- tually stimulated hostility, changes in rela- tive economic
position or political power, which are often hard to identify. Conflicts of interest 'are only part 'of the strain on a sys- tem, and not always the
most important part. It is very hard for people ito know their in- terests, and misperceptions of 'interest take place mainly through the dynamic
processes, not through the structural ones. It is only perceptions of interest which affect people's behavior, not the 'real' interests, whatever
these may be, and the gap between percep- ti'on and reality can be very large and re- sistant to change. However,
what Galitung calls
structural violence (which has been defined 'by one un- kind commenltator as anything that Galitung doesn't like) was originally
defined as any unnecessarily low expectation of life, on that assumption that anybody who dies before the allotted span has
been killed, however unintentionally and unknowingly, by some- body else. The concept has been expanded to include all
'the problems of poverty, desti- tution, deprivation, and misery. These are enormously real and are a very high priority for
research and action, but they belong to systems which are only peripherally related to 'the structures whi'ch
produce violence. This is not to say that the cultures of vio- lence and the cultures of poverty are not
sometimes related, though not all poverty cultures are cultures of violence, and cer- tainly not all
cultures of violence are pover- ty cultures. But the dynamics lof poverty and the success or failure to
rise out of it are of a complexity far beyond anything which the metaphor of structural violence can
offer. While the metaphor of structural violence performed a service in calling attention to a problem, it may have done
a disservice in preventing us from finding the answer.
No Solvency
Alternative fails- no clear mechanism of change
Bryant 12 Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collins College, November 11, 2012
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/
the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction . It’s good at carrying out critiques
that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of
alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be
remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants
gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase
3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as
follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social
transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be
done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3,
Unfortunately,
we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where
Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an
academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the
everything begins to fall apart.
humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the
we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with
presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other
academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and
world. To make matters worse,
tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and
We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the
questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we
endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s AntiOedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type
of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of
reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in
business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for
worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes.
how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately
jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete
proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That
network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the
building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and
material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points
that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing
ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system
that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems
of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least
the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the
anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical
environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an
environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the
state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an
Why should anyone even bother listening
to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes,
saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how
revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation.
“Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for selfcongratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the
problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique.
We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique?
alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start.
What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong.
Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory.
None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.
Util
1NC
1. Every life is an end in and of itself – All lives are infinitely valuable, the only ethical
option is to maximize the number saved
Cummisky 96 (David, professor of philosophy at Bates, “Kantian Consequentialism”, p. 131)
Finally, even
if one grants that saving two persons with dignity cannot outweigh and compensate
for killing one—because dignity cannot be added and summed in this way—this point still does not
justify deontological constraints. On the extreme interpretation, why would not killing one person be a
stronger obligation than saving two persons? If I am concerned with the priceless dignity of
each, it would seem that I may still save two; it is just that my reason cannot be that the two compensate for the loss
of the one. Consider Hill's example of a priceless object: If I can save two of three priceless statutes only by destroying one, then I
cannot claim that saving two makes up for the loss of the one. But similarly, the loss of the two is not outweighed by the one that was
not destroyed. Indeed, even
if dignity cannot be simply summed up, how is the extreme interpretation inconsistent
I should save as many priceless objects as possible? Even if two do not simply outweigh and
thus compensate for the loss of the one, each is priceless; thus, I have good reason to save as many as I can.
with the idea that
In short, it is not clear how the extreme interpretation justifies the ordinary killing/letting-die distinction or even how it conflicts with
the conclusion that the more persons with dignity who are saved, the better.8
2. Exclusion is a reason to vote neg – They advocate that the group they save is more
important than the rest of humanity – Since all lives are equal, you should treat them that
way by protecting the greatest number
Dworkin 77 (Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University (Ronald 1977, “Taking Rights Seriously” pg 274-5)
The liberal conception of equality sharply limits the extent to which ideal arguments of policy may be used to justify any constraint on
liberty. Such arguments cannot be used if the idea in question is itself controversial within the community. Constraints cannot be
defended, for example, directly on the ground that they contribute to a culturally sophisticated community, whether the community
wants the sophistication or not, because that argument would violate the canon of the liberal conception of equality that prohibits a
Utilitarian argument
of policy, however, would seem secure from that objection. They do not suppose that any form
of life is inherently more valuable than any other, but instead base· their claim, that constraints on liberty are
necessary to advance some collective goal of the community, just on the fact that that goal happens to be
desired more widely or more deeply than any other. Utilitarian arguments of policy, therefore, seem not to oppose
but on the contrary to embody the fundamental right of equal concern and respect, because they
treat the wishes of each member of the community on a par with the wishes of any other, with
no bonus or discount reflecting the view that that member is more or less worthy of concern, or his
government from relying on the claim that certain forms of life are inherently more valuable than others.
