Jaguar Debate 1

Biometrics
Notes – So there are a lot of directions that this can be taken. There is a kritikal version, which could use
the anti-blackness, biopower, and/or framing contentions. There is also a policy version, which could use
the privacy, security theatre, and/or covert operations contentions. With the policy version, there are a
number of potential solvency mechanisms to choose from, either the FBI, TSA, Customs, or DHS. Or
you can just do it in general, and combat the stupid ASPEC arguments that will come with it. You could
also potentially have some solvency for the anti-blackness and panopticism contentions while still using a
policy version of the affirmative. Just be prepared for an incrementalism debate. My personal favorite
arrangement is a fusion between anti-blackness and biopower. That Johnson ’14 card is straight fire for
fusing Wilderson and Agamben. There are a ton of different permutations that can be made with all the
advantages, solvency mechanisms, etc. – J to the izz A, C to the izz K
 Jaguar Debate 2

***AFF***K***
 Jaguar Debate 3

Advocacy
We affirm a critical biometric consciousness.

We affirm that The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail
its domestic surveillance, an affirmation not from policy, but from a studiously
playful standpoint of the political.

Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance. We affirm the resolution not through policy, but through the
conscious representation of the refugee.

The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its biometric
domestic surveillance.

The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance conducted by biometric technologies.

The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance of incoming refugees conducted by biometric technologies.
 Jaguar Debate 4

Bio-power/Anti-blackness 1AC
 Jaguar Debate 5

Contention 1: Refugees
The United States surveys refugees using biometrics at every point from when they
first arrive and for the rest of their lives.
Farraj ’11 [Achraf Farraj, JD candidate for Columbia Law and on Columbia Human Right Law Review,
“REFUGEES AND THE BIOMETRIC FUTURE: THE IMPACT OF BIOMETRICS ON REFUGEES AND
ASYLUM SEEKERS,” 2011]

The United States makes widespread use of biometrics in identifying and verifying the identity of
refugees and asylum seekers. Refugees’ fingerprints are collected prior to their entry into the United States, either while obtaining a visa
or at a port of entry.15 DHS operates the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program,
which collects fingerprints from nearly all international visitors to the United States, including
refugees.16 By 2007, US-VISIT had collected nearly 100 million fingerprints,17 and its data had been used for
various purposes, such as checking the identity of visa applicants against the terrorist watch list18 and being introduced into evidence to show that aliens overstayed
their visas.19 The anticipated benefits of US-VISIT include: “[i]mproved biometric identification of foreign national travelers who may present threats to public safety
and the national security of the United States,” “ensuring the integrity of the United States immigration system through enhanced enforcement of immigration laws,”
and “reductions in fraud, undetected imposters and identity theft.”20 Refugees’ fingerprints may also be collected during their
stay in the United States. The Refugees, Asylum, and Parole System (RAPS) of the U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS) tracks and monitors the processing of asylum applications.21
To verify the identity of asylum applicants and to conduct a background check, RAPS schedules
applicants for fingerprinting at an Application Support Center.22 The fingerprints are then sent to DHS and the
FBI for comparison to those stored in other databases.23 No fingerprints are stored in RAPS.24 Applicants’ failure to submit to
fingerprinting without good cause may result in dismissal of their asylum application or waiver of adjudication
before an asylum officer.25 Such failure also automatically stops the Clock Query, which would further delay
applicants’ procurement of Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) and thus their ability to find work.26 Refugees and
asylum seekers who refuse to provide fingerprints are further disadvantaged because EADs must contain
fingerprints.27 Biometric information is stored in a number of databases. The Integrated Automated Fingerprint
Identification System (IAFIS), established in 1999, is the largest database of fingerprints in the world and is
maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 28 DHS maintains the Automatic Biometric Identification System (IDENT),
which is a database of biometric information that is used for various DHS functions, including the
enforcement of immigration laws. 29 Information stored in IDENT may be collected by organizations within DHS,
such as US-VISIT, and by agencies external to DHS.30 Fingerprints recorded by Application
Support Centers are held in the Biometric Storage System (BSS), the repository of all USCIS biometrics.31
PostSeptember 11 legislation and inter-departmental cooperation have made IDENT and IAFIS significantly interoperable; both are now
searchable by officers at over 150 ports of entry.32 BSS also interfaces with IAFIS and IDENT and is
notified if its fingerprints appear in either database.33

The concept of the refugee, which biometric technologies survey and define,
separates the rights of the citizen from the rights of the non-citizen, radically calling
into question the fundamental assumptions of the nation-state. The refugee puts
modern sovereignty in crisis.
Agamben ’95 [Giorgi Agamben “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life” (1995), translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Part III: The Camp As Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern - Chapter 2, Sections 3 & 4, pages 131-
134]

2.3. If
refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such
a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all because by breaking
the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern
 Jaguar Debate 6

sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes
the secret presupposition of the political domain - bare life - to appear for an instant within that
domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly "the man of rights," as Arendt suggests, the first and only real appearance of
rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always covers them over. Yet this is precisely what makes the figure of the
refugee so hard to define politically. Since the First World War, the birth-nation link has no longer been capable of
performing its legitimating function inside the nation-state, and the two terms have begun to show themselves to be irreparably
loosened from each other. From this perspective, the immense increase of refugees and stateless persons in Europe
(in a short span of time 1,500,000 White Russians, 700,000 Armenians, 500,000 Bulgarians, 1,000,000 Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of Germans, Hungarians,
and Rumanians were displaced from their countries) is
one of the two most significant phenomena. The other is the
contemporaneous institution by many European states of juridical measures allowing for the mass
denaturalization and denationalization of large portions of their own populations. The first introduction of such rules into the juridical order took place in
France in 1915 with respect to naturalized citizens of "enemy" origin; in 1922, Belgium followed the French example and revoked the naturalization of citizens who
had committed "antinational" acts during war; in 1926, the fascist regime issued an analogous law with respect to citizens who had shown themselves to be "unworthy
of Italian citizenship"; in 1933, it was Austria's turn; and so it continued until the Nuremberg laws on "citizenship in the Reich" and the "protection of German blood
and honor" brought this process to the most extreme point of its development, introducing the principle according to which citizenship was something of which one
had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question. And oneof the few rules to which Nazis
constantly adhered during the course of the "Final Solution" was that Jews could be sent to the
extermination camps only after they had been fully denationalized (stripped even of the residual citizenship left to them
after the Nuremberg laws). These two phenomena - which are, after all, absolutely correlative - show that the
birth-nation link, on which the declaration of 1789 had founded national sovereignty, had already lost its mechanical force and
power of self-regulation by the time of the First World War. On the one hand, the nation-states become greatly concerned with
natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every
political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other hand, the very rights of
man that once made sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressively
separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake of the supposed
representation and protection of a bare life that is more and more driven to the margins of the
nation-states, ultimately to be recodified into a new national identity. The contradictory character of these processes is certainly one of
the reasons for the failure of the attempts of the various committees and organizations by which states, the League of Nations, and, later, the
United Nations confronted the problem of refugees and the protection of human rights, from the Bureau Nansen (1922) to the
contemporary High Commission for Refugees (1951), whose actions, according to statue, are to have not a political but rather a "solely humanitarian and social"
mission. What is essential is that, every time refugees represent not individual cases but - as happens more and more often today -
a mass phenomenon, both these organizations and individual states prove themselves, despite their solemn
invocations of the "sacred and inalienable" rights of man, absolutely incapable of resolving the problem and even of
confronting it adequately. 2.4. The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are
experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the
citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations - which today are more and more supported by international commissions -
can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves,
maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the
recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively
considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life - which is to say, as life that can be killed but not sacrificed - and that
only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. The "imploring eyes" of the Rwandan
child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who "is now becoming more and more
difficult to find alive," may well be the most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that
humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need. A humanitarianism
separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of
sovereignty, and the camp - which is to say, the pure space of exception - is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot
master. The concept of the refugee (and the figure of life that is concept represents) must be resolutely separated from
the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously consider Arendt's claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-state are bound
together such that the decline and crisis of the one necessarily implies the end of the other. The refugee must be considered for what he
 Jaguar Debate 7

is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of
the nation-state, from the birth-nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to
clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life
is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights.

The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance. We thus affirm the resolution not through policy, but through the
conscious representation of the refugee as the victim of biometric state surveillance.
 Jaguar Debate 8

Contention 2: Biopower
Biometrics regulate every part of a population, depoliticizing the public sphere and
propping up biopolitics through the model of the panopticon.
Koljević ’08 [Bogdana Koljević is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Media and
Communications, Research Associate at the Institute for Political Studies and Counselor at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in Belgrade, September 2008, “Biopower and government tehniques”, Biometrics, Security, and Human
Rights]

The phenomenon where almost everything is done “in the name of life” and where life is apparently “the largest
value”, thus in a kind of a specific humanitarian rhetoric, simultaneously indicates an almost reverse occurrence in reality,
i.e. that factors such as the population’s health, migrations, conditions of life, birth and death rates,
are regulated and directed in a thus far unprecedented manner. No one has offered so convincing and substantiated
arguments as Foucault to prove that this process corresponds to the development of the theory and practice of
liberalism through history3 and that the main purpose of this effort is precisely the depoliticization
of the public sphere, i.e. the public as the key locus of the political. Namely, where biopolitical techniques of
government enter the scene, life comes to the foreground and its politicization – the most
representative example of which in the modern context are biometric techniques – directly leads to
the depoliticization of politics as a public sphere. Foucault’s basic idea is that multiple instrumentalizaiton of
life representing a paradigm of biopolitical practice implies another concept of power – entirely
different from that of the traditional sovereign power, i.e. suggest that the issue at hand is the one of
power relations that are not centered in classical political categories of e.g. territory or state . Foucault
calls this capillary power and points out that his own research aims at microphysics or microstrategy of power which is essentially desubstantiated and precisely as
such appears as power with a totalitarian potential. Its
objects may be individuals and groups and people, or all these
together and at the same time. One of the best examples of this power’s functioning is Foucault’s
model of panopticon in his Discipline and Punish4. Borrowing Bentham’s idea of panopticon (a system of prison surveillance and observation), Foucault
takes this model metaphorically, presenting it as a paradigm of something he calls development of disciplinary i.e.
government techniques whereby the entire society, the whole populace, is placed in an invisible
prison and under observation where everybody is always potentially guilty.

Biometric surveillance reduces people to their biological identity, politicizing the

concept of bare life, and destroying a person’s political identity.
Agamben ’14 [Giorgio – Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of Philosophy at Collège International de Philosophie in
Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, “From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power,”
transcript of lecture delivered by Agamben in Athens, 11-16-13, published on Roarmag, 2-4-14,
http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/]

One important sphere in which the axiom is operative is that of biometrical security apparatuses,
which increasingly pervade every aspect of social life. When biometrical technologies first appeared
in 18th century in France with Alphonse Bertillon and in England with Francis Galton, the inventor of finger prints, they were obviously
not meant to prevent crimes but only to recognize recidivist delinquents . Only once a second crime has occurred, you
can use the biometrical data to identify the offender. Biometrical technologies, which had been invented for recividist criminals, remained for a long time their
exclusive privilege. In 1943, US Congress still refused the Citizen Identification Act, which was meant to introduce for every citizen an Identity Card with finger
prints. But according to a sort of fatality or unwritten law of modernity, the technologies which have
been invented for animals, for criminals, strangers or Jews, will finally be extended to all human
beings . Therefore, in the course of 20th century, biometric technologies have been applied to all citizens,
and Bertillon’s identification photographs and Galton’s fingerprints are currently in use everywhere for ID cards. The De-politicization of Citizenship But the
extreme step has been taken only in our days and it is still in the process of full realization . The
 Jaguar Debate 9

development of new digital technologies, with optical scanners which can easily record not only
finger prints but also the retina or the eye’s iris structure, biometrical apparatuses tend to move
beyond the police stations and immigration offices and spread into everyday life. In many countries, the access to
student’s restaurants or even to schools is controlled by a biometric apparatus on which the student just puts his or her hand. The European industries in this field,
which are quickly growing, recommend that citizens get used to this kind of control from their early youth. The phenomenon is really disturbing, because the
European Commissions for the development of security (like the ESPR, European Security Research Program) include among their permanent members the
representatives of the big industries in the field, which are just the old armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System, that have converted to
the security business. It is easy to imagine the dangers represented by a power that could have at its
disposal the unlimited biometric and genetic information of all its citizens . With such a power at
hand, the extermination of the Jews, which was undertaken on the basis of incomparably less efficient documentation, would have
been total and incredibly swift. But I will not dwell on this important aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you
concern rather the transformation of political identity and of political relationships that are involved in security technologies. This transformation is
so extreme that we can legitimately ask not only if the society in which we live is still a democratic
one, but also if this society can still be considered political. Christian Meier has shown how in the 5th century a transformation of
the conceptualization of the political took place in Athens, which was grounded on what he calls a “politicization” (politisierung) of citizenship. While until that
moment the fact of belonging to the polis was defined by a number of conditions and social statuses of different kind — for instance belonging to nobility or to a
certain cultural community, to be a peasant or merchant, a member of a certain family, etc. — from now on citizenship became the main criterion of social identity.
“The result was a specifically Greek conception of citizenship, in which the fact that men had to behave as citizens found an institutional form. The belonging to
economic or religious communities was removed to a secondary rank. The citizens of a democracy considered themselves as members of the polis only in so far as
they devoted themselves to a political life. Polis and politeia, city and citizenship, constituted and defined one another. Citizenship became in that way a form of life,
by means of which the polis constituted itself in a domain clearly distinct from the oikos, the house. Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to
the private space, which was the reign of necessity.” According to Meier, this specifically Greek process of politicization was transmitted to Western politics, where
citizenship remained the decisive element. The hypothesis I would like to propose to you is that this
fundamental political factor has
entered an irrevocable process that we can only define as a process of increasing de-politicization .
What was in the beginning a way of living, an essentially and irreducibly active condition, has now become
a purely passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and the public are progressively blurred and become indistinguishable.
This process of the de-politicization of citizenship is so evident that I will not dwell on it . Rise of the State of
Control I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the security apparatuses have
played a decisive role in this process. The growing extension to citizens of technologies which were
conceived for criminals inevitably has consequences for the political identity of the citizen . For the first
time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social personality and its recognition by
others, but rather a function of biological data, which cannot bear any relation to it, like the arabesques of the fingerprints or the
disposition of the genes in the double helix of DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive factor of
social identity, which loses therefore its public character. If my identity is now determined by
biological facts that in no way depend on my will and over which I have no control, then the
construction of something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic . What relationship can I
establish with my fingerprints or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics loses its
sense and must be thought again from the ground up. While the classical Greek citizen was defined through the
opposition between the private and the public, the oikos, which is the place of reproductive life, and the polis, place of political action,
the modern citizen seems rather to move in a zone of indifference between the private and the
public, or, to quote Hobbes’ terms, the physical and the political body. The materialization in space of this zone of
indifference is the video surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities . Here again an
apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a
video-recorded place is no more an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private; a zone of indifference
between the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space is certainly a complex
phenomenon that involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a
special place. The primacy of the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to
the politicization of bare life in modern states . But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity begun
with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the normal relationship
between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion, police filing and control. The unspoken
principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential terrorist . But what
 Jaguar Debate 10

is a state ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic state? Can we even consider it as something political? In what
kind of state do we live today? You will probably know that Michel Foucault, in his book Surveiller et Punir and in his courses at the Collège de
France, sketched a typological classification of modern states. He shows how the state of the Ancien Regime, which he calls the territorial or sovereign state and
whose motto was faire mourir et laisser vivre, evolves progressively into a population state and into a disciplinary state, whose motto reverses now into faire vivre et
laisser mourir, as it will take care of the citizen’s life in order to produce healthy, well-ordered and manageable bodies. The
state in which we live
now is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze suggested to call it the État de contrôle, or control state ,
because what it wants is not to order and to impose discipline but rather to manage and to control.
Deleuze’s definition is correct, because management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has told it so clearly as the Italian
police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001 declared that the government did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder. From
Politics to Policing American
political scientists who have tried to analyze the constitutional
transformation involved in the Patriot Act and in the other laws which followed September 2001
prefer to speak of a security state . But what does security here mean? It is during the French
Revolution that the notion of security – sureté, as they used to say — is linked to the definition of police. The laws of
March 16, 1791 and August 11, 1792 introduced thus into French legislation the notion of police de sureté (security police), which was doomed to have a long history
in modernity. If you read the debates which preceded the vote on these laws you will see that police and security define one another, but no one among the speakers
(Brissot, Heraut de Séchelle, Gensonné) is able to define police or security by themselves. The debates focused on the situation of the
police with respect to justice and judicial power. Gensonné maintains that they are “two separate and distinct powers,” yet, while the
function of the judicial power is clear, it is impossible to define the role of the police. An analysis of the debate shows that the place and function of
the police is undecidable and must remain undecidable, because, if it were really absorbed in the
judicial power, the police could no more exist. This is the discretionary power which still today defines the actions of police officer, who,
in a concrete situation of danger for the public security act, so to speak, as a sovereign. But, even when he exerts this discretionary power, the policeman does not
really take a decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judge’s decision. Every decision concerns the causes, while the police acts on effects, which are by
definition undecidable. The
name of this undecidable element is no more today, like it was in 17th century, raison d’État, or state reason. It
is rather “security reasons”. The security state is a police state, but, again, in the juridical theory, the police
is a kind of black hole. All we can say is that when the so called “science of the police” first appears in the 18th century, the “police” is brought back to
its etymology from the Greek politeia and opposed as such to “politics”. But it is surprising to see that “police” coincides now with the true political function, while
the term politics is reserved for foreign policy. Thus Von Justi, in his treatise on Policey-Wissenschaft, calls Politik the relationship of a state with other states, while
he calls Polizei the relationship of a state with itself. It is worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: “Police is the relationship of a state with itself.” The hypothesis I
would like to suggest here is that, placing
itself under the sign of security, the modern state has left the domain of
politics to enter a no man’s land, whose geography and whose borders are still unknown. The
security state, whose name seems to refer to an absence of cares (securus from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about
the dangers it involves for democracy , because in it political life has become impossible, while
democracy means precisely the possibility of a political life.