views more or less worthy of respect, than any other. This appearance of egalitarianism has, I think, been the principal source of the
great appeal that utilitarianism has had, as a general political philosophy, over the last century. In Chapter 9, however, I pointed out
that the egalitarian character of a utilitarian argument is often an illusion. I will not repeat, but only summarize, my argument here.
Utilitarian arguments fix on the fact that a particular constraint on liberty will make more people happier, or satisfy more of their
preferences, depending upon whether psychological or preference utilitarianism is in play. But people's overall preference for one
policy rather than another may be seen to include, on further analysis, both preference that are personal, because they state a
preference for the assignment of one set of goods or opportunities to him and preferences that are external, because they state a
preference for one assignment of goods or opportunities to others. But a utilitarian argument that assigns critical weight to the
external preferences of members of the community will not be egalitarian in the sense under consideration. It will not respect the right
of everyone to be treated with equal concern and respect.
3. Extinction destroys all human aspiration – Claims to outweigh it destroy value to life
Schell 82 (Jonathan, Visiting professor of liberal studies at Harvard University, “Fate of the Earth”)
For the generations that now have to decide whether or not to risk the future of the species, the implication of our species’ unique
place in the order of things is that while things in the life of [hu]mankind have worth, we must never raise that worth above the life of
[hu]mankind and above our respect for that life’s existence. To do this would be to make of our highest ideals so many swords with
which to destroy ourselves. To
sum up the worth of our species by reference to some particular
standard, goal, or ideology, no matter how elevated or noble it might be, would be to prepare the way
for extinction by closing down in thought and feeling the open-ended possibilities for human
development which extinction would close down in fact. There is only one circumstance in which it might be
possible to sum up the life and achievement of the species, and that circumstance would be that it had already died; but then, of
course, there would be no one left to do the summing up. Only a generation that believed itself to be in possession of final, absolute
truth could ever conclude that it had reason to put an end to human life, and only
generations that recognized the
limits to their own wisdom and virtue would be likely to subordinate their interests and dreams to
the as yet unformed interests and undreamed dreams of the future generations, and let human life go
on.
4. Their moral tunnel vision is complicit with the evil they criticize
Issac 2 (Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life,
PhD from Yale (Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It
is assumed that U.S. military intervention
is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is
a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace,
but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through
brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What
should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban
regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international
law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order.
But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how
diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand campus left
offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral
goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not
a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish
anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it
about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is
beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality . As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli,
Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness
undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with
morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence,
then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their
supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not
simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the
standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In
categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices
with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as
it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most
significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is
the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally
important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in
pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It
alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political
effectiveness.
5. Utilitarianism is key to morality – Extinction prevents future generation from attaining
other values
Nye 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 45-46)
Is there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival of the species? Is not
all-out nuclear war just as self contradictory in the real world as pacifism is accused of being? Some people argue that "we
are required to undergo gross injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the
authors of mass murder."73 Still others say that "when a person makes survival the highest value, he has declared that there
is nothing he will not betray. But for a civilization to sacrifice itself makes no sense since there are not
survivors to give meaning to the sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival may be worth
betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like unilateral disarmament that
forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing the chances of both)"?74 How one
judges the issue of ends can be affected by how one poses the questions. If one asks "what is worth a billion lives (or the
survival of the species)," it is natural to resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose one asks, "is it possible to
imagine any threat to our civilization and values that would justify raising the threat to a billion
lives from one in ten thousand to one in a thousand for a specific period?" Then there are several
plausible answers, including a democratic way of life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond mere survival. When
we pursue several values simultaneously, we face the fact that they often conflict and that we
face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value
and little else. Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but that does
not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few people act as though survival were an absolute
value in their personal lives, or they would never enter an automobile. We can give survival of the species a very
high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of an absolute value. Some degree of risk is
unavoidable if individuals or societies are to avoid paralysis and enhance the quality of life
beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a justifiable topic of both prudential and moral
reasoning.