Biopower and biopolitics regulate every part of the social body. Biopower was the
root cause to developments of capitalism, where the body was reduced as an
instrument of the state, and of segregation, which separated the racial and classist
‘abnormal’ from the ‘normal’. This creates an ultimately calculative approach to
human life.
Foucault ’76 [Michel Foucault, “The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction” Translated from the French
by Robert Hurley in 1978, published originally in 1976]

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism ; the latter would not ,
have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic
processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have
methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the
development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance
of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques
of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the
police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to
sustain them. They also acted
as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence
on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects
 Jaguar Debate 11

of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human
groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the
time indispensable. One knows how many times the question has been raised concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma" tion of capitalism; but what
occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps a
wider impact than the new morality; this
was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of
phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into
the sphere of political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this was the moment when the first contact between life and history was
brought about. On the contrary, the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very strong
for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always dominated by the menace of death.
But through a circular process, the economic-and primarily agricultural--development of the eighteenth century, and an increase in productivity and resources even
more rapid than the demographic growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the period of great
the
ravages from starvation and plague had come to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing to torment life so directly. But at the same time,
development of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agricultural
techniques, and the observations and measures relative to man's life and survival contributed to this
relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space for
movement thus conquered, and broadening and organizing that space, methods of power and
knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them.
Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual
and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history, no
doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence ; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate
that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and
power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death,
but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking
charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. If one can apply
the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-
power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and
made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. It is not that life has been totally integrated into
techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them. Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale than ever; and the biological risks
confronting the species are perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's "threshold of
modernity" has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as
a living being in question.

Constant surveillance is a technique of disciplinary control that creates the power

necessary to exclude the abnormal from the normal.
Foucault ’75 [Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," published in 1975, translated
in 1977, pages 196-198]

They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the nineteenth
century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant
(beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of power proper to disciplinary
partitioning Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused
space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution proper to power,
individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion – this is what
was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the
psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital. Generally speaking, all authorities
exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and
branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential
distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to
 Jaguar Debate 12

be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of
individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of
disciplinary controls makes it possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring into play against him the
dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to
which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary banding and exile of the leper
to quite different objects the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervision
and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise.
All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand hin
and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive. Bentham’s Panopticon is the
architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was base: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this
tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the
building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one
end to the other. All that is need, then, is to place a supervisor, in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a
schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the
The panoptic
periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.
mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it
reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – preserves only the first and
eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

Constant government surveillance has a normalizing function --- we seek to fit an

‘average’ created through aggregate data analysis --- this violently destroys
individualism --- when we take away government surveillance, disciplinary power
loses its efficacy.
Hall ’07 [5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political
Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 15-17)//roetlin]
Foucault labeled this new type of power as “disciplinary,” and while he acknowledged its earlier presence in isolated examples, his point was that, in modernity, this
type of disciplinary power extended its influence from society’s army barracks and monasteries to nearly every social institution. Disciplinary
mechanisms, he contended, infiltrated the whole of society in the late seventeenth century when the first concerted efforts to arrange and
control specific and identifiable groups of people took place. According to Foucault, the forces that are used to arrange and classify
groups of people also render those people as individual units. The individual, he argued, is thus a
construction of power created only when that individual is recognized as part of a larger and identifiable group–a group is not created
by a mass of individuals, but vice versa . According to Foucault, it is only through discipline that modern individuals are created out of a
mass. Disciplinary power, he claimed, differs from preexisting power mechanisms in that it is applied “primarily to bodies and
what they do rather than to the land and what it produces.” As a result of the propagation of disciplinary power, it at once
becomes possible to “extract time and labor, rather than commodities and wealth” from individual bodies (2003a, 35). An important step, Foucault points out, for the
budding capitalist economies of the time. Thus, for Foucault, this new mechanism of power was essentially “one of the basic tools for the establishment of industrial
capitalism and the corresponding type of society” that we now associate with capitalist economies (2003a, 36). In fact, it can be argued that the pressing need to
produce a labor force in the late seventeenth century sparked a refinement of existing disciplinary techniques–and the invention of others–in order to shape the bodies
of individuals into the exact type of laborers that would be appreciated by capitalists. The benefits of disciplinary power, Foucault explained, lie
in its precise manipulation of the body so as to render bodies “both useful and docile ” (Foucault 16 2003c,
249). “In short, [disciplinary power] dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an
‘aptitude,’ a ‘capacity,’ which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result
from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection ” (Foucault 1977, 138). All of this takes place, Foucault maintains,

through the meticulous regulation of the body’s movement and the time and space in which it moves. Specifically, there are three
elements of disciplinary power that Foucault claims train the bodies of individuals to become both “useful and docile;” hierarchical observation,
examination, and normalizing judgment. According to Foucault, the possibility of constant observation is
crucial for disciplinary power to be effective . For capitalist factories to succeed, he maintained, they need to be architecturally and
managerially structured so as to facilitate constant observation. Hierarchies must be established and workers must be monitored by those
in positions above their own, thus inducing good work habits without the threat of physical violence. Moreover, Foucault theorized that it was not
 Jaguar Debate 13

specifically constant observation that produced these results, for such observation of every worker would be both inefficient and impossible. It was merely the
possibility of being observed that shaped the behavior of laborers–the mere possibility that someone, somewhere might be watching. According to Foucault, those that
are being observed need to be evaluated in an effective way. Thus a second element of disciplinary power is the examination. Workers are periodically tested on their
abilities and their habits, however, the results of such tests matter little without some sort of standard of comparison. The
third element of disciplinary
power is
normalizing judgment–this element is linked to Foucault’s earlier interest in the development of statistics; the
gathering of knowledge about individuals . Through compiling such information, Foucault points out, it is
possible to identify an “average,” a standard by which to compare individual behavior. For Foucault, it is
ultimately the desire to be “normal,” that shapes individuals, their bodies and their minds. And “thanks to a
whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reports–all technology that
can be described as the disciplinary technology of labor,” the power to define what qualifies as
normal is taken completely out of the hands of those to which the standard is applied (Foucault 2003c, 242).
It is no accident that this form of power appears to be linked with another sense of the word “discipline,” meaning an academic field of study. In fact, for Foucault,
disciplinary power is inextricably bound to knowledge itself, particularly the fields of knowledge that make the individual the object of study–psychiatry, criminology,
sociology, psychology, and medicine. Together, the human sciences create a regime of power that, according to Foucault, controls, describes, and monitors human
behavior in terms of norms. By
setting out what is “normal,” the human sciences thus also intentionally create the idea
of abnormality or deviation. The more abnormal and excluded you are, the more individual you become.
Individuality is thus, for Foucault, not the desirable individuality of Liberalism–it is the mark of the mental
patient , the convict , and the over-comatose . It has nothing to do with taking control over one's own life and
everything to do with being controlled .
 Jaguar Debate 14

Contention 3: Anti-Blackness
Racism and biopolitics are co-constitutive, while certain populations become
marked as worthy of preservation, others become disposable commodities
Mendieta ’02 [Eduardo Prof. & Chair of Philosophy at SUNY at Stony Brook ‘To make live and to let die’ –
Foucault on Racism Meeting of the Foucault Circle APA Central Division Meeting –Chicago, April 25th2002,
http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/philosophy/people/faculty_pages/docs/foucault.pdf]
The narrative developed by Foucault in these lectures is more fractious and detailed that I am portraying. The canvass that Foucault is panting in these lectures
concerns not just the wars that gave birth to our society, and its novel forms of knowledge, it also concerns something which I find fascinating, and provocative: the
invention of a people. To counter and challenge the power of the invaders, as well as the power of popes and kings, and using the narratives to unmask their acts of
usurpation and tyranny, elements within a social body begin to appeal to the ideas of a people, which then refers to a race, which then refers to a populations, and then
is enshrined in the anodyne notion of “society.” From a Foucauldian perspective, the
objects of scientific study are partly constituted
by the disciplines that seek to study them. So, just as psychiatry produces the madman, and
sexology the sexual deviant, and so on, political theory in conjunction with historical discourse,
produces a people. But the discourse of political rationality that emerged since the sixteenth century does not secrete a univocal idea of a people. As
the political rationality of the modern state develops and grows in intensity, as it augments its
claims to power, a people becomes a nation, becomes a population, becomes a biological
phenomenon to be tended by all the sciences at the service of the state. Analogously to how sexuality
became the locus of the production of control, insofar as it was the pivot of interaction between
individuals and their surrounding social environment, race also became the pivot around which the
biopower state came to exert its claims, so as to be able to produce certain power effects. What is
provocative here is the link that Foucault establishes between the emergence of biopower and the constitution of something that we have now become accustomed to
calling society, by which we in fact mean a population, a people, a particular nation. For Foucault the emergence of political rationality is directly linked to the
constitution of the object over which it must act. And here I am able to foreground one of the central lessons of these lectures, namely that political theory has to
attend to the emergence of political rationality in terms not of its rationality, or claims to reason, but in terms of its modalities of operation. Behind political rationality
does not stand reason, or rather, reason is not the alibi of political rationality; instead, political rationality has to do with the horizon of its enactment. If we accept that
Foucault is a historical nominalist, and he is a nominalist through and through, in the way that Rorty reads him, and correctly I would argue, then there is no reason
behind political power. Political power itself cannot be mystified. There is no power without the horizon of its enactment and the vehicles of its transmission. This is
still a misleading way of putting. The effects produced by a certain way of organizing the social body, of studying it, of policing it, of taking care of it, of making sure
that its health and protection are attended to in the most detailed and careful ways possible, produce a confrontation of forces, whose momentary stalemates, clashes,
subjugations and dispersal, are summarized in the name of power. And that power is the power over life. The
political rationality of the
modern state is above all a rationality grounded in the way it tends to the life of the population. The
power of the biopolitical state is a regulation of life, a tending, a nurturing and management of the
living. The political rationality of the modern total state is management of the living body of the
people. This logic was epitomized in the paroxysm of the Nazi state, but also in the communist
states, withtheir Gulags. I have thus far discussed Foucault’s triangulation between the discourses of the production of truth, the power that these
discourse enact and make available to social agents, and the constitution of a political rationality that is linked to the invention and creation of its horizon of activity
and surveillance. I want now to focus on the main theme of this courses’ last lecture. This theme discloses in a unique way the power and perspicacity of Foucault’s
method. The theme concerns the kind of power that biopower renders available, or rather, how biopolitics produces certain power effects by thinking of the living in a
novel way. We will approach the theme by way of a contrast:
whereas the power of the sovereign under Medieval and early
Modern times was the power to make die and to let live, the power of the total state, which is the
biopower state, is the power to make live and to let die. Foucault discerned here a telling asymmetry. If the sovereign exercised
his power with the executioner’s axe, with the perpetual threat of death, then life was abandoned to its devices. Power was exhibited only on the scaffold, or the
guillotine –its terror was the shimmer of the unsheathed sword. Power was ritualistic, ceremonial, theatrical, and to that extent partial, molecular, and calendrical. It
was also a power that by its own juridical logic had to submit to the jostling of rights and claims. In the very performance of its might, the power of the sovereign
revealed its limitation. It is a power that is localized and circumscribed to the theater of its cruelty, and the staging of its pomp. In contrast, however, the power of the
biopower state is over life [expand]. And here Foucault asks “how can biopolitics then reclaim the power over death?” or rather, how can it make die in light of the
fact that its claim to legitimacy is that it is guarding, nurturing, tending to life? In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it make die, how does it
kill? This is a similar question to the one that theologians asked about the Christian God. If God is a god of life, the giver of life, how can he put to death, how can he
allow death to descend upon his gift of life –why is death a possibility if god is the giver of life? Foucault’s answer is that in order to re-claim death, to be able to
inflict death on its subjects, its living beings, biopower must make use of racism; more precisely, racism intervenes here to grant access to death to the biopower state.
We must recall that the political rationality of biopower is deployed over a population, which is understood as a continuum of life. It is this continuum of life that
eugenics, social hygiene, civil engineering, civil medicine, military engineers, doctors and nurses, policeman, and so on, tended to by a careful management of roads,
factories, living quarters, brothels, red-districts, planning and planting of gardens and recreation centers, and the gerrymandering of populations by means of roads,
access to public transformations, placement of schools, and so on. Biopolitics
is the result of the development and
maintenance of the hothouse of the political body, of the body-politic. Society has become the
vivarium of the political rationality, and biopolitics acts on the teeming biomass contained within
 Jaguar Debate 15

the parameters of that structure built up by the institutions of health, education, and production.
This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For
the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription
within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am
quoting: “the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization.
Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in
first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to
death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrière] function of the state, to the degree that the
state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political
Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after the 18 th century, a power which is enacted through the
police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the population is nothing
more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.”
(Foucault 2000, 416). Racism,
is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of
one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a
population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism
within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a
new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war
of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit,
against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower,
re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism
makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death
and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of
suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an
everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To
protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity
of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature.

Biometric technologies are a way of branding the black slave as a commodity.

Browne ’13 [Simone Browne completed her PhD in 2007. She began her faculty position in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She researches and teaches in the areas of Surveillance
Studies, Social Media, and Black Diaspora Studies., "Dark Matters: Branding, Biometric Technology, and the
Surveillance of Blackness" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual
Meeting, Hilton Washington, Washington, DC, Nov 21, 2013]
Wilson Chinn, the carte de visite, brings plantation punishment, branding, and escape into focus. I continue here with the discussion begun in chapter 2 on the Book of
Negroes, lantern laws, and how
the tracking of blackness as property informs the contemporary surveillance
of the racial body by now questioning how the intimate relation between branding and the black
body—our biometric past—can allow us to think critically about our biometric present. Biometric
information technology, or biometrics, in its simplest form, is a means of body measurement that is
put to use to allow the body, or parts and pieces and performances of the human body, to function
as identification. In order to understand the meanings of branding as historically situated, in this chapter I explore
some early applications of this biometric information technology and question its role in the racial
framing of blackness as property. What I am suggesting here is that branding in the transatlantic slave trade was
a biometric technology , as it was a measure of slavery's making, marking, and marketing of the
black subject as commodity.
 Jaguar Debate 16

Biometric technologies place nonwhites in a racialized zero degree of

nonrepresentation, and presumes whiteness as the gauge of merit for society,
putting the white, or human, on a hierarchy of power above the black, or
nonhuman, and the savage.
Pugliese ’07 [Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of Media, Music,
Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the
Racialized Zero Degree of Nonrepresentation”, 2007]

This racialized zero degree of nonrepresentation must not be viewed in terms of some mystifying
technological “anomaly” or “glitch.” On the contrary, I would argue that particular biometric technologies are
infrastructurally calibrated to whiteness—that is, whiteness is configured as the universal gauge
that determines the technical settings and parameters for the visual imaging and capture of a
subject. I will draw on the term calibration as it effectively encapsulates the three key levels of signification that
inscribe the operation of whiteness in biometric technologies. On one level, to calibrate a technology is
“to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities.”12 As universal gauge,
whiteness is the absolute standard within certain biometric technologies, targeting the capture of white subjects but
also allowing for a degree of white variations in skin tone and color—that is, allowing for a certain
range of “irregularities” that may fall outside this standard. These “irregularities,” however, are circumscribed within
a clearly delineated zone of whiteness and its various chromatic variations. Outside of this diffuse, gray-scale zone of whiteness reside
nonwhite subjects who are literally beyond the pale. As I have demonstrated, this degree of allowance literally
cuts off when biometric imaging technologies are confronted by subjects whose biometric details—
for example, their dark skin color—are so “irregular” as to fall outside the technical parameters set for image
capture. Here the term irregular graphically illustrates the disciplinary power of the white gauge in
determining the normative standards of imaging technologies. In such instances, nonwhite subjects, in literally
failing to appear before the biometric system despite their physical presentation, are dispatched to the outer limits of
nonappearance, to the zero degree of nonrepresentation. Calibration perfectly resonates with this imaging economy in that it is a
term that effectively belongs to the lexical set of camera settings: a camera operator has a repertoire of calibrations at hand when filming; these calibrations operate at
the level of lighting, aperture, and lens focus. On another level, the process of calibrating a technology means not only to establish “a set of graduations or markings”
but also to generate a “classification.”13 The calibration to whiteness of biometric systems, in other words, not only
determines the universal gauge of these imaging technologies, it also implicitly reproduces the legendary
racial system of classification and hierarchy that places whiteness at the apex followed, in a graduating scale, by
Asians and blacks.14 Within Western economies of visual representation, this racial hierarchy has systemically guaranteed the
nonrepresentation of nonwhites within a wide spectrum of visual media, including film and
television. Finally, the semantic core of calibration is derived from the term caliber. Caliber refers to a “degree
of social standing or importance, quality, rank; ‘stamp,’ degree of merit or importance.”15 In the context of the calibration to whiteness
of biometric technologies, the term caliber underscores questions of power and hierarchy that inflect the
physical settings of imaging technologies, as whiteness assumes the gauge of “merit or importance” that determines
who may or may not be visually captured within the calibrated zone of representation.

Traditional academic and political discourse is ineffective because it focuses on the

unique instances of discriminatory practices instead of challenging the violent
antagonisms of the world as a whole. This entrenches the violent biopolitical state.
Wilderson ’10 [Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure
of US Antagonisms,”]
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by
extension, the
grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are
the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large , for they draw our
 Jaguar Debate 17

attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently
powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act,
and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent
and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the
actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The
woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she
was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was
articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition
from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through
commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone
else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she
had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In
her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical .
And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world
attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an
indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid
enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political?
Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually , and
cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair
the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the
structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no
longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have
been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When
pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political,
questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides,
and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar,
an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if
the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and
the plethora
of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is
now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously
unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker
“crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship,
and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.ii In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not
“Should the U.S. be overthrown?” or even “Would it be overthrown?” but rather when and how—and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those
steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ
large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion
Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the
paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather
Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle
mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success ,” but they could not
dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—
that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and
progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no
ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.iii One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom,
however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.” The political discourse of

Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The
raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical
accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the
question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired”
from struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM
Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been
 Jaguar Debate 18

rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the “crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not
only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and
with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a
revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement
and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no
longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in
the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but
“yes” in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and
Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both
cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms . Between 1967 and 1980, we could
think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present,
Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is,
as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic
strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed
and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not
dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with
problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the non-narrative, or
cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red
and Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the
mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes
unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is
possible.v Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the grammar of assumptions regarding the
ontology of suffering—which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct
relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also
unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a
structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume
crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity
mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering
stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may
not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is,
nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows. The difficulty of a writing a book which seeks to uncover Red,
Back, and White socially engaged feature films as aesthetic accompaniments to grammars of suffering,
predicated on the subject positions of the “Savage” and the Slave is that today’s intellectual
protocols are not informed by Fanon’s insistence that “ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the
wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [sic]” (Black Skin, White Masks 110). In sharp
contrast to the late 60s and early 70s, we now live in a political, academic, and cinematic milieu which stresses
“diversity,” “unity,” “civic participation,” “hybridity,” “access,” and “contribution.” The radical
fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and
social stability. The distance between the protester and the police has narrowed considerably. The
effect of this upon the academy is that intellectual protocols tend to privilege two of the three
domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around “political unity,” “social
attitudes,” “civic participation,” and “diversity,”) and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the humanities’ postmodern regimes of
“diversity,” “hybridity,” and “relative [rather than “master”] narratives”). Since the 1980s, intellectual protocols aligned with structural
positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly fashionable
anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power
relations— such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academy’s ensembles of questions are fixated on
specific and “unique” experience of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions.
This would fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the upshot of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play,
and the composite effect of cinematic and political discourse since the 1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites the
 Jaguar Debate 19

US and its foundational antagonisms. This

state of affairs exacerbates—or, more precisely, mystifies and veils— the ontological
death of the Slave and the “Savage” because (as in the 1950s) cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of
the current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of
Indigenism and Blackness— academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a revolutionary
critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how Left-leaning scholars help
civil society recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of emergency for Indians
and Blacks .