2NC: Util Tradeoff inevitable
Trade-offs are inevitable – Util is the only way to resolve competing moral values
Bailey 97 (James Wood 1997; “Oxford University Press; “Utilitarianism, institutions, and Justice” pg 9)
A consequentialist moral theory can take account of this variance and direct us in our decision
about whether a plausible right to equality ought to outweigh a plausible right to freedom of
expression. 16 In some circumstances the effects of pornography would surely be malign enough to justify our banning it, but in
others they may be not malign enough to justify any interference in freedom. I? A deontological theory, in contrast,
would be required either to rank the side constraints, which forbid agents from interfering in
the free expression of others and from impairing the moral equality of others, or to admit
defeat and claim that no adjudication between the two rights is possible. The latter admission is
a grave failure since it would leave us no principled resolution of a serious policy question. But the
former conclusion is hardly attractive either. Would we really wish to establish as true for all times and circumstances a lexical ordering
between two side constraints on our actions without careful attention to consequences? Would we, for instance, really wish to
establish that the slightest malign inegalitarian effect traceable to a form of expression is adequate grounds for an intrusive and costly
censorship? Or would we, alternatively, really wish to establish that we should be prepared to tolerate a society horrible for women
and children to live in, for the sake of not allowing any infringement on the sacred right of free expression?18 Consequentialist
accounts can avoid such a deontological dilemma. In so doing, they show a certain healthy
sense of realism about what life in society is like. In the world outside the theorist's study, we
meet trade-offs at every turn. Every policy we make with some worthy end in Sight imposes
costs in terms of diminished achievement of some other plausibly worthy end.
Consequentialism demands that we grapple with these costs as directly as we can and justify
their incurrence. It forbids us to dismiss them with moral sophistries or to ignore them as if we
lived in an ideal world.
Incomplete information about every effected individual makes util the only option for
policymakers
Goodin 95 (Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E.,
Cambridge University Press, “Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy” pg 63)
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation
of public officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes
them adopt a form of utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals.
Before proceeding with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special
about public officials and their situations that makes it both more necessary and more desirable
for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first the argument from
necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of
a very special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are made under some degree of
uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more
complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications
that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, are relatively
poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What
they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen
most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices. But that is all. That is
enough to allow public policy makers to use the utilitarian calculus – if they want to use it at all –
to choose general rules of conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to
calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative possible general rule. But they cannot
be sure what the payoff will be to any given individual or on any particular occasion. Their
knowledge of generalities, aggregates and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that.
Furthermore, the argument from necessity would continue, the instruments available to public
policy-makers are relatively blunt. They can influence general tendencies, making rather more
people behave in certain sorts of ways rather more often. But perfect compliance is unrealistic.
And (building on the previous point) not knowing particular circumstances of particular
individuals, rules and regulations must necessarily be relatively general in form. They must treat
more people more nearly alike than ideally they should, had we perfect information. The
combined effect of these two factors is to preclude public policy-makers from fine-tuning
policies very well at all. They must, of necessity, deal with people in aggregate, imposing upon
them rules that are general in form. Nothing in any of this necessarily forces them to be
utilitarian in their public policy-making, of course. What it does do, however, is force them- if
they are inclined to be utilitarian at all-away from direct (act) utilitarianism. The circumstances
surrounding the selection and implementation of public policies simply do not permit the more
precise calculations required by any decision rule more tailored to peculiarities of individuals or
situations.