Anti-Blackness is the Controlling Impact for how we should interpret all forms of
violence. The perpetual and gratuitous violence against the black sets the stage for
how all other contingent acts of violence are enacted.
Crockett ‘14 [J’Nasah , writer, performer, and cultural worker who focuses on Black cultural production and
Black radical traditions. “Raving Amazons”: Anti-blackness and Misogynoir in Social Media June
30,2014https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/raving-amazons-antiblackness-and-misogynoir-in-social-media.]

Anti-blackness, in a rough-hewn nutshell, is the structuring logic of the modernity and the foundation of the
contemporary world we live in. It is the glue and the string running through our conceptions of
what it means to be free, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a legitimate and
productive member of society, what it means to be Human, and what it means to be the anti-
Human. Anti-blackness is the structural positioning of the Black (“the Black” here being a marker for a certain type of
subjectivity comparable to Marx’s “the worker” – shoutout Frank Wilderson) as an object that is fungible and able to be
accumulated like any other wicket churned out by the process of capitalism; it is the fact of Black
folks being open to perpetual and gratuitous violence that needs no definitive prior provocation or
“reason;” the “reason” is the fact of Blackness (see:getting shot for walking home with some
Skittles, getting shot while being handcuffed in the backseat of a car, getting shot for calling
911, being beaten for staring at someone in a “dehumanizing” way, and on and on).It is, to echo Hartman, the
afterlife of slavery: a logic that collapses the past and the present and places violence towards the Black within a range of acceptable daily practices. Certainly anti-
blackness is attitudinal – see the libidinal economy, i.e. the systems of desire and instincts and fantasies and repulsion around skin tone, hair types,
bodies that makes itself apparent in Eurocentric beauty standards or the fact that lighter-skinned African American women receive shorter prison sentences than their
darker-skinned counterparts. But that’s how logic and structures operate, they imbue everything that springs
forth from them. Our lives and societies (because when we speak of the afterlife of race-based chattel slavery, Arab and trans-Atlantic, we
are speaking of the entire world) are fundamentally shaped by it, not only institutionally, but also at the level of
the everyday, including crossing the street. So of course it makes itself apparent in the supposedly brave new world (so different from any
world that came before!) of social media.I myself joined both Twitter and Tumblr back in 2009, after experiences stretching back to high school with
BlackPlanet.com, Myspace, Livejournal, and of course Facebook. With Twitter and Tumblr, however, I joined after spending a year or two lurking on the edges of a
particular group of (mostly) women of color, and moving onto social media around the same time they did allowed me to connect with them in ways I wasn’t able to
when the main platform was, say, WordPress. For us, and for the many Black women I have since connected and built with since 2009, social media offers us yet
another way to build our “beloved communities,” to extend the networks of love, camaraderie, and joyous support that have long existed in our meatspace
communities – hair salons, churches, Black student unions, kitchen tables, etc. Social media also becomes a central site for much of our activism, from the
multinational #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to holding media outlets accountable for publishing blatant racism. We are also theory houses, circulating and challenging
discourses and practices that negatively impact our lives as Black women, and making critical connections that are often missing from the media that surrounds us. I
can’t help but see historical parallels to, say, early 20th century Pullman Porters secretly distributing copies of The Chicago Defender to the Black folks they came
across. What we’re doing is nothing new, but being on social media means that this networking is happening in the public eye. I also can’t help but see historical
The topic of surveillance
parallels in the multiple forms of anti-black backlash Black women have received on social media over the past few years.
has been a hot one lately, but many discussions on it stop and end at the Edward
in social media
Snowden/NSA type revelations over post-9/11, post-War on Terror invasions of privacy at the
hands of an overzealous government. However, if we were to extend the idea of policing and
surveillance further back in time, and expand it beyond the trope of it being primarily carried out
by government employees, it becomes apparent that surveillance has already been a central part of
the experience of Black women on Twitter. Recall that in the U.S., the police have their roots in slave
patrols; policing and management of the potentially unruly Black bodies underlies the call for law
and order and the constituent need for police. To quote Wilderson again, in society there is a “fundamental anxiety
 Jaguar Debate 20

over where is the Black and what is he or she doing,” and in an anti-black world, every non-Black is
deputized to patrol and manage the Blacks.
 Jaguar Debate 21

Bio-Power/Anti-Blackness for Lay 1AC

 Jaguar Debate 22

Contention 1: Refugees
The United States surveys refugees using biometrics at every point from when they
first arrive and for the rest of their lives.
Farraj ’11 [Achraf Farraj, JD candidate for Columbia Law and on Columbia Human Right Law Review,
“REFUGEES AND THE BIOMETRIC FUTURE: THE IMPACT OF BIOMETRICS ON REFUGEES AND
ASYLUM SEEKERS,” 2011]

The United States makes widespread use of biometrics in identifying and verifying the identity of
refugees and asylum seekers. Refugees’ fingerprints are collected prior to their entry into the United States, either while obtaining a visa
or at a port of entry.15 DHS operates the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program,
which collects fingerprints from nearly all international visitors to the United States, including
refugees.16 By 2007, US-VISIT had collected nearly 100 million fingerprints,17 and its data had been used for
various purposes, such as checking the identity of visa applicants against the terrorist watch list18 and being introduced into evidence to show that aliens overstayed
their visas.19 The anticipated benefits of US-VISIT include: “[i]mproved biometric identification of foreign national travelers who may present threats to public safety
and the national security of the United States,” “ensuring the integrity of the United States immigration system through enhanced enforcement of immigration laws,”
and “reductions in fraud, undetected imposters and identity theft.”20 Refugees’ fingerprints may also be collected during their
stay in the United States. The Refugees, Asylum, and Parole System (RAPS) of the U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS) tracks and monitors the processing of asylum applications.21
To verify the identity of asylum applicants and to conduct a background check, RAPS schedules
applicants for fingerprinting at an Application Support Center.22 The fingerprints are then sent to DHS and the
FBI for comparison to those stored in other databases.23 No fingerprints are stored in RAPS.24 Applicants’ failure to submit to
fingerprinting without good cause may result in dismissal of their asylum application or waiver of adjudication
before an asylum officer.25 Such failure also automatically stops the Clock Query, which would further delay
applicants’ procurement of Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) and thus their ability to find work.26 Refugees and
asylum seekers who refuse to provide fingerprints are further disadvantaged because EADs must contain
fingerprints.27 Biometric information is stored in a number of databases. The Integrated Automated Fingerprint
Identification System (IAFIS), established in 1999, is the largest database of fingerprints in the world and is
maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 28 DHS maintains the Automatic Biometric Identification System (IDENT),
which is a database of biometric information that is used for various DHS functions, including the
enforcement of immigration laws. 29 Information stored in IDENT may be collected by organizations within DHS,
such as US-VISIT, and by agencies external to DHS.30 Fingerprints recorded by Application
Support Centers are held in the Biometric Storage System (BSS), the repository of all USCIS biometrics.31
PostSeptember 11 legislation and inter-departmental cooperation have made IDENT and IAFIS significantly interoperable; both are now
searchable by officers at over 150 ports of entry.32 BSS also interfaces with IAFIS and IDENT and is
notified if its fingerprints appear in either database.33

The concept of the refugee, which biometric technologies survey and define,
separates the rights of the citizen from the rights of the non-citizen, radically calling
into question the fundamental assumptions of the nation-state. The refugee puts
modern sovereignty in crisis.
Agamben ’95 [Giorgi Agamben “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life” (1995), translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Part III: The Camp As Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern - Chapter 2, Sections 3 & 4, pages 131-
134]

2.3. If
refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such
a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all because by breaking
the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern
 Jaguar Debate 23

sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes
the secret presupposition of the political domain - bare life - to appear for an instant within that
domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly "the man of rights," as Arendt suggests, the first and only real appearance of
rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always covers them over. Yet this is precisely what makes the figure of the
refugee so hard to define politically. Since the First World War, the birth-nation link has no longer been capable of
performing its legitimating function inside the nation-state, and the two terms have begun to show themselves to be irreparably
loosened from each other. From this perspective, the immense increase of refugees and stateless persons in Europe
(in a short span of time 1,500,000 White Russians, 700,000 Armenians, 500,000 Bulgarians, 1,000,000 Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of Germans, Hungarians,
and Rumanians were displaced from their countries) is
one of the two most significant phenomena. The other is the
contemporaneous institution by many European states of juridical measures allowing for the mass
denaturalization and denationalization of large portions of their own populations. The first introduction of such rules into the juridical order took place in
France in 1915 with respect to naturalized citizens of "enemy" origin; in 1922, Belgium followed the French example and revoked the naturalization of citizens who
had committed "antinational" acts during war; in 1926, the fascist regime issued an analogous law with respect to citizens who had shown themselves to be "unworthy
of Italian citizenship"; in 1933, it was Austria's turn; and so it continued until the Nuremberg laws on "citizenship in the Reich" and the "protection of German blood
and honor" brought this process to the most extreme point of its development, introducing the principle according to which citizenship was something of which one
had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question. And oneof the few rules to which Nazis
constantly adhered during the course of the "Final Solution" was that Jews could be sent to the
extermination camps only after they had been fully denationalized (stripped even of the residual citizenship left to them
after the Nuremberg laws). These two phenomena - which are, after all, absolutely correlative - show that the
birth-nation link, on which the declaration of 1789 had founded national sovereignty, had already lost its mechanical force and
power of self-regulation by the time of the First World War. On the one hand, the nation-states become greatly concerned with
natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every
political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other hand, the very rights of
man that once made sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressively
separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake of the supposed
representation and protection of a bare life that is more and more driven to the margins of the
nation-states, ultimately to be recodified into a new national identity. The contradictory character of these processes is certainly one of
the reasons for the failure of the attempts of the various committees and organizations by which states, the League of Nations, and, later, the
United Nations confronted the problem of refugees and the protection of human rights, from the Bureau Nansen (1922) to the
contemporary High Commission for Refugees (1951), whose actions, according to statue, are to have not a political but rather a "solely humanitarian and social"
mission. What is essential is that, every time refugees represent not individual cases but - as happens more and more often today -
a mass phenomenon, both these organizations and individual states prove themselves, despite their solemn
invocations of the "sacred and inalienable" rights of man, absolutely incapable of resolving the problem and even of
confronting it adequately. 2.4. The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are
experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the
citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations - which today are more and more supported by international commissions -
can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves,
maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the
recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively
considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life - which is to say, as life that can be killed but not sacrificed - and that
only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. The "imploring eyes" of the Rwandan
child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who "is now becoming more and more
difficult to find alive," may well be the most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that
humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need. A humanitarianism
separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of
sovereignty, and the camp - which is to say, the pure space of exception - is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot
master. The concept of the refugee (and the figure of life that is concept represents) must be resolutely separated from
the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously consider Arendt's claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-state are bound
together such that the decline and crisis of the one necessarily implies the end of the other. The refugee must be considered for what he
 Jaguar Debate 24

is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of
the nation-state, from the birth-nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to
clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life
is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights.

The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance conducted by biometric technologies.
 Jaguar Debate 25

Contention 2: Biopower
Biometrics regulate every part of a population, depoliticizing the public sphere and
propping up biopolitics through the model of the panopticon.
Koljević ’08 [Bogdana Koljević is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Media and
Communications, Research Associate at the Institute for Political Studies and Counselor at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in Belgrade, September 2008, “Biopower and government tehniques”, Biometrics, Security, and Human
Rights]

The phenomenon where almost everything is done “in the name of life” and where life is apparently “the largest
value”, thus in a kind of a specific humanitarian rhetoric, simultaneously indicates an almost reverse occurrence in reality,
i.e. that factors such as the population’s health, migrations, conditions of life, birth and death rates,
are regulated and directed in a thus far unprecedented manner. No one has offered so convincing and substantiated
arguments as Foucault to prove that this process corresponds to the development of the theory and practice of
liberalism through history3 and that the main purpose of this effort is precisely the depoliticization
of the public sphere, i.e. the public as the key locus of the political. Namely, where biopolitical techniques of
government enter the scene, life comes to the foreground and its politicization – the most
representative example of which in the modern context are biometric techniques – directly leads to
the depoliticization of politics as a public sphere. Foucault’s basic idea is that multiple instrumentalizaiton of
life representing a paradigm of biopolitical practice implies another concept of power – entirely
different from that of the traditional sovereign power, i.e. suggest that the issue at hand is the one of
power relations that are not centered in classical political categories of e.g. territory or state . Foucault
calls this capillary power and points out that his own research aims at microphysics or microstrategy of power which is essentially desubstantiated and precisely as
such appears as power with a totalitarian potential. Its
objects may be individuals and groups and people, or all these
together and at the same time. One of the best examples of this power’s functioning is Foucault’s
model of panopticon in his Discipline and Punish4. Borrowing Bentham’s idea of panopticon (a system of prison surveillance and observation), Foucault
takes this model metaphorically, presenting it as a paradigm of something he calls development of disciplinary i.e.
government techniques whereby the entire society, the whole populace, is placed in an invisible
prison and under observation where everybody is always potentially guilty.

Biometric surveillance reduces people to their biological identity, politicizing the

concept of bare life, and destroying a person’s political identity.
Agamben ’14 [Giorgio – Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of Philosophy at Collège International de Philosophie in
Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, “From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power,”
transcript of lecture delivered by Agamben in Athens, 11-16-13, published on Roarmag, 2-4-14,
http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/]

One important sphere in which the axiom is operative is that of biometrical security apparatuses,
which increasingly pervade every aspect of social life. When biometrical technologies first appeared
in 18th century in France with Alphonse Bertillon and in England with Francis Galton, the inventor of finger prints, they were obviously
not meant to prevent crimes but only to recognize recidivist delinquents . Only once a second crime has occurred, you
can use the biometrical data to identify the offender. Biometrical technologies, which had been invented for recividist criminals, remained for a long time their
exclusive privilege. In 1943, US Congress still refused the Citizen Identification Act, which was meant to introduce for every citizen an Identity Card with finger
prints. But according to a sort of fatality or unwritten law of modernity, the technologies which have
been invented for animals, for criminals, strangers or Jews, will finally be extended to all human
beings . Therefore, in the course of 20th century, biometric technologies have been applied to all citizens,
and Bertillon’s identification photographs and Galton’s fingerprints are currently in use everywhere for ID cards. The De-politicization of Citizenship But the
extreme step has been taken only in our days and it is still in the process of full realization . The
 Jaguar Debate 26

development of new digital technologies, with optical scanners which can easily record not only
finger prints but also the retina or the eye’s iris structure, biometrical apparatuses tend to move
beyond the police stations and immigration offices and spread into everyday life. In many countries, the access to
student’s restaurants or even to schools is controlled by a biometric apparatus on which the student just puts his or her hand. The European industries in this field,
which are quickly growing, recommend that citizens get used to this kind of control from their early youth. The phenomenon is really disturbing, because the
European Commissions for the development of security (like the ESPR, European Security Research Program) include among their permanent members the
representatives of the big industries in the field, which are just the old armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System, that have converted to
the security business. It is easy to imagine the dangers represented by a power that could have at its
disposal the unlimited biometric and genetic information of all its citizens . With such a power at
hand, the extermination of the Jews, which was undertaken on the basis of incomparably less efficient documentation, would have
been total and incredibly swift. But I will not dwell on this important aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you
concern rather the transformation of political identity and of political relationships that are involved in security technologies. This transformation is
so extreme that we can legitimately ask not only if the society in which we live is still a democratic
one, but also if this society can still be considered political. Christian Meier has shown how in the 5th century a transformation of
the conceptualization of the political took place in Athens, which was grounded on what he calls a “politicization” (politisierung) of citizenship. While until that
moment the fact of belonging to the polis was defined by a number of conditions and social statuses of different kind — for instance belonging to nobility or to a
certain cultural community, to be a peasant or merchant, a member of a certain family, etc. — from now on citizenship became the main criterion of social identity.
“The result was a specifically Greek conception of citizenship, in which the fact that men had to behave as citizens found an institutional form. The belonging to
economic or religious communities was removed to a secondary rank. The citizens of a democracy considered themselves as members of the polis only in so far as
they devoted themselves to a political life. Polis and politeia, city and citizenship, constituted and defined one another. Citizenship became in that way a form of life,
by means of which the polis constituted itself in a domain clearly distinct from the oikos, the house. Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to
the private space, which was the reign of necessity.” According to Meier, this specifically Greek process of politicization was transmitted to Western politics, where
citizenship remained the decisive element. The hypothesis I would like to propose to you is that this
fundamental political factor has
entered an irrevocable process that we can only define as a process of increasing de-politicization .
What was in the beginning a way of living, an essentially and irreducibly active condition, has now become
a purely passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and the public are progressively blurred and become indistinguishable.
This process of the de-politicization of citizenship is so evident that I will not dwell on it . Rise of the State of
Control I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the security apparatuses have
played a decisive role in this process. The growing extension to citizens of technologies which were
conceived for criminals inevitably has consequences for the political identity of the citizen . For the first
time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social personality and its recognition by
others, but rather a function of biological data, which cannot bear any relation to it, like the arabesques of the fingerprints or the
disposition of the genes in the double helix of DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive factor of
social identity, which loses therefore its public character. If my identity is now determined by
biological facts that in no way depend on my will and over which I have no control, then the
construction of something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic . What relationship can I
establish with my fingerprints or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics loses its
sense and must be thought again from the ground up. While the classical Greek citizen was defined through the
opposition between the private and the public, the oikos, which is the place of reproductive life, and the polis, place of political action,
the modern citizen seems rather to move in a zone of indifference between the private and the
public, or, to quote Hobbes’ terms, the physical and the political body. The materialization in space of this zone of
indifference is the video surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities . Here again an
apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a
video-recorded place is no more an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private; a zone of indifference
between the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space is certainly a complex
phenomenon that involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a
special place. The primacy of the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to
the politicization of bare life in modern states . But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity begun
with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the normal relationship
between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion, police filing and control. The unspoken
principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential terrorist . But what
 Jaguar Debate 27