2NC: Util Tradeoff good
Overriding rights is justified to protect a greater amount of rights
Kateb 92 – William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University (George,
Cornell University Press; “The
Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture” pg 12)
One can even think, against utilitarianism, that any substantive outcome achieved by morally proper procedure is morally right and
hence acceptable (so long as rights are not in play). The main point, however, is that utilitarianism
has a necessary pace
in any democratic country's normal political deliberations. But its advocates must know its place, which
ordinarily is only to help to decide what the theory of rights leaves alone. When may rights be overridden by government? I have two
sorts of cases in mind: overriding
a particular right of some persons for the sake of preserving the
same right of others, and overriding the same right of everyone for the sake of what I will
clumsily call "civilization values." An advocate of rights could countenance, perhaps must countenance, the state's
overriding of rights for these two reasons. The subject is painful and liable to dispute every step of the way. For the state to overridethat is, sacrifice—a right of some so that others may keep it. The
situation must be desperate. I have in mind, say,
circumstances in which the choice is between sacrificing a right of some and letting a right of all
be lost. The state (or some other agent) may kill some (or allow them to he killed), if the only
alternative is letting every-one die. It is the right to life which most prominently figures in thinking about desperate
situations. I cannot see any resolution but to heed the precept that "numbers count." Just as one may
prefer saving one's own life to saving that of another when both cannot be saved, so a third parry—let us say, the state—can (perhaps
must) choose to save the greater number of lives and at the cost of the lesser number, when there is otherwise no hope for either
group. That choice does not mean that those to be sacrificed are immoral if they resist being sacrificed. It follows, of course, that if a
third party is right to risk or sacrifice the lives of the lesser for the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when the lesser
would otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed.
2NC: No prior Questions FW
No prior questions
Molly Cochran 99, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Georgia Institute for Technology,
“Normative Theory in International Relations”, 1999, pg. 272
To conclude this chapter, while modernist and postmodernist
debates continue, while we are still unsure as to what we
can legitimately identify as a feminist ethical/political concern, while we still are unclear about the
relationship between discourse and experience, it is particularly important for feminists that we proceed with
analysis of both the material (institutional and structural) as well as the discursive. This holds not only for feminists, but for all theorists
oriented towards the goal of extending further moral inclusion in the present social sciences climate of
epistemological uncertainty. Important ethical/political concerns hang in the balance . We cannot afford to
wait for the meta-theoretical questions to be conclusively answered. Those answers may be
unavailable. Nor can we wait for a credible vision of an alternative institutional order to appear before an
emancipatory agenda can be kicked into gear. Nor do we have before us a chicken and egg question of which comes
first: sorting out the metatheoretical issues or working out which practices contribute to a credible
institutional vision . The two questions can and should be pursued together , and can be via moral imagination.
Imagination can help us think beyond discursive and material conditions which limit us, by pushing the boundaries of those limitations in thought and examining
what yields. In this respect, I believe international ethics as pragmatic critique can be a useful ally to feminist and normative theorists generally.
Their rigid understanding of law destroys emancipatory politics
Brännström 8 Leila Brännström is Assistant Professor @ Lund University Faculty of Law. “How I learned
to stop worrying and use the legal argument: A critique of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of law,” April,
2008, DOA: 8-25-13, y2k
Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998 [1995]), and State of Exception (2005 [2003]) are, among other things, efforts to
explore the deep structures shaping contemporary tendencies in the development of law and politics.1 Agamben
Giorgio
offers us the diagnosis that we live in a ‘permanent state of exception’ – a situation in which law cannot be distinguished from lawlessness. He also suggests a prescription; we ought to look beyond law and reach for a realm of
human activity ‘uncontaminated’ by law. He warns us that if we do not overcome law, we risk the ‘juridico-political’ system transforming itself into ‘a killing machine’, thus causing an ‘unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe’
One of the troubles with his line of reasoning, the
is its deadlocked and overly formalistic understanding of how law operates and of how it might
be used and transformed.2 Surely Agamben insightfully points out certain dangerous trajectories in contemporary law and
politics, but I believe that the rigid way in which he analyses law and politics forecloses the most promising
ways of responding to and acting upon the problems that he outlines. There is a more general rationale for scrutinizing Agamben’s analysis of law and of the state of
exception and the implications of his analysis. Agamben’s understanding of law as a mechanism that puts limitations to our political
potential and imagination and his conviction that law cannot be used for emancipatory purposes, is shared
by many engaged in the field of critical legal and social studies who assume that exposing the repressive character of law and legal practices is the only
(Agamben 1998, 188; Agamben 2005, 86). In this article, I will argue against both Agamben’s diagnosis and his prescription.