is a state ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic state? Can we even consider it as something political? In what
kind of state do we live today? You will probably know that Michel Foucault, in his book Surveiller et Punir and in his courses at the Collège de
France, sketched a typological classification of modern states. He shows how the state of the Ancien Regime, which he calls the territorial or sovereign state and
whose motto was faire mourir et laisser vivre, evolves progressively into a population state and into a disciplinary state, whose motto reverses now into faire vivre et
laisser mourir, as it will take care of the citizen’s life in order to produce healthy, well-ordered and manageable bodies. The
state in which we live
now is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze suggested to call it the État de contrôle, or control state ,
because what it wants is not to order and to impose discipline but rather to manage and to control.
Deleuze’s definition is correct, because management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has told it so clearly as the Italian
police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001 declared that the government did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder. From
Politics to Policing American
political scientists who have tried to analyze the constitutional
transformation involved in the Patriot Act and in the other laws which followed September 2001
prefer to speak of a security state . But what does security here mean? It is during the French
Revolution that the notion of security – sureté, as they used to say — is linked to the definition of police. The laws of
March 16, 1791 and August 11, 1792 introduced thus into French legislation the notion of police de sureté (security police), which was doomed to have a long history
in modernity. If you read the debates which preceded the vote on these laws you will see that police and security define one another, but no one among the speakers
(Brissot, Heraut de Séchelle, Gensonné) is able to define police or security by themselves. The debates focused on the situation of the
police with respect to justice and judicial power. Gensonné maintains that they are “two separate and distinct powers,” yet, while the
function of the judicial power is clear, it is impossible to define the role of the police. An analysis of the debate shows that the place and function of
the police is undecidable and must remain undecidable, because, if it were really absorbed in the
judicial power, the police could no more exist. This is the discretionary power which still today defines the actions of police officer, who,
in a concrete situation of danger for the public security act, so to speak, as a sovereign. But, even when he exerts this discretionary power, the policeman does not
really take a decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judge’s decision. Every decision concerns the causes, while the police acts on effects, which are by
definition undecidable. The
name of this undecidable element is no more today, like it was in 17th century, raison d’État, or state reason. It
is rather “security reasons”. The security state is a police state, but, again, in the juridical theory, the police
is a kind of black hole. All we can say is that when the so called “science of the police” first appears in the 18th century, the “police” is brought back to
its etymology from the Greek politeia and opposed as such to “politics”. But it is surprising to see that “police” coincides now with the true political function, while
the term politics is reserved for foreign policy. Thus Von Justi, in his treatise on Policey-Wissenschaft, calls Politik the relationship of a state with other states, while
he calls Polizei the relationship of a state with itself. It is worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: “Police is the relationship of a state with itself.” The hypothesis I
would like to suggest here is that, placing
itself under the sign of security, the modern state has left the domain of
politics to enter a no man’s land, whose geography and whose borders are still unknown. The
security state, whose name seems to refer to an absence of cares (securus from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about
the dangers it involves for democracy , because in it political life has become impossible, while
democracy means precisely the possibility of a political life.

Biopower and biopolitics regulate every part of the social body. Biopower was the
root cause to developments of capitalism, where the body was reduced as an
instrument of the state, and of segregation, which separated the racial and classist
‘abnormal’ from the ‘normal’. This creates an ultimately calculative approach to
human life.
Foucault ’76 [Michel Foucault, “The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction” Translated from the French
by Robert Hurley in 1978, published originally in 1976]

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism ; the latter would not ,
have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic
processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have
methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the
development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance
of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques
of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the
police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to
sustain them. They also acted
as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence
on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects
 Jaguar Debate 28

of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human
groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the
time indispensable. One knows how many times the question has been raised concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma" tion of capitalism; but what
occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps a
wider impact than the new morality; this
was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of
phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into
the sphere of political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this was the moment when the first contact between life and history was
brought about. On the contrary, the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very strong
for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always dominated by the menace of death.
But through a circular process, the economic-and primarily agricultural--development of the eighteenth century, and an increase in productivity and resources even
more rapid than the demographic growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the period of great
the
ravages from starvation and plague had come to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing to torment life so directly. But at the same time,
development of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agricultural
techniques, and the observations and measures relative to man's life and survival contributed to this
relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space for
movement thus conquered, and broadening and organizing that space, methods of power and
knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them.
Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual
and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history, no
doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence ; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate
that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and
power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death,
but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking
charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. If one can apply
the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-
power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and
made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. It is not that life has been totally integrated into
techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them. Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale than ever; and the biological risks
confronting the species are perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's "threshold of
modernity" has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as
a living being in question.

Constant surveillance is a technique of disciplinary control that creates the power

necessary to exclude the abnormal from the normal.
Foucault ’75 [Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," published in 1975, translated
in 1977, pages 196-198]

They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the nineteenth
century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant
(beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of power proper to disciplinary
partitioning Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused
space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution proper to power,
individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion – this is what
was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the
psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital. Generally speaking, all authorities
exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and
branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential
distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to
 Jaguar Debate 29

be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of
individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of
disciplinary controls makes it possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring into play against him the
dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to
which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary banding and exile of the leper
to quite different objects the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervision
and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise.
All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand hin
and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive. Bentham’s Panopticon is the
architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was base: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this
tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the
building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one
end to the other. All that is need, then, is to place a supervisor, in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a
schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the
The panoptic
periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.
mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it
reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – preserves only the first and
eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.
 Jaguar Debate 30

Contention 3: Anti-Blackness
Racism and biopolitics are co-constitutive, while certain populations become
marked as worthy of preservation, others become disposable commodities
Mendieta ’02 [Eduardo Prof. & Chair of Philosophy at SUNY at Stony Brook ‘To make live and to let die’ –
Foucault on Racism Meeting of the Foucault Circle APA Central Division Meeting –Chicago, April 25th2002,
http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/philosophy/people/faculty_pages/docs/foucault.pdf]
The narrative developed by Foucault in these lectures is more fractious and detailed that I am portraying. The canvass that Foucault is panting in these lectures
concerns not just the wars that gave birth to our society, and its novel forms of knowledge, it also concerns something which I find fascinating, and provocative: the
invention of a people. To counter and challenge the power of the invaders, as well as the power of popes and kings, and using the narratives to unmask their acts of
usurpation and tyranny, elements within a social body begin to appeal to the ideas of a people, which then refers to a race, which then refers to a populations, and then
is enshrined in the anodyne notion of “society.” From a Foucauldian perspective, the
objects of scientific study are partly constituted
by the disciplines that seek to study them. So, just as psychiatry produces the madman, and
sexology the sexual deviant, and so on, political theory in conjunction with historical discourse,
produces a people. But the discourse of political rationality that emerged since the sixteenth century does not secrete a univocal idea of a people. As
the political rationality of the modern state develops and grows in intensity, as it augments its
claims to power, a people becomes a nation, becomes a population, becomes a biological
phenomenon to be tended by all the sciences at the service of the state. Analogously to how sexuality
became the locus of the production of control, insofar as it was the pivot of interaction between
individuals and their surrounding social environment, race also became the pivot around which the
biopower state came to exert its claims, so as to be able to produce certain power effects. What is
provocative here is the link that Foucault establishes between the emergence of biopower and the constitution of something that we have now become accustomed to
calling society, by which we in fact mean a population, a people, a particular nation. For Foucault the emergence of political rationality is directly linked to the
constitution of the object over which it must act. And here I am able to foreground one of the central lessons of these lectures, namely that political theory has to
attend to the emergence of political rationality in terms not of its rationality, or claims to reason, but in terms of its modalities of operation. Behind political rationality
does not stand reason, or rather, reason is not the alibi of political rationality; instead, political rationality has to do with the horizon of its enactment. If we accept that
Foucault is a historical nominalist, and he is a nominalist through and through, in the way that Rorty reads him, and correctly I would argue, then there is no reason
behind political power. Political power itself cannot be mystified. There is no power without the horizon of its enactment and the vehicles of its transmission. This is
still a misleading way of putting. The effects produced by a certain way of organizing the social body, of studying it, of policing it, of taking care of it, of making sure
that its health and protection are attended to in the most detailed and careful ways possible, produce a confrontation of forces, whose momentary stalemates, clashes,
subjugations and dispersal, are summarized in the name of power. And that power is the power over life. The
political rationality of the
modern state is above all a rationality grounded in the way it tends to the life of the population. The
power of the biopolitical state is a regulation of life, a tending, a nurturing and management of the
living. The political rationality of the modern total state is management of the living body of the
people. This logic was epitomized in the paroxysm of the Nazi state, but also in the communist
states, withtheir Gulags. I have thus far discussed Foucault’s triangulation between the discourses of the production of truth, the power that these
discourse enact and make available to social agents, and the constitution of a political rationality that is linked to the invention and creation of its horizon of activity
and surveillance. I want now to focus on the main theme of this courses’ last lecture. This theme discloses in a unique way the power and perspicacity of Foucault’s
method. The theme concerns the kind of power that biopower renders available, or rather, how biopolitics produces certain power effects by thinking of the living in a
novel way. We will approach the theme by way of a contrast:
whereas the power of the sovereign under Medieval and early
Modern times was the power to make die and to let live, the power of the total state, which is the
biopower state, is the power to make live and to let die. Foucault discerned here a telling asymmetry. If the sovereign exercised
his power with the executioner’s axe, with the perpetual threat of death, then life was abandoned to its devices. Power was exhibited only on the scaffold, or the
guillotine –its terror was the shimmer of the unsheathed sword. Power was ritualistic, ceremonial, theatrical, and to that extent partial, molecular, and calendrical. It
was also a power that by its own juridical logic had to submit to the jostling of rights and claims. In the very performance of its might, the power of the sovereign
revealed its limitation. It is a power that is localized and circumscribed to the theater of its cruelty, and the staging of its pomp. In contrast, however, the power of the
biopower state is over life [expand]. And here Foucault asks “how can biopolitics then reclaim the power over death?” or rather, how can it make die in light of the
fact that its claim to legitimacy is that it is guarding, nurturing, tending to life? In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it make die, how does it
kill? This is a similar question to the one that theologians asked about the Christian God. If God is a god of life, the giver of life, how can he put to death, how can he
allow death to descend upon his gift of life –why is death a possibility if god is the giver of life? Foucault’s answer is that in order to re-claim death, to be able to
inflict death on its subjects, its living beings, biopower must make use of racism; more precisely, racism intervenes here to grant access to death to the biopower state.
We must recall that the political rationality of biopower is deployed over a population, which is understood as a continuum of life. It is this continuum of life that
eugenics, social hygiene, civil engineering, civil medicine, military engineers, doctors and nurses, policeman, and so on, tended to by a careful management of roads,
factories, living quarters, brothels, red-districts, planning and planting of gardens and recreation centers, and the gerrymandering of populations by means of roads,
access to public transformations, placement of schools, and so on. Biopolitics
is the result of the development and
maintenance of the hothouse of the political body, of the body-politic. Society has become the
vivarium of the political rationality, and biopolitics acts on the teeming biomass contained within
 Jaguar Debate 31

the parameters of that structure built up by the institutions of health, education, and production.
This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For
the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription
within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am
quoting: “the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization.
Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in
first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to
death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrière] function of the state, to the degree that the
state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political
Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after the 18 th century, a power which is enacted through the
police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the population is nothing
more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.”
(Foucault 2000, 416). Racism,
is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of
one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a
population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism
within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a
new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war
of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit,
against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower,
re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism
makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death
and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of
suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an
everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To
protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society

Biometric technologies place nonwhites in a racialized zero degree of

nonrepresentation, and presumes whiteness as the gauge of merit for society,
putting the white, or human, on a hierarchy of power above the black, or
nonhuman, and the savage. This propagates the state of anti-blackness.
Pugliese ’07 [Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of Media, Music,
Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the
Racialized Zero Degree of Nonrepresentation”, 2007]

This racialized zero degree of nonrepresentation must not be viewed in terms of some mystifying
technological “anomaly” or “glitch.” On the contrary, I would argue that particular biometric technologies are
infrastructurally calibrated to whiteness—that is, whiteness is configured as the universal gauge
that determines the technical settings and parameters for the visual imaging and capture of a
subject. I will draw on the term calibration as it effectively encapsulates the three key levels of signification that
inscribe the operation of whiteness in biometric technologies. On one level, to calibrate a technology is
“to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities.”12 As universal gauge,
whiteness is the absolute standard within certain biometric technologies, targeting the capture of white subjects but
also allowing for a degree of white variations in skin tone and color—that is, allowing for a certain
range of “irregularities” that may fall outside this standard. These “irregularities,” however, are circumscribed within
a clearly delineated zone of whiteness and its various chromatic variations. Outside of this diffuse, gray-scale zone of whiteness reside
nonwhite subjects who are literally beyond the pale. As I have demonstrated, this degree of allowance literally
cuts off when biometric imaging technologies are confronted by subjects whose biometric details—
for example, their dark skin color—are so “irregular” as to fall outside the technical parameters set for image
capture. Here the term irregular graphically illustrates the disciplinary power of the white gauge in
 Jaguar Debate 32

determining the normative standards of imaging technologies. In such instances, nonwhite subjects, in literally
failing to appear before the biometric system despite their physical presentation, are dispatched to the outer limits of
nonappearance, to the zero degree of nonrepresentation. Calibration perfectly resonates with this imaging economy in that it is a
term that effectively belongs to the lexical set of camera settings: a camera operator has a repertoire of calibrations at hand when filming; these calibrations operate at
the level of lighting, aperture, and lens focus. On another level, the process of calibrating a technology means not only to establish “a set of graduations or markings”
but also to generate a “classification.”13 The calibration to whiteness of biometric systems, in other words, not only
determines the universal gauge of these imaging technologies, it also implicitly reproduces the legendary
racial system of classification and hierarchy that places whiteness at the apex followed, in a graduating scale, by
Asians and blacks.14 Within Western economies of visual representation, this racial hierarchy has systemically guaranteed the
nonrepresentation of nonwhites within a wide spectrum of visual media, including film and
television. Finally, the semantic core of calibration is derived from the term caliber. Caliber refers to a “degree
of social standing or importance, quality, rank; ‘stamp,’ degree of merit or importance.”15 In the context of the calibration to whiteness
of biometric technologies, the term caliber underscores questions of power and hierarchy that inflect the
physical settings of imaging technologies, as whiteness assumes the gauge of “merit or importance” that determines
who may or may not be visually captured within the calibrated zone of representation.

Anti-Blackness is the Controlling Impact for how we should interpret all forms of
violence. The perpetual and gratuitous violence against the black sets the stage for
how all other contingent acts of violence are enacted.
Crockett ‘14 [J’Nasah , writer, performer, and cultural worker who focuses on Black cultural production and
Black radical traditions. “Raving Amazons”: Anti-blackness and Misogynoir in Social Media June
30,2014https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/raving-amazons-antiblackness-and-misogynoir-in-social-media.]

Anti-blackness, in a rough-hewn nutshell, is the structuring logic of the modernity and the foundation of the
contemporary world we live in. It is the glue and the string running through our conceptions of
what it means to be free, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a legitimate and
productive member of society, what it means to be Human, and what it means to be the anti-
Human. Anti-blackness is the structural positioning of the Black (“the Black” here being a marker for a certain type of
subjectivity comparable to Marx’s “the worker” – shoutout Frank Wilderson) as an object that is fungible and able to be
accumulated like any other wicket churned out by the process of capitalism; it is the fact of Black
folks being open to perpetual and gratuitous violence that needs no definitive prior provocation or
“reason;” the “reason” is the fact of Blackness (see:getting shot for walking home with some
Skittles, getting shot while being handcuffed in the backseat of a car, getting shot for calling
911, being beaten for staring at someone in a “dehumanizing” way, and on and on).It is, to echo Hartman, the
afterlife of slavery: a logic that collapses the past and the present and places violence towards the Black within a range of acceptable daily practices. Certainly anti-
blackness is attitudinal – see the libidinal economy, i.e. the systems of desire and instincts and fantasies and repulsion around skin tone, hair types,
bodies that makes itself apparent in Eurocentric beauty standards or the fact that lighter-skinned African American women receive shorter prison sentences than their
darker-skinned counterparts. But that’s how logic and structures operate, they imbue everything that springs
forth from them. Our lives and societies (because when we speak of the afterlife of race-based chattel slavery, Arab and trans-Atlantic, we
are speaking of the entire world) are fundamentally shaped by it, not only institutionally, but also at the level of
the everyday, including crossing the street. So of course it makes itself apparent in the supposedly brave new world (so different from any
world that came before!) of social media.I myself joined both Twitter and Tumblr back in 2009, after experiences stretching back to high school with
BlackPlanet.com, Myspace, Livejournal, and of course Facebook. With Twitter and Tumblr, however, I joined after spending a year or two lurking on the edges of a
particular group of (mostly) women of color, and moving onto social media around the same time they did allowed me to connect with them in ways I wasn’t able to
when the main platform was, say, WordPress. For us, and for the many Black women I have since connected and built with since 2009, social media offers us yet
another way to build our “beloved communities,” to extend the networks of love, camaraderie, and joyous support that have long existed in our meatspace
communities – hair salons, churches, Black student unions, kitchen tables, etc. Social media also becomes a central site for much of our activism, from the
multinational #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to holding media outlets accountable for publishing blatant racism. We are also theory houses, circulating and challenging
discourses and practices that negatively impact our lives as Black women, and making critical connections that are often missing from the media that surrounds us. I
can’t help but see historical parallels to, say, early 20th century Pullman Porters secretly distributing copies of The Chicago Defender to the Black folks they came
across. What we’re doing is nothing new, but being on social media means that this networking is happening in the public eye. I also can’t help but see historical
The topic of surveillance
parallels in the multiple forms of anti-black backlash Black women have received on social media over the past few years.
in social media has been a hot one lately, but many discussions on it stop and end at the Edward
Snowden/NSA type revelations over post-9/11, post-War on Terror invasions of privacy at the
 Jaguar Debate 33

hands of an overzealous government. However, if we were to extend the idea of policing and
surveillance further back in time, and expand it beyond the trope of it being primarily carried out
by government employees, it becomes apparent that surveillance has already been a central part of
the experience of Black women on Twitter. Recall that in the U.S., the police have their roots in slave
patrols; policing and management of the potentially unruly Black bodies underlies the call for law
and order and the constituent need for police. To quote Wilderson again, in society there is a “fundamental anxiety
over where is the Black and what is he or she doing,” and in an anti-black world, every non-Black is
deputized to patrol and manage the Blacks.
 Jaguar Debate 34

Anti-Blackness
 Jaguar Debate 35

Link
Biometric technologies are a way of branding the black slave as a commodity.
Browne ’13 [Simone Browne completed her PhD in 2007. She began her faculty position in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. She researches and teaches in the areas of Surveillance
Studies, Social Media, and Black Diaspora Studies., "Dark Matters: Branding, Biometric Technology, and the
Surveillance of Blackness" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual
Meeting, Hilton Washington, Washington, DC, Nov 21, 2013]
Wilson Chinn, the carte de visite, brings plantation punishment, branding, and escape into focus. I continue here with the discussion begun in chapter 2 on the Book of
Negroes, lantern laws, and how
the tracking of blackness as property informs the contemporary surveillance
of the racial body by now questioning how the intimate relation between branding and the black
body—our biometric past—can allow us to think critically about our biometric present. Biometric
information technology, or biometrics, in its simplest form, is a means of body measurement that is
put to use to allow the body, or parts and pieces and performances of the human body, to function
as identification. In order to understand the meanings of branding as historically situated, in this chapter I explore
some early applications of this biometric information technology and question its role in the racial
framing of blackness as property. What I am suggesting here is that branding in the transatlantic slave trade was
a biometric technology , as it was a measure of slavery's making, marking, and marketing of the
black subject as commodity.