one that I will focus on,
Such an assumption is problematic as it overlooks the possibility to raise legal
arguments and to engage in legal practices for pursuing emancipatory politics, a possibility that in many
cases would be both forceful and productive. Sometimes, as in Agamben’s case, these assumptions are built on a perception
possible way of conducting critical studies of law.
of law as a machine whose workings, effects and possibilities are given beforehand – once and for all. The
objectification of law, in turn, induces fear and aversion which often leads to political, social and legal analyses
that suffer, like Agamben’s analysis does, from an overemphasis on, and an overestimation of, the legally authorized power
of the state which nourishes the persisting, but misleading, idea that the major threats to our freedom and to a
better future are to be found in repressive state-practices.
Legal devices minimize global conflict- aff is a DA to the Alt
Schureman 6—William E. Scheueman is Professor of Political Science @ Indiana University,
Constellations, 13(1), p. 116
Schmitt offers three reasons in support of this view. First, he implicitly relies on the stock argument that “authentic” politics necessarily
elides legal regulation: when conflicts involve “existentially” distinct collectivities faced with “the real possibility of killing,” the attempt to tame such conflicts by juridical
means is destined to fail, or at least badly distort the fundamental (political) questions at hand. Insofar as the partisan fighter represents one of the last vestiges of authentic (i.e., Schmittian)
this argument
relies on Schmitt’s controversial model of politics, as outlined eloquently but unconvincingly in his famous Concept of the Political. To be
sure, there are intense conflicts in which it is naïve to expect an easy resolution by legal or juridical means. But the
argument suffers from a troubling circularity : Schmitt occasionally wants to define “political” conflicts as those
irresolvable by legal or juridical devices in order then to argue against legal or juridical solutions to them. The claim also suffers
from a certain vagueness and lack of conceptual precision . At times, it seems to be directed against trying to resolve conflicts in the courts or juridical
system narrowly understood; at other times it is directed against any legal regulation of intense conflict. The former argument is surely stronger than the latter. After all, legal
devices have undoubtedly played a positive role in taming or at least minimizing the potential dangers of harsh
political antagonisms. In the Cold War, for example, international law contributed to the peaceful resolution of conflicts
which otherwise might have exploded into horrific violence , even if attempts to bring such conflicts before an international court or tribunal
politics in an increasingly depoliticized world, he has to dub any attempt to regulate the phenomenon at hand as misguided and maybe even dangerous. Yet
probably would have failed.22
2NC: Util DA (offense)
B. Their argument risks a slippery slope – once we decide that certain lives are not worth living, we
jeopardize all ethics and legitimize killing babies for their organs. Welcome to moral nihilism.
Lisa
Hanger
, B.A. at Miami University, Summer, 19
92
, Journal of Law-Medicine, 5 Health Matrix 347
Considering anencephalic infants "dead" or "close enough to death" instills in the public a fear that
other individuals very near death also will be declared dead and will be killed for the sake of
procuring their organs. If the UAGA or state statutes are amended to require anencephalic infants to become organ donors, it is
believed that other individuals with neural tube anomolies or debilitating cognitive deficiencies also may be forced to become organ donors
n38 Specifically,
the " slippery slope" would lead most directly to those infants
born with hydroencephaly n39 and microencephaly n40 as becoming forced organ donors. This position
could then extend to other groups of people similarly situated who possess only limited cognitive
functioning or who arguably lack a "valid" interest in life, including death row inmates, adults in a
permanently vegetative state, individuals with Alzheimer's disease, [*357] or incompetent individuals
with terminal illnesses. n41 To declare as dead many of these groups whom the general population
perceive to be very much alive could jeopardize the ethical integrity of the medical profession and decrease public
before their natural deaths.
trust in medicine.
n42 Many individuals also would become even more skeptical of organ donation. While some groups have tried to
minimize the fear of a slippery slope by arguing that "safeguards" would prevent groups of individuals other than anencephalic infants from
n43 any "safeguard" would not be sufficient. Once "very fine
distinctions [are made] regarding the dying," n44 the risk of descending down the slippery slope
becomes significant.
being affected by an amendment to the UDDA,
C. Consequentialism the best framework to avoid their impacts.
Robert E.