Biometric systems are calibrated to the white gauge and has image acquisition
parameters that are predetermined by infrastructural whiteness.
Pugliese ’10 [Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of Media, Music,
Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics”,
2010]

In order to enrol within a biometric system, the subject whose identity will be verified by the
particular biometric system is required initially to supply the requisite biometric data , such as a digital scan
of their face, which is subsequently converted into a template. The template, which is generated by the
algorithmic encoding of a subject's distinctive biometric features , is stored in the system and is used to verify a user's
identity every time they present themselves for biometric screening—in other words, the initial enrolment template is matched against the user's verification template.
It would seem that the process of biometric enrolment is a straight- forward process: subjects present themselves to a biometric system; their biometric data are
within the biometric
extracted and algorithmically converted into a template that is consequently used for either verification or identification. Yet,
industry, there is also what is termed "failure to enrol “FTE" whereby certain subjects' features
cannot be "extracted" or "acquired" by the relevant biometric systems. FTE is due to what is known as "Failure to
Acquire (FTA) also known as Failure to Capture (FTC)," and it "denotes the proportion of times the biometric device fails to capture a sample when the biometric
characteristic is presented to it" (Jain and Ross 2008, 10). Significantly, this failure to enrol is neither random nor
arbitrary. Rather, it is marked by the fact that only certain ethnic or demographic groups appear
to experience this phenomenon. "Certain ethnic and demographic populations," write Nanavati et al. (2002, 35—36), "are
more prone to high FTE rates than others. Those of Pacific Rim/Asian descent are more prone to FTE than control groups ... Users of
Pacific Rim/Asian descent may have faint fingerprint ridges—especially female users." This failure to enrol occurs across a number of
biometric systems, including finger-scan, iris-scan and facial-scan technologies. I want to focus specifically on
FTE in the context of finger-scan and facial-scan technologies. "Testing of facial-scan solutions indicates ," write Nanavati et al. (2002, 37),
"that the technology may not be as adept at enrolling very dark-skinned users. The increased FTE
rate is not attributable to the lack of distinctive features, of course, but to the quality of the images
provided to the facial- scan systems by video cameras optimized for lighter-skinned users. " Despite
the acknowledgement that FTE does not result because dark-skinned users "lack distinctive
features," the fact that biometric technologies might be "optimized for lighter-skinned users" still
 Jaguar Debate 36

fails to prompt the authors to proceed to name the constitutive role of whiteness as an
infrastructural racialised gauge that sets the operating parameters of these image acquisition
technologies . Nanavati et al. (2002, 65—66) are attentive to the question of lighting/ race without ever unpacking the larger ramifications of this powerful
nexus: "facial-scan technologies are generally unable to acquire images that are somewhat overexposed or are here in the realm of the "black blobs" and "white
bleachings" that Dyer (1997, 89) draws attention to in his mapping of the effects of this nexus. From this point on, Nanavati et al. (2002, 66) continue to sidestep the
problematic of whiteness as an infrastructural racialised gauge:
Facial-scan systems' sensitivity to lighting and gain can
actually result in reduced ability to acquire faces from individuals of certain races and ethnicities.
Select Hispanic, black and Asian individuals can be more difficult to enrol and verify in some
facial-scan systems because acquisition devices are not always optimised to acquire darker faces. At
times, an individual may stand in front of a facial-scan system and simply not be found. While the
issue of failure-to-enrol is present in all biometric systems, many are surprised that facial-scan
systems occasionally encounter faces they cannot enrol. The articulation that "many are surprised" at this FTE
regarding facial- scan systems marks a double moment of occlusion: the systemic, empirical
occlusion of the non-white face before the biometric system calibrated to the white gauge, and the
ideological occlusion that it is this very white calibration of biometric systems that precludes the
acquisition of the features of non-white subjects. This moment of occlusion must be named in terms
of a racialised blind-spot, a technological and discursive point of irreflectivity that cuts in two
directions at once: failure to begin to theorise on the technological/race nexus of these systems (thus the
"surprise" that some subjects are "simply not found") and the failure of non-white bodies to function as reflective subjects
that emit sufficient light to register precisely as template subjects of enrolment in the face of
biometric systems whose image acquisition parameters are predetermined by an infrastructural
whiteness. Everything from this point gestures towards a racialised zero degree of non-
representation. And this racialised question of a subject's epidermal reflectivity is not something merely confined to the field of biometrics. On the contrary,
it occupies a much larger social domain and it is sometimes generative of fatal effects. Mmaskepe Sejoe (2009) has discussed how black people in Australia's
Northern Territory, with a large Aboriginal population, are often sarcastically referred to by whites as "non-reflectives"; the point to this racist slur being that if a black
person is run over at night, then they are at fault for being "non-reflectives." Gracelyn Smallwood (2009) has documented how, one evening, an Aboriginal woman
was hit by a car driven by a white driver in a car park and left to die, despite the fact he was aware that he had run her over; the woman took four hours to die alone in
the car park. The white driver's excuse was that she was a "non-reflective" and that he thus had not seen her; he was let off with a $750 fine.

Biometric technologies place nonwhites in a racialized zero degree of

nonrepresentation, and presumes whiteness as the gauge of merit for society,
putting the white, or human, on a hierarchy of power above the black, or
nonhuman, and the savage.
Pugliese ’07 [Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of Media, Music,
Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the
Racialized Zero Degree of Nonrepresentation”, 2007]

This racialized zero degree of nonrepresentation must not be viewed in terms of some mystifying
technological “anomaly” or “glitch.” On the contrary, I would argue that particular biometric technologies are
infrastructurally calibrated to whiteness—that is, whiteness is configured as the universal gauge
that determines the technical settings and parameters for the visual imaging and capture of a
subject. I will draw on the term calibration as it effectively encapsulates the three key levels of signification that
inscribe the operation of whiteness in biometric technologies. On one level, to calibrate a technology is
“to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities.”12 As universal gauge,
whiteness is the absolute standard within certain biometric technologies, targeting the capture of white subjects but
also allowing for a degree of white variations in skin tone and color—that is, allowing for a certain
range of “irregularities” that may fall outside this standard. These “irregularities,” however, are circumscribed within
a clearly delineated zone of whiteness and its various chromatic variations. Outside of this diffuse, gray-scale zone of whiteness reside
nonwhite subjects who are literally beyond the pale. As I have demonstrated, this degree of allowance literally
 Jaguar Debate 37

cuts off when biometric imaging technologies are confronted by subjects whose biometric details—
for example, their dark skin color—are so “irregular” as to fall outside the technical parameters set for image
capture. Here the term irregular graphically illustrates the disciplinary power of the white gauge in
determining the normative standards of imaging technologies. In such instances, nonwhite subjects, in literally
failing to appear before the biometric system despite their physical presentation, are dispatched to the outer limits of
nonappearance, to the zero degree of nonrepresentation. Calibration perfectly resonates with this imaging economy in that it is a
term that effectively belongs to the lexical set of camera settings: a camera operator has a repertoire of calibrations at hand when filming; these calibrations operate at
the level of lighting, aperture, and lens focus. On another level, the process of calibrating a technology means not only to establish “a set of graduations or markings”
but also to generate a “classification.”13 The calibration to whiteness of biometric systems, in other words, not only
determines the universal gauge of these imaging technologies, it also implicitly reproduces the legendary
racial system of classification and hierarchy that places whiteness at the apex followed, in a graduating scale, by
Asians and blacks.14 Within Western economies of visual representation, this racial hierarchy has systemically guaranteed the
nonrepresentation of nonwhites within a wide spectrum of visual media, including film and
television. Finally, the semantic core of calibration is derived from the term caliber. Caliber refers to a “degree
of social standing or importance, quality, rank; ‘stamp,’ degree of merit or importance.”15 In the context of the calibration to whiteness
of biometric technologies, the term caliber underscores questions of power and hierarchy that inflect the
physical settings of imaging technologies, as whiteness assumes the gauge of “merit or importance” that determines
who may or may not be visually captured within the calibrated zone of representation.

Traditional academic and political discourse is ineffective because it focuses on the

unique instances of discriminatory practices instead of challenging the violent
antagonisms of the world as a whole. This entrenches the violent biopolitical state.
Wilderson ’10 [Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure
of US Antagonisms,”]
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by
extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are
the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large , for they draw our
attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently
powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act,
and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent
and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the
actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The
woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she
was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was
articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition
from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor” (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through
commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone
else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In
her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical .
And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world
attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an
indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid
enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political?
Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually , and
cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the “Savage.” Repair
the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the
structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no
longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have
been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When
 Jaguar Debate 38

pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why
questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political,
questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides,
and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar,
an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if
the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and
the plethora
of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is
now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously
unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker
“crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship,
and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable.ii In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not
“Should the U.S. be overthrown?” or even “Would it be overthrown?” but rather when and how—and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those
steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ
large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion
Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the
paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather
Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle
mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of “success ,” but they could not
dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—
that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and
progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no
ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.iii One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom,
however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called “balance of forces.” The political discourse of

Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The
raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical
accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the
question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who “retired”
from struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM
Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been
rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the “crazies” shout at passers-by. Gone are not
only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and
with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a
revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement
and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no
longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is “no” in
the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but
“yes” in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and
Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both
cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms . Between 1967 and 1980, we could
think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present,
Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is,
as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic
strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed
and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not
dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with
problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of “family values”), the
non-narrative, or
cinematic, strategies of the film often
disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red
and Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the
mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes
unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is
possible.v Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the grammar of assumptions regarding the
 Jaguar Debate 39

ontology of suffering—which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct
relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also
unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a
structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume
crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity
mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering
stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may
not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is,
nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows. The difficulty of a writing a book which seeks to uncover Red,
Back, and White socially engaged feature films as aesthetic accompaniments to grammars of suffering,
predicated on the subject positions of the “Savage” and the Slave is that today’s intellectual
protocols are not informed by Fanon’s insistence that “ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the
wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [sic]” (Black Skin, White Masks 110). In sharp
contrast to the late 60s and early 70s, we now live in a political, academic, and cinematic milieu which stresses
“diversity,” “unity,” “civic participation,” “hybridity,” “access,” and “contribution.” The radical
fringe of political discourse amounts to little more than a passionate dream of civic reform and
social stability. The distance between the protester and the police has narrowed considerably. The
effect of this upon the academy is that intellectual protocols tend to privilege two of the three
domains of subjectivity, namely preconscious interests (as evidenced in the work of social science around “political unity,” “social
attitudes,” “civic participation,” and “diversity,”) and unconscious identification (as evidenced in the humanities’ postmodern regimes of
“diversity,” “hybridity,” and “relative [rather than “master”] narratives”). Since the 1980s, intellectual protocols aligned with structural
positionality (except in the work of die-hard Marxists) have been kicked to the curb. That is to say, it is hardly fashionable
anymore to think the vagaries of power through the generic positions within a structure of power
relations— such as man/woman, worker/boss. Instead, the academy’s ensembles of questions are fixated on
specific and “unique” experience of the myriad identities that make up those structural positions.
This would fine if the work led us back to a critique of the paradigm; but most of it does not. Again, the upshot of this is that the intellectual protocols now in play,
and the composite effect of cinematic and political discourse since the 1980s, tend to hide rather than make explicit the grammar of suffering which underwrites the
US and its foundational antagonisms. This
state of affairs exacerbates—or, more precisely, mystifies and veils— the ontological
death of the Slave and the “Savage” because (as in the 1950s) cinematic, political, and intellectual discourse of
the current milieu resists being sanctioned and authorized by the irreconcilable demands of
Indigenism and Blackness— academic enquiry is thus no more effective in pursuing a revolutionary
critique than the legislative antics of the loyal opposition. This is how Left-leaning scholars help
civil society recuperate and maintain stability. But this stability is a state of emergency for Indians
and Blacks .

Biometric ordering has an inherent white gaze that seeks to map “truth” unto
bodies. Whiteness sets the barometer within biometric regimes through dialectics of
recognition
Browne 09 (Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics Simone Browne, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA Critical
Sociology 36(1) 131-150 2009)

The notion of a body made out of place, or made ontologically insecure, is useful when thinking
through the moments of contact enacted at the ‘institutional sites’ of international border crossings
and spaces of the internal borders of the state, such as the voting booth and other sites and moments where identification, and increasingly
biometric identification, is required to speak the ‘truth’ of and for muted bodies. These sites and
moments are productive of, and often necessitate ontological insecurity, where ‘the body is
surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty’ (Fanon 1967: 111). This atmosphere of certain
 Jaguar Debate 40

uncertainty is part of what Lewis Gordon refers to as ‘the problematic of a denied subjectivity’ (2004: 3).
On this, Gordon is worth quoting at length: Fanon’s insight, shared by Du Bois, is that there is no inner subjectivity, where there is no

being, where there is no one there, and where there is no link to another subjectivity as ward, as
guardian, or owner, then all is permitted. Since in fact there is an Other human being in the denied
relationship, evidenced by, say, antiblack racism, what this means is that there is a subjectivity that
is experiencing a world in which all is permitted against him or her. (2004: 3) For Gordon, this is a structured
violence where ‘all is permitted’ and where this structured violence is productive of and produced
by a certain white normativity. Meaning that whiteness is made normative, and in so being, raceless, or what David Theo Goldberg terms ‘racially
invisible’ (1997: 83). What Gordon insightfully terms the ‘notion of white prototypicality’ (2004: 4) is the enabling condition of the structured violence of ‘the dialectics of recognition’ (2004: 3). What I am suggesting here is that

this prototypical whiteness is one facet of the cultural and technological logic that informs many
instances of the practices of biometrics and the visual economy of recognition and verification that
accompany these practices. Practices here are taken to include research and development (R&D), applications, and governmental rationalization. Digital
epidermalization is the exercise of power cast by the disembodied gaze of certain surveillance
technologies (for example, identity card and e-passport verification machines) that can be employed to do the work of alienating the
subject by producing a ‘truth’ about the body and one’s identity (or identities) despite the subject’s
claims. To understand the practices of white prototypicality, I turn to some recent statements appearing in publications in biometrics R&D, as they are telling of industry concerns and specifications. For example, Nanavati et
al. note that in comparative testing with control groups, higher failure to enrol rates (FTE) appear with

those whose fingerprints are said to be unmeasurable. They state: Elderly users often have very faint fingerprints and may have poorer circulation than younger
users. Construction workers and artisans are more likely to have highly worn fingerprints, to the point where ridges are nearly nonexistent. Users of Pacific Rim/Asian descent may have faint fingerprint ridges – especially female

facial scan technology may produce

users. (2002: 36–7, emphasis mine). Could these systems be calibrated to allow for cutaneous gender detection? Further, Nanavati et al. note that

higher FTE rates for ‘very dark-skinned users’, not due to ‘lack of distinctive features, of course,
but to the quality of images provided to the facial-scan system by video cameras optimized for
lighter- skinned users’ (2002: 37).6 In this way, the technology privileges whiteness, or at least lightness, in its use
of lighting. This same logic of prototypical whiteness is seemingly present in earlier models of iris-scan technology that were based on 8-bit grayscale image capture, allowing for 256 shades of gray but leaving very dark
irises ‘clustered at one end of the spectrum’ (Nanavati et al. 2002: 37).7 The distribution of this spectrum’s 256 shades of gray is made possible only through the unambiguous black-white binary; the contrapuntal extremes that anchor
the spectrum leaving the dark matter clustered at one end. Such epidermal thinking is present in other research on facial recognition technology where ‘the facial feature quantities (spacing between eyes, turn up of the eyes, thickness
of mouth etc.) are classified’; it is suggested that systems ‘can search for faces with a certain feature, if the degree of the feature quantity is designated’ (Lao and Kawade 2004: 346). Here, the possibilities for digital epidermalization
are revealed.

Biometrics and access control is rooted in the culture of slave-catching – empirical

data proves.
Browne 12 (Simone, Completed her PhD in 2007. She began her faculty position in the Department of Sociology at the University of
Texas at Austin in 2007. She researches and teaches in the areas of Surveillance, Social Media, Social Network Sites, and Black Diaspora
Studies. She is a member of the Executive Board of HASTAC, “Everybody’s got a little light under the sun’: Black Luminosity and the Visual
Culture of Surveillance.”, Taylor & Francis Online, July/4/2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.644573)

It was not only Patriots who seized upon their slaves. British Loyalists also contributed to this
atmosphere, however many black men, women and children outwitted this terror. Slaver Valentine Nutter placed a notice in the 12 May 1783 edition of the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury offering an award
of five guineas for ‘a negro man named Jack’ described as around 23 years of age. Notably, this ad drew detailed attention to Jack’s skin as a means of identification, describing him as having ‘scars on his left arm and a small scar on
his nose’. Perhaps Jack evaded capture as the following September Nutter left for Port Roseway, Nova Scotia aboard the ship L’Abondance with ‘Silvia’, a woman described in The Book of Negroes as a 30-year-old ‘stout wench’ and

Though the Treaty of Paris stipulated that the British were not to
‘Sam’, a ‘tall’ and ‘stout fellow’ recorded as 22 years old, as his property.

‘carry away any Negroes’, for General Guy Carleton, Commander-in-Chief of all Downloaded by [Northwestern
University] at 14:59 15 July 2015 550 CULTURAL STUDIES British Forces in North America, it did not require the British to

readily facilitate the delivery of those deemed property. In a pre-emptive move the British began to
issue Birch Certificates by order of Brigadier General Birch as defacto passports. These Birch Certificates served as
status documents that identified the holder and confirmed the holder’s right to cross an
international border. Birch Certificates would become breeder documents for The Book of
Negroes. These early passports were a guarantee that the legitimate holder had resided voluntarily with the British before 30 November 1782, the date of the signing of the Provisional Peace Treaty, as only
those who resided within British lines for 12 months or longer were deemed eligible for
embarkation on British ships. Birch Certificates, such as the one issued to Cato Ramsey, read as follows: New York, 21st April 1783 This is to certify to whomever it may concern, that the
bearer hereof Cato Ramsay a Negro, reported to the British Lines, in consequence of the Proclamations of Sir William Howe, and Sir Henry Clinton, late Commanders in Chief in America; and that the said Negro has hereby his
Excellency Sir Guy Carleton’s Permission to go to Nova Scotia, or wherever else he may think proper. By the Order of Brigadier General Birch Those who made use of such certification to embark on the ships to Canada as well as
England and Germany, had their names listed in the inventory that is The Book of Negroes. After General Birch departed New York in 1783, similar certification was issued by General Thomas Musgrave to close to 300 blacks who
were eligible for evacuation.
 Jaguar Debate 41

Biometrics are used to racialize groups, and prop up white majorities and
capitalism
Browne 12 (Simone Browne, Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Texas, specializing in surveillance and technology,
Affiliated Professor in African and African Diaspora studies, 2012, “Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”,
https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=bell+hooks+surveillance&ots=y_cwHilZU5&sig=iyT3wYeFrSqB3bDvjpJuMRHaSAI
#v=onepage&q=bell%20hooks%20surveillance&f=false, mew)
One constant has remained in terms of racial categories and the US census form: an unspecified
“whiteness.” "White" has always been listed first among the boxes from which to choose in order to
answer the question "what is your race?" The current proliferation of racial categories was first
reserved for the management of blackness, and then later for other groupings to reflect changing immigration patterns. For example, in the 1890 census
"Mulatto," "'Quadroon," and "Octoroon" appeared as subcategories of “Black” "only to be collapsed into the singularity of
an unqualified blackness” by the 1900 census, reflecting the one-drop rule of hypodescent (Goldberg 2002: 189). "Mulatto" was reintroduced in 1910 and was replaced with "Negro" by the 1930 census, a category that fell in and out

For the 2010 census “Black, African-Am or Negro" were subsumed

of favor, depending on each subsequent decennial enumeration.

under one box. As Goldberg notes, when the category "Mexican" was introduced it was understood
to mean not white unless the census informant “explicitly and accurately claimed white descent" (2002:
190). Thus, it was left to the enumerator to judge whether the census informant's claim to whiteness was

valid, rather than accepting at face value the informant's self-identification as white. It was not until 1940 when both
the Mexican government and the US State Department intervened that the category "Mexican" became formalized as white. The category was later replaced with the new

subcategory "Hispanic" in 1980. The market research industry relied at its outset on information
culled from the US Census that was then correlated with other data, such as credit scores and retail
loyalty card transactions, to profile through patterns (or by "lifestyle segments") and for direct marketing
strategies (Parenti 2003: 103). For Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. data mining and internet "'cookie" technologies of the sorts now used for consumer profiling and market segmentation raise concerns around privacy and the
possibilities of “computer-enhanced discriminatory techniques," when, for example, information brokers profile an individual's web browsing activity and this information is then used to provide (or deny) e-commerce services and
transactions in a discriminatory manor (Gandy, Jr 2006: 363). This practice falls trader the rubric of what David Lyon calls "digital discrimination," marking the differential application of surveillance technologies where “flows of

). This
personal data—abstracted information—are sifted and channeled in the process of risk assessment, to privilege some and disadvantage others, to accept some as legitimately present and to reject others" (2003: 674

sifting of data flows to render some segments of populations as legitimate while rejecting other
demographic groupings as illegitimate along racial lines was apparent in 2001 when inaccurate
voter registration lists for certain county election boards in the state of Florida were generated by a
subsidiary of the data-mining company ChoicePoint and were used to disenfranchise "an estimated
eight thousand potential voters, many of them African Americans" who, as Gandy points out, were
"far less likely to have supported George W. Bush" in the US Presidential election (2006: 373). In other instances, zip
codes and credit scores might be used to restrict the products and services available to certain
consumers, or to target specific consumers for predatory lending services like payday loans, pawn
shops and "high cost" subprime mortgages that contribute to the higher foreclosure rates in
segregated black and Latino neighborhoods.
 Jaguar Debate 42

Impacts
Anti-Blackness is the Controlling Impact for how we should interpret all forms of
violence. The perpetual and gratuitous violence against the black sets the stage for
how all other contingent acts of violence are enacted.
Crockett ‘14 [J’Nasah , writer, performer, and cultural worker who focuses on Black cultural production and
Black radical traditions. “Raving Amazons”: Anti-blackness and Misogynoir in Social Media June
30,2014https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/raving-amazons-antiblackness-and-misogynoir-in-social-media.]

Anti-blackness, in a rough-hewn nutshell, is the structuring logic of the modernity and the foundation of the
contemporary world we live in. It is the glue and the string running through our conceptions of
what it means to be free, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a legitimate and
productive member of society, what it means to be Human, and what it means to be the anti-
Human. Anti-blackness is the structural positioning of the Black (“the Black” here being a marker for a certain type of
subjectivity comparable to Marx’s “the worker” – shoutout Frank Wilderson) as an object that is fungible and able to be
accumulated like any other wicket churned out by the process of capitalism; it is the fact of Black
folks being open to perpetual and gratuitous violence that needs no definitive prior provocation or
“reason;” the “reason” is the fact of Blackness (see:getting shot for walking home with some
Skittles, getting shot while being handcuffed in the backseat of a car, getting shot for calling
911, being beaten for staring at someone in a “dehumanizing” way, and on and on).It is, to echo Hartman, the
afterlife of slavery: a logic that collapses the past and the present and places violence towards the Black within a range of acceptable daily practices. Certainly anti-
blackness is attitudinal – see the libidinal economy, i.e. the systems of desire and instincts and fantasies and repulsion around skin tone, hair types,
bodies that makes itself apparent in Eurocentric beauty standards or the fact that lighter-skinned African American women receive shorter prison sentences than their
darker-skinned counterparts. But that’s how logic and structures operate, they imbue everything that springs
forth from them. Our lives and societies (because when we speak of the afterlife of race-based chattel slavery, Arab and trans-Atlantic, we
are speaking of the entire world) are fundamentally shaped by it, not only institutionally, but also at the level of
the everyday, including crossing the street. So of course it makes itself apparent in the supposedly brave new world (so different from any
world that came before!) of social media.I myself joined both Twitter and Tumblr back in 2009, after experiences stretching back to high school with
BlackPlanet.com, Myspace, Livejournal, and of course Facebook. With Twitter and Tumblr, however, I joined after spending a year or two lurking on the edges of a
particular group of (mostly) women of color, and moving onto social media around the same time they did allowed me to connect with them in ways I wasn’t able to
when the main platform was, say, WordPress. For us, and for the many Black women I have since connected and built with since 2009, social media offers us yet
another way to build our “beloved communities,” to extend the networks of love, camaraderie, and joyous support that have long existed in our meatspace
communities – hair salons, churches, Black student unions, kitchen tables, etc. Social media also becomes a central site for much of our activism, from the
multinational #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to holding media outlets accountable for publishing blatant racism. We are also theory houses, circulating and challenging
discourses and practices that negatively impact our lives as Black women, and making critical connections that are often missing from the media that surrounds us. I
can’t help but see historical parallels to, say, early 20th century Pullman Porters secretly distributing copies of The Chicago Defender to the Black folks they came
across. What we’re doing is nothing new, but being on social media means that this networking is happening in the public eye. I also can’t help but see historical
The topic of surveillance
parallels in the multiple forms of anti-black backlash Black women have received on social media over the past few years.
has been a hot one lately, but many discussions on it stop and end at the Edward
in social media
Snowden/NSA type revelations over post-9/11, post-War on Terror invasions of privacy at the
hands of an overzealous government. However, if we were to extend the idea of policing and
surveillance further back in time, and expand it beyond the trope of it being primarily carried out
by government employees, it becomes apparent that surveillance has already been a central part of
the experience of Black women on Twitter. Recall that in the U.S., the police have their roots in slave
patrols; policing and management of the potentially unruly Black bodies underlies the call for law
and order and the constituent need for police. To quote Wilderson again, in society there is a “fundamental anxiety
over where is the Black and what is he or she doing,” and in an anti-black world, every non-Black is
deputized to patrol and manage the Blacks.
 Jaguar Debate 43

Social death is gratuitous violence, this is violence that is unwarranted, created

through ontological destruction. There is a qualitative ontological distinction
between CONTINGENT violence and GRATUITIOUS violence. We are controlling
the uniqueness of the impacts and control the FRAMING of all other impacts
Sexton ‘10 [“‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction” in Critical Sociology 36; 11. Jared Sexton, Associate
Professor of African-American studied and Critical Theory at the UC-Irvine]

To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land and
resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is unenviable
unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved. More simply, we might say of the
colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the ‘social death’ under
which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the ‘natal alienation’ and
‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social Death:nI
prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s

forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the
important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any
attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was
the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson
1982: 7–8) True even if elevated by the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity
of a Hollywood icon, or the political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World.4 The alienation
and isolation of the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and
rendering thereby the notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition,
canceling ties to the slave’s contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave, as Mannoni and Fanon each note
in their turn, is total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized, whose status

obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection or dispersal of a class of
things. Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’ discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s
1997 Scenes of Subjection: the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty
(Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever of ‘reasoning … intent and rationality’ are [is]
recognized‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is, ‘the slave’s will [is] acknowledged
only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal
rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate
and illegible a priori. The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the
white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle
against actually existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American
revolutions (with their themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation)or,
later still, the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and
renaissance).5 One of the defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black suffering as the
template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc Wacquant calls its ‘functional
surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently,
‘the occult presence of racial slavery’ continues to haunt our
political imagination: ‘nowhere, but nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving’
(Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name
the interminable terror of slavery, but we are still very much within the crisis of language – of thinking and feeling,
seeing and hearing – that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery, precisely because
it requires the untenable demarcation of an historic end in Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death

knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system are
largely maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in surrogate
institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on, it survives, despite the grand
attempts on its institutional life forged by the international movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment (Davis 2003).But what if
slavery does not die, as it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least
not in the psychic life of power? What if the source of slavery’s longevity is not its resilience in the face of opposition, but the

obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the illegibility of its grammar? On this
 Jaguar Debate 44

account, for those that bear the mark of slavery – the trace of blackness – to speak is to sound off
without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative
capacity to absent thepresence, or negate the will to presence, of every claimto human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully
by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the very fruitful notion of ‘fugitive justice’ that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue of Representations on
‘Redress’. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best are posing the right question: ‘How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their
consequence the impossibility of restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?’ (Hartman and Best 2005: 2)That is to say,
they are thinking about ‘the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition’, ‘the contemporary predicament of freedom’ (2005: 5, emphasis added).
Yet, the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life ‘lived in loss’ – spanning the split difference between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law and
justice, hope and resignation – relies nonetheless on an outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life. Returning to our
schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problématique of colonization and its imaginary topography, indeed, the fact that it
can imagine topographically at all.But, even if the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images of place (and to do here does not imply that one
can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant registers,
is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. ‘The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade’ (Hartman 2007: 5).
And if that context is our context and that context is the world, then this is the principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such
thing as a fugitive slave.To
be sure, Humans do not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In
fact, modernity is, to a large degree, marked by societies structured in dominance :
[hetero]patriarchy and white supremacy, settler colonialism and extra-territorial conquest,
imperialist warfare and genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet, for
Wilderson, there is a qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or
dehumanization of the masses of people ‘in Asia…in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of
their land and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in
part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that
structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated and
exchanged.

Anti-blackness is a product where blackness stands juxtaposed to civil society,

defining the ontological positionalities of whites or humans against the black or the
slave. This creates the necessary conditions for gratuitous violence
Wilderson ’10 [Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure
of US Antagonisms, 2010”]

Anti-Blackness manifests as the monumentalization and fortification of civil society against social
death. “Narcissism can be deconstructed in pursuit of subjectivity but civil society remains
strengthened.”xxxiv Whereas Lacan’s analytic encounter, the process of full speech, is deconstructive
of narcissism internal to civil society, it is one in a wide range of encounters (from voting to coalition
building to “innocent” filial encounters) is re-constitutive of civil society’s fortification against social
death. If, on the other hand, White supremacy’s foundations were built solely on a grid of alienation,
where entified signification wards off the encroachment of deconstructive signification, then full
speech would hold out the revolutionary promise of White supremacy’s demise much the way many
White film theorists and feminists have demonstrated full speech can hasten the demise of intra-
Human patriarchy. But, as Fanon so vividly warns, White supremacy’s and Humanism’s foundations
are also built on a grid of violence, where positions of contingent violence are divided from
positions of gratuitous violence (from the slave position). Here two kinds of “species” are produced
and zoned beyond the pale of speech. The social distinction between Whites (or Humans) and Blacks
can be neither assessed nor redressed by way of signifying practices alone because the social
distinction between life and death cannot be spoken. “It is impossible to fully redress this pained
condition without the occurrence of an event of epic and revolutionary proportions… the destruction
of a racist social order” [my emphasis] (Hartman 77). In life, identification is limited only by the play
of endless analogies, but death is like nothing at all. Perhaps psychoanalysis and the promise of full
speech are not ready for the end of the world.
 Jaguar Debate 45

The Middle Passage started the unending, unwarranted violence on black bodies
that is perpetuated through every succeeding generation. The Middle Passage
promoted the idea that Blacks were a separate species from humanity. The Middle
Passage caused the social death of Black bodies. Humanity’s civil society is wholly
dependent through denial of humanity of the black.
Wilderson ’10 [Frank B, “Red, White, and Black-Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms”, pg 19-21,
Frank B. Wilderson I I I is an associate professor of African American studies and drama at the University of
California, Irvine.]

During the emergence of new ontological relations in the modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s, many
different kinds of people experienced slavery. In other words, there have been times when natal alienation,
general dishonor, and gratuitous violence have turned¶ 18 INTRODUCTION¶ individuals of myriad
ethnicities and races into beings who are socially dead. But African, or more precisely Blackness,
refers to an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality. Thus modernity
marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, a priori, that is
prior to the contingency of the "transgressive act" (such as losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the
rest of the world. This, I will argue, is as true for those who were herded onto the slave ships as it is for those
who had no knowledge whatsoever of the coffles. In this period, chattel slavery, as a condition of ontology and not just as an event of experience, stuck to the African
like Velcro. To the extent that we can think the essence of Whiteness and the essence of Blackness, we must think their essences through the structure of the
Master/Slave relation. It should be clear by now that I am not only drawing a distinction between what is commonly thought of as the Master/Slave relation and the
constituent elements of the Master/Slave relation,26 but I am also drawing a distinction between the experience of slavery (which anyone can be subjected to) and the
ontology of slavery, which in modernity (the years 1300 to the present) becomes the singular purview of the Black. In this period, slavery is cathedralized. It
"advances" from a word which describes a condition that anyone can be subjected to, to a word which reconfigures the African body into Black flesh . Far
from
being merely the experience of the African, slavery is now the Africans access to (or, more
correctly, banishment from) ontology.¶ In their own ways, Spillers, a Black woman and cultural historian, and Eltis, a White historian of the
transatlantic slave trade, make the similar points. First, they claim that the pre-Columbian period, or the late Middle Ages (1300-1500), was a moment in which
Europe, the Arab world, and Asia found themselves at an ontological crossroads in society's ability to meditate on its own existence. Second, Spillers and Eltis ask
whether the poor, convicts, vagrants, and beggars of any given society (French, German, Dutch, Arab, East Asian) should be condemned to a life of natal alienation.
Should they have social death forced on them in lieu of real death (i.e., executions)? Should this form of chattel slavery be imposed on the internal poor, en masse—
that is, should the scale of White slavery (to the extent that any one nation carried it out at all) become industrial?¶ INTRODUCTION 19¶ And, most important,
should the progeny of the White slave be enslaved as well?¶ It took some time for this argument to unfold. Eltis suggests the argument ensued—depending on the
country—from 1200 to the mid-i4oos (1413-23), and that, whereas it was easily and forthrightly settled in places like England and the Netherlands, in other countries
like Portugal, parts of southern France, and parts of the Arab world, the question waxed and waned.¶ Again, what is important for us to glean from these historians is
that the pre-Columbian period, the late Middle Ages, reveals no archive of debate on these three questions as they might be related to that massive group of black-
skinned people south of the Sahara. Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive debate which ultimately led to Britain taking the lead in the abolition of slavery, but
he reminds us that that debate did not have its roots in the late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or the Virginia colony period of the 1600s. It
was, he asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late eighteenth-century emancipatory thrust— intra-Human disputes such as the French and American revolutions— that
swept through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis further than this. Therefore, it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism about the Enlightenment
and its subsequent abolitionist discourses. It is highly conceivable that the
discourse that elaborates the justification for freeing
the slave is not the product of the Human being having suddenly and miraculously recognized the
slave. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman argues, emancipatory discourses present themselves to us as further
evidence of the Slave's fungibility: "The figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of fancy while increasing the likelihood of the
captive's disappearance."27 First, the questions of Humanism were elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the African qua chattel (the 1200s to the end
of the 1600s). Second, as the presence of Black chattel in the midst of exploited and unexploited Humans (workers and bosses, respectively) became a fact of the
world, exploited Humans (in the throes of class conflict with unexploited Humans) seized the image of the Slave as an
enabling vehicle that animated the evolving discourses of their own emancipation, just as
unexploited Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase their profits.¶ 20 INTRODUCTION¶
Without this gratuitous violence, a violence that marks everyone ex-perientially until the late Middle Ages when it starts to mark the Black onto
logically, the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernity— Marxism, feminism,
postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement—political discourses predicated on
grammars of suffering and whose constituent elements are exploitation and alienation, might not
have developed.28 Chattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of culturally disparate entities
from Europe to the East.¶ I am not suggesting that across the globe Humanism developed in the same way regardless of region or culture; what I am saying is that the
late Middle Ages gave rise to an ontological category—an ensemble of common existential concerns—which made and continues to make possible both war and
peace, conflict and resolution, between the disparate members of the human race, East and West. Senator Thomas Hart Benton intuited this notion of the existential
commons when he wrote that though the "Yellow race" and its culture had been "torpid and stationary for thousands of years . . . [Whites and Asians] must talk
together, and trade together, and marry together. Commerce is a great civilizer—social intercourse as great—and marriage greater."29 Eltis points out that as late as
the seventeenth century, "prisoners taken in the course of European military action... could expect death if they were leaders, or banishment if they were deemed
followers, but never enslavement.... Detention followed by prisoner exchanges or ransoming was common." "By the seventeenth century, enslavement of fellow
Europeans was beyond the limits" of Humanism's existential commons, even in times of war.30 Slave status "was reserved for non-Christians. Even the latter group
 Jaguar Debate 46

however . . . had some prospect of release in exchange for Christians held by rulers of Algiers, Tunis, and other Mediterranean Muslim powers."31 But though the
practice of enslaving the vanquished was beyond the limit of wars among Western peoples and only practiced provisionally in East-West conflicts, the baseness of the
The race of Humanism (White, Asian, South Asian, and Arab)
option was not debated when it came to the African.
could not have produced itself without the simultaneous production of that walking destruction which
became known as the Black. Put another way, through chattel slavery the world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its
struggles of political discontent; and¶ INTRODUCTION 21¶ with these joys and struggles the Human was born, but not
before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and
the social death of Blacks.