Goodin
, professor of social sciences and philosopher at the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National
University, Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, 19
95
, p. 39
Failure to discharge
isolated, individual responsibilities may well result in other people's being harmed. That is wrong, but it
is, at least in principle, a remediable wrong. People can, at least in principle, always be compensated for
harms to their interests (or so the libertarian would claim, anyway). Failure to discharge shared, collective
responsibilities has more grievous consequences, undermining in certain crucial respects other people's
moral agency itself. For that, compensation is in principle impossible. There must be a moral agent to be
compensated, and it is that very moral agency that is being undermined."
The rather more grand way of phrasing the point here might be couched in terms of undermining moral agency.
Rationality Turn
1NC
Attempting to reversee technological advancement dooms the environment to catastrophe –
we must apply tech and instrumental rationality
Bronner, 2004 (Stephen Eric, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, “Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of
Radical Engagement”, p.162-163)
Critics of the Enlightenment may have correctly emphasized the price of progress , the costs of alienation and
reification, and the dangers posed by technology and scientific expertise for nature and a democratic society. Even so, this does not
justify romantic attempts to roll back technology. They conflate far too easily with ideological justifications
for rolling back the interventionist state and progressive legislation for cleaning up the environment. Such
a stance also pits the Enlightenment against environmentalism: technology, instrumental rationality, and progress are
often seen as inimical to preserving the planet. Nevertheless, this is to misconstrue the problem. Technology is crucial for dealing
with the ecological devastation brought about by modernity. A redirection of technology will undoubtedly have to take place: but
seeking to confront the decay of the environment without it is like using an umbrella to defend against a
hurricane. Institutional action informed by instrumental rationality and guided by scientific specialists is
unavoidable. Investigations are necessary into the ways government can influence ecologically sound
production, provide subsidies or tax-benefits for particular industries, fund particular forms of knowledge creation, and make
“risks” a matter of public debate. It is completely correct to note that: “neither controversial social issues nor cultural concerns
can be settled simply by scientific fiat, particularly in a world where experts usually disagree and where science can be compromised by
institutional sponsors. No laboratory can dictate what industrial practices are tolerable or what degree of industrialization is permissible.
These questions transcend the crude categories of technical criteria and slide-rule measurements.”7
Instrumental scientific rationality is a prerequisite for subverting arbitrary authority and
fostering political equality—verification and falsifiability are key to effective resistance
Bronner, 2004 (Stephen Eric Bronner, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and a Member of the Graduate Faculty in Comparative
Literature and German Studies at Rutgers University, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Published by
Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231126090, p. 159-160)
Much has been written about the need for a "new science" no longer defined by instrumental rationality and
incapable of reifying the world. But these new undertakings always seem to ignore the need for criteria of
verification or falsification; science without such criteria is, however, no science at all. Contempt for
"instrumental" scientific rationality, moreover, undermines the possibility of meaningful dialogue between the
humanities and the sciences. And that is a matter of crucial importance: popular debates are now taking
place on issues ranging from the eco-system to cloning, the assumptions of western medicine to the
possibilities of acupuncture, using animals for experiments to state support for space travel . This shows
ethical progress, again perhaps not in the sense that people have become more "moral," but surely in the sense that more questions
of everyday life have become open to moral debate. Science has not eroded ethics . The Frankfurt School misjudged the
impact of science from the beginning. It is still the case that the science plays a crucial role in subverting religious authority,
and fostering political equality by enabling each to judge the veracity of truth claims. There is also nothing
exaggerated in the claim [end page 159] that "the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was perhaps the single
greatest influence on the development of the idea that political resistance is a legitimate act ."6
2nc
Criticism of instrumental rationality is wrong and overstated – only our framework can self-correct
ensuring constitutive and introspective opportunities
Brady, 1985 (Neil F., “A Defense of Utilitarian Policy Processes in Corporate and Public Management”, Journal of Business Ethics,
February)
Therefore, the
largest question is whether the subjective function of reason as found in the predominantly utilitarian
or instrumental processes of the administrative world excessively distorts life, as Horkheimer and others suggest.