The Middle Passage is what transformed Africans into Blacks, severing them of
their ontology in the eyes of Humanity
Wilderson ’10 [Frank Wilderson III, full professor of Drama and African American studies at the University of
California, Irvine. He received his BA in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College, his Masters in Fine
Arts from Columbia University and his PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from the University of California,
Berkeley. “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms”. Durham, NC: Duke UP pg 38]

Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through
some struggle for, of, or through recognition, Blacks cannot reach this plane.6 Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman
maintain that the violence that continually repositions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically
alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of
oppression, like the "little family quarrels" which for Fanon the Jewish Holocaust exemplifies. Rather, the
gratuitous violence of the Black's
first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, "wiped out [his or her] metaphysics ... his [or her]
customs and sources on which they are based."7 Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews.
Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is
a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the
Jews have the Dead (the Muselmann) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.¶ This
violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the
possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and indeterminately horrifying
and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such,
"the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man" or, more precisely, in the eyes
of Humanity.

Only through a new discourse can we discuss the structural violence being done to
blacks- our current humanist grammar is structured on the suffering of the Black
Wilderson ’10 [Frank Wilderson III, full professor of Drama and African American studies at the University of
California, Irvine. He received his BA in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College, his Masters in Fine
Arts from Columbia University and his PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from the University of California,
Berkeley. “Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms”. Durham, NC: Duke UP pg 38]
IN THE INTRODUCTION and chapter 1, we saw how the aporia between Black being and political ontology has existed since Arab and European enslavement of
Africans. The
crafting of questions through which one might arrive at an unflinching paradigmatic
analysis of political ontology, a language that could express the structural and performative
violence of Slave-making, is repeatedly thwarted. Humanist discourse, whose episte- mological
machinations provide our conceptual frame- works for thinking political ontology, is diverse and
contrary. But for all its diversity and contrariness it is sutured by an implicit rhetorical consensus
that violence accrues to the Human body as a result of transgres- sions, whether real or imagined, within the symbolic
order. That is to say, Humanist discourse can only think a subject's relation to violence as a contingency and not as a matrix that positions the subject. Put another way,
Humanism has no theory of the Slave because it imag- ines a subject who has been either alienated
in language or alienated from his or her cartographic and temporal capacities.1 It cannot imagine
an object who has been positioned by gratuitous violence and who has no car- tographic and
 Jaguar Debate 47

temporal capacities to lose—a sentient being for whom recognition and incorporation is impossible.
In short, political ontology, as imagined through Humanism, can only produce discourse that has as
its foundation alienation and exploitation as a grammar of suffering, when what is needed (for the
Black, who is always already a Slave) is an ensemble of ontological questions that has as its
foundation accumula- tion and fungibility as a grammar of suffering.2 The violence of the Middle
Passage and the Slave estate,3 technologies of accumulation and fungibility, recompose and reenact
their horrors on each succeeding generation of Blacks. This violence is both gratuitous (not contingent on
transgressions against the hegemony of civil society) and structural (positioning Blacks onto logically outside of
Humanity and civil society). Simultaneously, it renders the ontological status of Humanity (life
itself) wholly dependent on civil society's repetition compulsion: the frenzied and fragmented
machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous violence on the Black —that civil society might
know itself as the domain of Humans—generation after generation. Again, we need a new language of abstraction to explain this
horror. The explanatory power of Humanist discourse is bankrupt in the face of the Black. It is
inadequate and inessential to, as well as parasitic on, the ensemble of questions which the dead but sentient thing, the Black, struggles to articulate in a world of living
subjects. My work on film, cultural theory, and political ontology is my attempt to contribute to this often fragmented and constantly assaulted quest to forge a
language of abstraction with explanatory powers emphatic enough to embrace the Black, an accumulated and fungible object, in a Human world of exploited and
alienated subjects.
 Jaguar Debate 48

Biometric Consciousness Solvency

Thus we affirm a critical biometric consciousness
Browne 13 [Dr. Simone Browne; “Dark Sousveillance: Race, Surveillance, and Resistance,” a talk given on
December 9, 2013, hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the Digital Praxis Seminar and the CUNY Digital
Humanities Initiative; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMFdiLsqbg, 36:30-41:08, video published March 21,
2014; transcribed by Ameena Ruffin]
Popular cultural representations of surveillance are some of the ways in which the public comes to understand these technologies and how we come to see biometric
technologies as a necessary security measure even for getting on our laptops or our phones and how they get rationalized or sold to the general public. You could call
this, as I said, a popular biometrics consciousness and as a pitch-man it doesn’t get much better than Will Smith who was named one of the highest paid actors by
Forbes in 2008. He’s often the star of, as I mentioned, many blockbuster films where the audience is often subject to his heroic exploits, particularly when his films
become on syndicated networks every weekend. So there’re lessons about the surveillance technologies and practices are regularly broadcasted; Will Smith’s in a
starring role. He’s often seen saving America, and by extension the planet, from alien others, whether it’s Independence Day or I Am Legend, Hancock, Wild Wild
West. Interestingly, when he was promoting I, Robot in 2004 he was in Germany and he was asked by the German press about the effects of 9/11—and I’m going to
do my German translation with Google Translate here—but his answer was “If you grew up as a Black man in America, you have a very different view of the world
than white Americans. We Blacks live with a constant feeling of malaise and if you’re attacked by a racist cop
now or wounded and attacked by terrorists, excuse me, it makes no difference. In the sixties, Blacks were
constantly the target of terrorist attacks and while it was civil terrorism but terrorism is terrorism.
We are accustomed to being attacked. As for a permanent alert, a defensive attitude with which one lives anyway
has not changed since. No not for me personally. As to my everyday life the tragedy of September 11 changed nothing. I live
anyway, always 100% alert. I was not even nervous, anxious, or cautious after 9/11.” So what Will Smith is articulating there is the racial terror
imposed on Black life in America by an overseeing surveillance apparatus that was in effect on
September 10, 2001 and long before that. And he’s giving us a bit of Black counter-framing as well too. So
given this—the histories, the failure to enroll rates, the idea around prototypical whiteness, the racializing surveillance—I’m calling for
a critical biometric consciousness, and this is following Eugene Thacker’s call for a critical genomic consciousness. And a critical
biometric consciousness entails informed public debate around these technologies and their
application. It’s a demand of accountability by the state and by private sectors who might have our data—trade it, sell it,
rent it out. And a critical biometric technologies sees biometric technology and the ownership and access
to one’s own body data and information that is derived or generated from one’s body data—so think
about the idea of your fingerprint being turned into a code and that being your intellectual property—that must be understood as a right. And as well,
importantly, this consciousness must also understand kind of the historical connections between contemporary
biometric information technology and its historical antecedents, meaning here that a critical biometrics
consciousness must contend with the ways in which branding and particularly racial slavery was
instituted as a means of population management in the making, marking, and marketing of
Blackness as visible and as commodity. I think another thing that is important here is the use of
conflict minerals in these technologies to produce them or the—people have done, [?] Nakamura has done work on this—the
people that produce these technologies as well, so a consciousness about the implications of those things as well too. And so, as I mentioned,
a critical biometric consciousness must contend with the ways in which branding was a form of
punishment and racial profiling—the idea of every body marks society, or ‘F’ for fugitive but perhaps that “F’
stood for freedom; and “R,” rather than standing for “Runaway,” could stand for “Revolt,” so a
critical repurposing of that. So much of how biometrics are languaged in R and D derives from the
racial thinking and assumptions around gender that were used to falsify evolutionary trajectories
that rationalized violence—the violence of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, genocide, imperialism. And so
the absence of a discussion of how such racial thinking shapes the research and development of
contemporary biometric information technology is itself constitutive of the power relations existing
in that very technology.
 Jaguar Debate 49

Refugee Solvency
Black refugees are constantly ignored by the world and portrayed by the media to
be savages. The trials and tribulations of the refugee are the new middle passage
and African slave trade.
Arthur 8/2 [Sylvia Arthur, “#BlackLivesMatter in Europe's Refugee Crisis,” For Harriet, 8/2/15, Sylvia Arthur
is a writer and journalist. After graduating with a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from the University of
Westminster, she worked as a runner for Sky News before becoming a reporter at News Africa magazine.

While European nations have grudgingly agreed to host 120,000 of the 500,000 refugees who’ve made the
perilous journey to their shores this year, their offer of sanctuary is primarily to those fleeing the bloodshed in Syria. The same grace
hasn’t been extended to those coming from outside Syria's war-torn borders, many of whom
happen to be of a darker hue . If you’re Black in this gruesome mix of migration and despair,
you’re assumed to be an economic migrant exploiting the chaos of the Middle East to sneak into Europe “in
search of a better life.” And Europe is committed to sending back anyone presumed to be a n economic migrant. Less
than half of the migrants to Europe are from sub-Saharan Africa. Of the top ten countries of origin of those applying for asylum in Europe in 2014, only two, Eritrea
and Nigeria, are in Africa. Yet up until the heartbreaking photograph of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi went viral, the images that flooded the
media were of hordes of young, dark-skinned African men “invading” European territory. This has
facilitated the use of racially-coded language that reduces the pain of migrants to populist slogans
(“swarms” of “marauding” Africans). Many Syrians, with their fair skin, green eyes and blonde hair, could pass for natives of the
countries in which they’ve been given haven. These refugees have often been said to be among their country’s finest ,
with desirable skills in their professions as doctors, lawyers, and academics that could be of use to their new countries . By contrast, African
refugees are referred to in less hallowed terms: poor, uneducated, a potential burden. This is
similar to the public discourse about African Americans who’ve come face-to-face with the full
force of the law. Just as Michael Brown was described by his killer as looking “like a demon,”
African migrants are likewise dehumanized. Europe’s treatment of these refugees is yet another
example of the fact that Black Lives Don't Matter, wherever they are in the world. The racial
empathy gap that prevents American police from seeing a 12-year-old with a toy gun as a little boy at
play is the same gap that allows Europe to deny human beings from Africa an individual identity and the
right to seek asylum. Just as America, “the land of the free,” has been laid bare in the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore, so too has Europe. Europe’s
refugees could do with the advocacy of the #BlackLivesMatter movement . The intersectionality of
the crisis – race, class, gender (and religion) – and the politics of who gets saved is the same
affliction that besets African-American victims of state violence that the #BlackLivesMatter
movement seeks to highlight. The Mediterranean is the Atlantic of our day . Thousands of Africans
en route to Europe in boats that are little more than floating coffins have transformed the warm waters
of the Med into an icy graveyard . The echoes of the slave trade don’t stop there . Even where there is no rule of
law, one dogma still prevails: on these death boats, racism and the racial hierarchy are implemented with shocking brutality. Stories of Black Africans being sealed
into the hull while Arabs are placed above deck are standard. Those who don’t obey orders are punished for their survival instincts, the smugglers slashing or
thrashing depending on ethnicity: Black Africans are branded on their heads with knives while unruly Arabs are beaten with belts. The
Africans’ crime,
like those of slain African Americans, is that they’re Black and poor, conditions that condemn them
to being treated less than human. Who is speaking up for these migrants, these numbers without
names? Just as #BlackLivesMatter forced us to #SayHerName, we need to be able to humanize those who’ve died in their
thousands and whose lives are reduced to nothing more than dazzling, incomprehensible numbers .
And why should we care? The last fifteen years have shown us how quickly the local becomes the global. What’s happening on the streets of Tunis or Damascus has a
direct link to events on the streets of Brussels and Washington. As the Indian-American author, Suketu Metha points out in his 2004 opus Maximum City, the young
man working in a call centre in Mumbai today could very well be your neighbour in New York tomorrow. African Americans know viscerally that “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Members of #BlackLivesMatter have travelled to Palestine to highlight the Palestinian struggle. Palestinians in Gaza have
protested in support of #BlackLivesMatter. There are #BLM chapters in Ghana and London. The refugee crisis is the next frontier in the
 Jaguar Debate 50

international battle
for equality. Yes, All Lives Matter – Syrian, Afghani, Iraqi and Eritrean. But in the hell that is the new Middle
Passage, some lives deserve more protection than others.
 Jaguar Debate 51

Agamben Fusion
Wilderson and Agamben’s theorization of structural violence are complementary
and work best together
Johnson ’14 [Paul – Lecturer and Associate Director of Debate at the University of Iowa, “A Reading of Some
of Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black, Contra/Pro Giorgio Agamben,” in Sounding Rhetoric, 5-31-14,
http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-reading-of-some-of-frank-wildersons_5930.html]
Wilderson’s argument has far reaching implications for those in communication studies who remain interested in rendering accounts of how deliberative practices and
institutional action do or do not succeed in achieving certain goals, either thought of in terms of constituting material benchmarks through traditional metrics
(legislative change, changes in legal interpretation) or in a more Between Facts and Norms sense of moving the needle in terms of expanding the repertoire of forms
and practices of argumentation that civil society is capable of recognizing as “political.” Wilderson has no compunction about aligning himself with the academic
movement of what is called Afro-pessimism because in his view, the structural exclusion of the Black from society ensures that efforts at expansionary inclusion
emanating from the mass public serve only to confirm the authority of that public to judge while at the same time routinely failing to address the structural conditions
of exclusion. I am cheating a bit here by splitting them into two functions, actually. It is really the case that the confirmation of the mass public’s capacity to judge
perpetuates the structural conditions of exclusion. Despite Wilderson’s decision to place Giorgio Agamben in his crosshairs in the opening of his book, I believe that
Agamben’s account of the distinction between bare life and political life offers an elegant
supplement that explains the rhetorical mechanisms for the production of the process Wilderson
identifies. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Agamben outlines his case for how the dispossession of
populations comes to function structurally as opposed to contingently. Working from the Aristotelian distinction
between life with the capacity for political speech, political life, and life which is incapable of signifying, bare life, Agamben suggests political actors utilize a rhetoric
Elevating
that elevates “the good life,” that is, life which exists above the realm of pure biological existence and into the realm of shared speech, politics.
political life, however, requires that political life be defined against some other version of life, and that
other form of life is bare life. Political philosophy has defended Western political institutions on the
basis not of their capacity to protect a Hobbesian social contract, that is, the basis to secure bare life, but instead on the
basis to provide for the good life. Michel Foucault engineered this turn in thinking politics in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, where he identified
emerging tendencies on the part of the government to rationalize interventions as means of enabling populations not just to live, but also to live well and in a certain
way. Such rationales represent racialized thought because they discriminate between various and
sundry populations to the extent that some ways of living are valued and prioritized over and above
others. By the time he wrote State of Exception Agamben was applying his thesis to the conduct of internal politics
and especially the war on terror. It should be noted that he does not think the war on terror is a unique
example of the politicization of bare life, only that it is one among many available in what he says is
now, following Walter Benjamin, a state of permanent exception in which populations find themselves “bare”
and thus vulnerable to management, dispossession, and extermination at the hands of the sovereign.
These bodies suffer the violence of sovereignty, included only to feel its force, but are otherwise excluded from
participation. In this way a simple topographical distinction between inside and outside is not
enough, but a threshold, “a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other
but rather blur with each other.”[8] Let me give an example of this process. Many of George W. Bush’s speeches in the
wake of September 11th spoke of the Al Qaeda and the nations that harbored them as barbaric
threats to Western civilization. At the same time that these populations were described in these terms, America continued to conduct a campaign
of vigilant military attack on these nations, attacks which created and intensified numerous political and infrastructural deficiencies faced by countries which were
often already struggling with developmental deficits that indexed not only the legacy of colonialism but also their position on the periphery rather than center of the
global order. Existing cultural differences, especially religious and ethnic, were played up in media accounts of the condition’s facing women in nations like
Afghanistan. At
the same time that political rhetoric emanating from the West suggested that these
nations were politically bereft and thus in need of Western military intervention , sanctions,
international scorn, and that military intervention worked to verify the rhetorical account of these
nations as backwards and outside of the world of Western “political” life. They were inside
sovereignty only to the extent that they faced the exercise of sovereign violence but constitutively
excluded in all other ways. So the question: would Wilderson recognize the strife between Western Europe and the populations in the East as a
“family quarrel” following Fanon’s analysis of the Holocaust? Would the position of Afghanistan be contingent in his view, i.e. occupying a position of the Black but
only until there comes to be a recognition of something shared between Afghanistan and the West? Would this recognition depend upon what Wilderson, building on
the work of Sadiya Hartman, would call the “fungibility” of the idea of violence as applied to the black body? Those who are both geographically segregated from the
West and also marked ethnically will probably not be permitted to symbolically “enter” the West anytime soon. And if the soft, permanent electronic euthanasia of
drone strikes is any indicator, civil society’s capacity to perceive the bodies of those like the son of Anwar Awlaki is seriously denuded. While some Western
 Jaguar Debate 52

theorists, chief among them Agamben, are capable of ascertaining similar characteristics in the Holocaust and the ongoing war on terror, one would be hard pressed to
identify this analogical mode of thinking as anything approaching dominant or ascendant, which suggests a level of permanence to the position of bare life in the war
on terror as constitutively excluded. This example emphasizes that Wilderson
and Agamben have strikingly similar accounts
of suffering. Both suggest that for certain bodies the difference from other bodies is one of kind
rather than degree. That is, for Wilderson the slave is ontologically distinct from the body that is included in civil society. Similarly, Agamben
holds that bare life is in a position of abjection, subject to the vicissitudes of violent sovereignty by
virtue of an inclusion whose only index is the body’s subjection to violence. But there is one important seeming
distinction: while Wilderson and Agamben both render the violence as ontological in the sense that it absolutely denies the humanity and agency of those upon it is
visited, Agamben reads the emptiness of sovereignty’s authority—here I would say its rhetorical basis—as a sign of
hope rather than the pessimism that Wilderson suggests. As he says in State of Exception the lack of a
“substantial articulation” between violence and law, that is, the fact that the relationship is established through tautology rather than
through appeal to some kind of external authority, suggests that the inability to distinguish between violence and the law
is itself a resource for political action, one that could demonstrate that emptiness.[9] Wilderson on the
other hand believes that the investment in authority for authority’s sake is evidence that there is no
chance for the slave to exist in the world because the slave’s existence is what makes the world
possible. As he says it, “No slave, no world” because of both how the physical labor of slavery makes our existing world possible and also how the symbolic
figure of the slave secures, through various and sundry means, the intelligibility of civil society itself. Above I mark the distinction as “seeming” because I think the
attitudinal difference between the two thinkers is much less than the shared explanation both give
for the way in which political action sediments hierarchies to the detriment of bodies that have no
access to those political worlds. Both Agamben and Wilderson indicate that the authority of civil
society is generated by tautological exercises of sovereign power the ground themselves in their own
assumption of authority. Agamben suggests that sovereignty anticipates its own success to close off alternative perspectives while Wilderson argues
that anti-blackness works as a paradigm by rendering a constitutively impossibility arguments and actions which might testify to its own self-investment in authority.
Wilderson and Agamben both outline theories of political exclusion that argue some forms of life are given priority over other forms of life, and the unintelligibility of
those other forms of life is the grist for the mill of civil society and politics, respectively. Wilderson’s point regarding Agamben’s focus on the Holocaust is a
contemporary situations of global violence also suggest that there may be a level of
necessary one, but

permanence to the state of exception that argues more for a reading of affinity between the two
rather than a theorization of their opposition .