Despite its great difficulty the need to resolve the issue leaves the thoughtful administrator with significant philosophical discomfort. Are
utilitarian techniques fundamentally flawed, biased, or distorted? Does one serve society well who merely manages
resources in the service of unexamined wants, without considering whether things (especially preferences) should be any different from what in
fact they now are? The link of corporate and public policy with utilitarian theory is virtually axiomatic, with little or no recognition given to the
objective goals or philosophical purpose. At the same time, its procedures have been severely criticized and are well-known to policy analysts
[MacIntyre, 1977; Tribe, 1972; Tribe, 1974). Such problems will not go away, but will continually serve to keep makers of policy firmly if
comfortably immersed in the fluid reality of human wants and needs. Yet, the focus of this paper goes beyond these well-known procedural
difficulties to defend utilitarian policy-analytic techniques against charges of alleged distortion to human nature inherent in its use. If procedures
have flaws, that is one matter, but if a method intrudes upon essential relationships or modifies important social processes, that is quite another.
Therefore, although this paper cannot respond to Horkheimer’s large assertions head on, it does respond to two specific charges
made against utilitarian processes in the world of corporate and public policy making. The first is the claim that utilitarian
policy processes systematically discriminate against the rights of non-human life and suppress any feelings of sympathy or obligations humans
might feel for animals or plants. The second is the argument that utilitarianism circumvents considerations of process which are essential to the
development of individual and societal identity. This paper hopes to show that from a philosophical point of view, utilitarian policy-
analytic techniques ‘hold their own’ against certain powerful and specific complaints. In that event, the monkey is places on
the back of those who are so critical of the predominantly utilitarian nature of policy processes ti show what the objective function of reason and
add to policy processes beyond the present contribution of utilitarian techniques. Continues… A second criticism of utilitarian theory applied in
policy making objects to its circumvention of a process valuable to society, viz. the constitutive or value-learning process. Marx, for example,
objects to utilitarianism from the perspective of a social reformer. For him, utilitarian methods promote a static society: the theory of utility
[changes]…into a mere apology of what exists; into a demonstration that under the existing conditions the present relations among men are the
most advantageous and in the general interest. It has this character in all the recent economists [Bottomore, 1956, p. 166]. That is, utilitarian
ethics only inquires after the strength of current values; it does not promote their review or change. Of course, Marx’s interest in promoting
societal dynamism is motivated by a sense of direction; a dynamic society is a revolutionary society which will, in the long run, promote the
classical Marxist ideals. On the other hand, one’s interest in societal dynamism need not be instrumental; awareness and self-criticism can be
prized for their own sake, regardless of the outcome. More specifically, the process in which a society chooses what it will value is one in which
the society continually constitutes itself; and contrasted with a system of runaway technology, for example, where societal values are in part
determined by the forward momentum of technological development, a society which continually or periodically studies the implications of
technological development for its well-being ‘chooses itself’. It may do so incrementally and without lofty vision, but all that is important is that
society takes its development into its own hands. Laurence Tribe (1972) has argued that the utilitarian system of technology assessment
institutionalized in the United States often results in the circumvention of the kind of process essential for the development of the higher forms of
human rationality and for the promotion of democracy. That is, standard utilitarian assessment techniques are outcome-oriented: they collapse
what might otherwise be a healthy review of public values into a speedy judgment regarding the comparative merit of possible outcomes. ‘In
most areas of human endeavor – from performing a symphony to orchestrating a society – the processes and rules that constitute the enterprise
and define the roles played by its participants matter quite apart from any identifiable ‘end state’ that is ultimately produced. Indeed, in many
cases it is the process itself that matters most to those who take part in it. By focusing all but exclusively on how to optimize some externally
defined end state, policy analytic methods distort thought, and sometimes action, to whatever extent process makes – or ought to make – an
independent difference. (Tribe, 1973, p. 631) Thus, he fundamentally utilitarian nature of technology assessment may distort or abbreviate an
important societal process simply in order to obtain closure on an issue. Another way to describe the phenomenon involves seeing technology
assessment procedures as a scientific method in terms of scientific ideals, no measuring technique should have an effect upon the items is seeks to
measure. Yet, if Tribe is correct, utilitarian assessment techniques do distort the nature of the phenomenon they inquire after, principally by virtue
of the fact that they ignore the truly societal nature of policy processes in the course of sampling personal preferences. Daniel Bell is getting at the
same problem when he writes that “utilitarianism neglects the reality of structures that necessarily stand outside individuals.” (1976, p. 257)
Nevertheless, despair over the propriety of utilitarian techniques for societal processes may be premature. There are at least two reasons
for supposing the critiques of utilitarianism outlined above to be overstated. The first is related to the corporate
experience with utilitarian policy making. It simply is not clear that the traditionally utilitarian character of corporate decision-making stifles the
more constitutive or value-choosing functions of reason. Indeed, the decision-making phase of weighing preferences at least causes executives to
consider the comparative strengths of corporate values, if not absolute strengths. A company, for example, which is wrestling with the issue of
expansion of facilities must review the comparative strengths of several goals: the short-term interests of stockholders, the long-term survival and
growth interests of the corporation, public image, the sacrificing of alternative uses of the capital, etc. Such discussions can be vigorous. Just
because utilitarian methods press for outcomes does not require that the constitutive function of reason be
short-circuited altogether. The question “What do I want?’ in situations of conflicting goals often prompts the question ‘How
badly do I want it?’ The later question is not far removed from ‘Why do I want it?’ and ‘What ought I to want?’, which respect human
rationality in its own right and not just for its instrumental capacities. The second reason for justified
optimism is the cyclical nature of utilitarian assessment process. Descriptions of utilitarian decision-making often
conclude with a feed-back loop. (Rowen, 1969) The effect of the loop on the process is to diffuse some of the thrust toward closure and
to promote continued reflection and assessment. That is, when one feels intuitive discomfort with the result of a utilitarian
assessment, the cause may be failure in any or all of three traditional utilitarian steps which only rarely can be completed with confidence: (1)
List all alternative courses of action. (2) List all relevant criteria for evaluating the alternatives. (3) Weigh the criteria
with respect to their importance. Presumably, the inclusion of feedback loops is prima facia recognition of the freedom and lack of closure
inherent in these earlier stages of utilitarian procedures. So, if these two arguments have merit, one need not despair altogether over the
alleged process-collapsing application of utilitarian or instrumental strategies in the policy-forming process.
Instrumental rationality as expressed in utilitarian assessments is subtly infected with introspective
opportunities – chances to redetermine what values are relevant for assessing goals, how important each
value is, and whether further insight can be achieved regarding alternatives and their consequences.
Continues… Returning, finally, to Marx’s initial complaint regarding the alleged natural tendency of utilitarian techniques to defend the status
quo one might conclude that the alternative to utilitarian rationality , viz. constitutive thinking, could have
posed an even greater obstacle to societal dynamism! The contribution of the constitutive function of rationality s discovery –
the identification of values or principles which sustain themselves over time and lend permanence to individual identity. The danger lies in
attributing more permanence or absoluteness to the products of constitutive thought than is consistent with
changing times – the result being institutionalized dogma and a form of ‘constitutive rationality’ which no
longer constitutes but merely reaffirms. It seems fair to conclude, then, that Marx would have been unhappy with too much societal
stability, whether it were due to policies derived from the utilitarian inertia of present preferential relations among men or to the privileged status
of historical ideology. Both instrumental and constitutive forms of rationality can be carried to extremes: but there
is nothing about the application of utilitarian techniques to the process of policy-formation that theoretically
requires societal stagnation or abdication of self-formative responsibilities. The successful management of societies as
well as corporations must rely upon an uncomfortable balancing of instrumental and constitutive rationality - of operating in an ambiguous realm
of no knowing fully what should be achieved or how it should be achieved – of the counterposition of incremental policy formulation with ‘fell
swoop’ analysis.