Agamben’s mediations on the Jewish holocaust and The Muselmann are precursors
to Wilderson’s theorization of the black ‘slave’. Agamben’s Muselmann is non-
human, part of a unique point in history where Jews were subjected to Blackness
and Redness. The gratuitous violence against the black through the middle passage
created an environment of anti-blackness where the black is not human in the eyes
of a white humanity.
Wilderson ’10 [Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and Structure
of US Antagonisms,”]
Thirty to forty years before the current milieu of multiculturalism, immigrants rights activism, White women’s liberation, and sweat shop struggles, Frantz Fanon
found himself writing in a post-WWII era fixated on the Jewish holocaust as the affective destination that made legible the ensemble of questions that animated the
political common sense of oppression. The holocaust provided a “natural” metaphor through which ontologists in
Fanon’s time, such as Sartre, worked out a grammar through which the question, what does it mean to suffer,
can be asked. The Jewish Holocaust as “natural” metaphor continues to anchor many of today’s
meta-commentaries. Giorgio Agamben’s meditations on the Muselmann, for example, allow him to
claim Auschwitz as: [S]omething so unprecedented that one tries to make it comprehensible by
bringing it back to categories that are both extreme and absolutely familiar: life and death, dignity
and indignity. Among these categories, the rue cipher of Auschwitz-the Muselmann, the ‘core of the camp,’ he whom ‘no one wants to see,’ and who is
inscribed in every testimony as lacuna— wavers without finding a definite position. (Remnants of Auschwitz 81) Agamben is not wrong, so much as

he is late. Auschwitz is not “so unprecedented” to one whose frame of reference is the Middle Passage ,
 Jaguar Debate 53

followed by Native American genocide. In this way, Auschwitz would rank third or fourth in a normative, as opposed to “unprecedented,”
pattern. Agamben goes on to sketch out the ensemble of questions that Churchill and Spillers have asked, but he does so by deploying the
Jewish Muselmann as the template of such questions, instead of the Red “Savage,” or the Black
Slave: In one case, [the Muselmann] appears as the non-living, as the being whose life is not truly life; in the other, as he whose death cannot be called death, but
only the production of a corpse—as the inscription of life in a dead area and, in death, of a living area. In both cases, what is called into question is the very humanity
of man, since man observes the fragmentation of his privileged tie to what constitutes him as human, that is, the sacredness of death and life. The
Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is the human that cannot be
told apart from the inhuman. (82) In the historiography of intellectual thought, Agamben’s widely cited template of the Muselmann is an
elaboration of Sartre’s work. As philosophers, they work both to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of
widely accepted political common sense which positions the German/Jewish relation as the sin-qua-
non of a structural antagonism, thus allowing political philosophy to attribute ontological—and not just
social—significance to the Jewish Holocaust. Fanon has no truck with all of this. He dismisses the presumed antagonism between Germans
and Jews by calling the Holocaust “little family quarrels” (115), recasting with this single stroke the German/Jew encounter as a conflict rather than an antagonism.
Fanon returns the Jew to his/her rightful position—a position within civil society animated by an ensemble of Human discontents. The
Muselmann,
then, can be seen as a provisional moment within existential Whiteness, when Jews were subjected
to Blackness and Redness —and the explanatory power of the Muselmann can find its way back to
sociology, history, or political science where it more rightfully belongs. This is one of several moments in Black Skin,
White Masks when Fanon splits the hair between social oppression and structural suffering, making it possible to theorize the impossibility of a Black ontology (thus
allowing us to meditate on how the Black suffers) without being chained to the philosophical and rhetorical demands of analogy, demands which the evidentiary
register of social oppression (i.e., how many Jews died in the ovens, how many Blacks were lost in the Middle Passage) normally imposes upon such meditations. The
ruse of analogy erroneously locates the Black in the world—a place where s/he has not been since the dawning of Blackness. This attempt to position the Black in the
world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-
Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society, promising an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure
because, whereas Masters may share the same fantasies as Slaves, and Slaves can speak as though they have the same interests as Masters, their respective grammars
of suffering are irreconcilable. In dragging his interlocutors kicking and screaming through “Fact of Blackness,” or what Ronald Judy has translated more pointedly as
“The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon is not attempting to play “oppression Olympics” and thus draw conclusions that Blacks are at the top of every empirical
hierarchy of social discrimination, though that case has also been made.xv Having established that, yes, the Jew is oppressed (and, yes, the Black is oppressed) Fanon
refuses to let the lived experience of oppression dictate the terms of his meditations on suffering. He writes: [The Jew] belongs to the race of those [who] since the
beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough one has only not to be a nigger [emphasis mine]…[I]n my case
everything takes on a new guise. I am the slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance. (Black Skin, White Masks 115-16) Two tensions are at
work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-- “simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.”xvi This, I submit, is
the essence of
being for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common
denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of
me but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as nonniggerness; and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field, “my
own appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the non-niggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead.
Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some
struggle for/of/through recognition, Blacks cannot attain the plane of recognition (West 82). Spillers, Fanon, and
Hartman maintain that the violence that has positioned and repetitively re-positions the Black as a void of
historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The
violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the
Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon exemplify
the Jewish Holocaust. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle
Passage, “wiped out [his/her] metaphysics…his [her] customs and sources on which they are based”
(BSWM 110). Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came
out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical
holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmenn) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.
This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black within an
infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, “ the
black has
no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110) or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity. How is it
that the Black appears to partner with the senior and junior partners of civil society (Whites and colored immigrants, respectively), when in point of fact the Black is
not in the world? The answer lies in the ruse of analogy. By acting as if the Black is present, coherent, and above all human, Black film theorists are “allowed” to
meditate on cinema only after “consenting” to a structural adjustment.xvii Such an adjustment, required for the “privilege” of participating in the political economy of
academe, is not unlike the structural adjustment debtor nations must adhere to for the privilege of securing a loan: signing on the dotted line means feigning
ontological capacity regardless of the fact that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form. It means theorizing Blackness as “borrowed
institutionality.”xviii
 Jaguar Debate 54

Racism and biopolitics are co-constitutive, while certain populations become

marked as worthy of preservation, others become disposable commodities
Mendieta ’02 [Eduardo Prof. & Chair of Philosophy at SUNY at Stony Brook ‘To make live and to let die’ –
Foucault on Racism Meeting of the Foucault Circle APA Central Division Meeting –Chicago, April 25th2002,
http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/philosophy/people/faculty_pages/docs/foucault.pdf]
The narrative developed by Foucault in these lectures is more fractious and detailed that I am portraying. The canvass that Foucault is panting in these lectures
concerns not just the wars that gave birth to our society, and its novel forms of knowledge, it also concerns something which I find fascinating, and provocative: the
invention of a people. To counter and challenge the power of the invaders, as well as the power of popes and kings, and using the narratives to unmask their acts of
usurpation and tyranny, elements within a social body begin to appeal to the ideas of a people, which then refers to a race, which then refers to a populations, and then
is enshrined in the anodyne notion of “society.” From a Foucauldian perspective, the
objects of scientific study are partly constituted
by the disciplines that seek to study them. So, just as psychiatry produces the madman, and
sexology the sexual deviant, and so on, political theory in conjunction with historical discourse,
produces a people. But the discourse of political rationality that emerged since the sixteenth century does not secrete a univocal idea of a people. As
the political rationality of the modern state develops and grows in intensity, as it augments its
claims to power, a people becomes a nation, becomes a population, becomes a biological
phenomenon to be tended by all the sciences at the service of the state. Analogously to how sexuality
became the locus of the production of control, insofar as it was the pivot of interaction between
individuals and their surrounding social environment, race also became the pivot around which the
biopower state came to exert its claims, so as to be able to produce certain power effects. What is
provocative here is the link that Foucault establishes between the emergence of biopower and the constitution of something that we have now become accustomed to
calling society, by which we in fact mean a population, a people, a particular nation. For Foucault the emergence of political rationality is directly linked to the
constitution of the object over which it must act. And here I am able to foreground one of the central lessons of these lectures, namely that political theory has to
attend to the emergence of political rationality in terms not of its rationality, or claims to reason, but in terms of its modalities of operation. Behind political rationality
does not stand reason, or rather, reason is not the alibi of political rationality; instead, political rationality has to do with the horizon of its enactment. If we accept that
Foucault is a historical nominalist, and he is a nominalist through and through, in the way that Rorty reads him, and correctly I would argue, then there is no reason
behind political power. Political power itself cannot be mystified. There is no power without the horizon of its enactment and the vehicles of its transmission. This is
still a misleading way of putting. The effects produced by a certain way of organizing the social body, of studying it, of policing it, of taking care of it, of making sure
that its health and protection are attended to in the most detailed and careful ways possible, produce a confrontation of forces, whose momentary stalemates, clashes,
subjugations and dispersal, are summarized in the name of power. And that power is the power over life. The
political rationality of the
modern state is above all a rationality grounded in the way it tends to the life of the population. The
power of the biopolitical state is a regulation of life, a tending, a nurturing and management of the
living. The political rationality of the modern total state is management of the living body of the
people. This logic was epitomized in the paroxysm of the Nazi state, but also in the communist
states, withtheir Gulags. I have thus far discussed Foucault’s triangulation between the discourses of the production of truth, the power that these
discourse enact and make available to social agents, and the constitution of a political rationality that is linked to the invention and creation of its horizon of activity
and surveillance. I want now to focus on the main theme of this courses’ last lecture. This theme discloses in a unique way the power and perspicacity of Foucault’s
method. The theme concerns the kind of power that biopower renders available, or rather, how biopolitics produces certain power effects by thinking of the living in a
novel way. We will approach the theme by way of a contrast:
whereas the power of the sovereign under Medieval and early
Modern times was the power to make die and to let live, the power of the total state, which is the
biopower state, is the power to make live and to let die. Foucault discerned here a telling asymmetry. If the sovereign exercised
his power with the executioner’s axe, with the perpetual threat of death, then life was abandoned to its devices. Power was exhibited only on the scaffold, or the
guillotine –its terror was the shimmer of the unsheathed sword. Power was ritualistic, ceremonial, theatrical, and to that extent partial, molecular, and calendrical. It
was also a power that by its own juridical logic had to submit to the jostling of rights and claims. In the very performance of its might, the power of the sovereign
revealed its limitation. It is a power that is localized and circumscribed to the theater of its cruelty, and the staging of its pomp. In contrast, however, the power of the
biopower state is over life [expand]. And here Foucault asks “how can biopolitics then reclaim the power over death?” or rather, how can it make die in light of the
fact that its claim to legitimacy is that it is guarding, nurturing, tending to life? In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it make die, how does it
kill? This is a similar question to the one that theologians asked about the Christian God. If God is a god of life, the giver of life, how can he put to death, how can he
allow death to descend upon his gift of life –why is death a possibility if god is the giver of life? Foucault’s answer is that in order to re-claim death, to be able to
inflict death on its subjects, its living beings, biopower must make use of racism; more precisely, racism intervenes here to grant access to death to the biopower state.
We must recall that the political rationality of biopower is deployed over a population, which is understood as a continuum of life. It is this continuum of life that
eugenics, social hygiene, civil engineering, civil medicine, military engineers, doctors and nurses, policeman, and so on, tended to by a careful management of roads,
factories, living quarters, brothels, red-districts, planning and planting of gardens and recreation centers, and the gerrymandering of populations by means of roads,
access to public transformations, placement of schools, and so on. Biopolitics
is the result of the development and
maintenance of the hothouse of the political body, of the body-politic. Society has become the
vivarium of the political rationality, and biopolitics acts on the teeming biomass contained within
the parameters of that structure built up by the institutions of health, education, and production.
 Jaguar Debate 55

This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For
the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription
within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am
quoting: “the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization.
Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in
first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to
death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrière] function of the state, to the degree that the
state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political
Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after the 18 th century, a power which is enacted through the
police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the population is nothing
more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.”
(Foucault 2000, 416). Racism,
is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of
one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a
population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism
within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a
new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war
of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit,
against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower,
re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism
makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death
and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of
suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an
everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To
protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity
of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature.
 Jaguar Debate 56

Biopower
 Jaguar Debate 57

Link
The surveillance state, perpetuated by biometrics, is aimed at social sorting and
panopticism.
Lyon ’03 [David Lyon is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, “Surveillance as
Social Sorting: Privacy, risk, and digital discrimination”, 2003]

Everyday surveillance depends increasingly on searchable databases. Even where this is not yet or not fully the case – such as
with the predominantly human-operated CCTV systems – a central aim is social sorting. The surveillance system obtains
personal and group data in order to classify people and populations according to varying criteria,
to determine who should be targeted for special treatment, suspicion, eligibility, inclusion, access,
and so on. What, in relation to database marketing, Oscar Gandy calls the “panoptic sort” is, in short, a discriminatory
technology, whether or not it is fully automated in every case (Gandy 1993, 1995, 1996). It sieves and sorts for
the purpose of assessment, of judgement. It thus affects people’s lifestyle choices – if you won’t accept the cookie
that reports your surfing habits to the parent company, don’t expect that information or access will be available – and their life-chances – details about the
neighborhood in which you live affect items such as your insurance premiums, what sorts of services are available (Graham and Marvin 2001), how the area is
policed, and what advertising you receive. If surveillance as social sorting is growing, this is not merely because some
new devices have become available. Rather, the devices are sought because of the increasing
number of perceived and actual risks and the desire more completely to manage populations –
whether those populations are citizens, employees, or consumers. The dismantling of state welfare,
for instance, that has been occurring systematically in all the advanced societies since its zenith in the 1960s, has the effect
of individualizing risks. Whereas the very concept of state welfare involves a social sharing of risks, the converse occurs when that state welfare goes
into decline. What are the results of this? For those still in dire need, because of unemployment, illness, single

parenthood, or poverty otherwise generated, surveillance is tightened as a means of discipline .

Cases of fraud are more actively sought through datamatching and other means – Ontario residents who cross
the USA border when on unemployment benefit may have their details cross-checked by Canada Customs with a view to sniffing out double-dipping – and the criteria
of eligibility become more strictly means-tested. In Ohio, the
human services department warns its clients that “your
social security number may be used to check your income and/or employment information with
past or present employers, financial resources through IRS, employment compensation, disability
benefits [.]” The document continues: the “number as well as other information will be used in
computer matching and program reviews or audits to make sure your household is eligible for food
stamps . . . school lunch, ADC and Medicaid” (cf. Gilliom 2001: 18). For those whose risks have become primarily a personal or family
responsibility, insurance companies will employ increasingly intrusive means to verify the health, employment, and other risks associated with each application.
Personal data are constantly sought for such exchanges, which require surveillance knowledge to be
communicated. The individualization of risk thus fosters ever-spiralling levels of surveillance,
implying that automated categorization occurs with increasing frequency. Now, as we noted above, categorization is
endemic and vital to human life, especially to social life. The processes of institutional categorization, however, received a major boost from modernity, with its
analytical, rationalizing thrust. All
modern social institutions, for example, depend upon differentiation, to discover
who counts as a citizen, which citizens may vote, who may hold property, which persons may
marry, who has graduated from which school, with what qualifications, who is employed by whom,
and so on. Many of these matters were less scrupulously checked before the coming of modernity, and there was a certain vagueness and (what might now be
seen as) blurring of boundaries.

Biometrics regulate every part of a population, depoliticizing the public sphere and
propping up biopolitics through the model of the panopticon.
Koljević ’08 [Bogdana Koljević is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Media and
Communications, Research Associate at the Institute for Political Studies and Counselor at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in Belgrade, September 2008, “Biopower and government tehniques”, Biometrics, Security, and Human
Rights]
 Jaguar Debate 58

The phenomenon where almost everything is done “in the name of life” and where life is apparently “the largest
value”, thus in a kind of a specific humanitarian rhetoric, simultaneously indicates an almost reverse occurrence in reality,
i.e. that factors such as the population’s health, migrations, conditions of life, birth and death rates,
are regulated and directed in a thus far unprecedented manner. No one has offered so convincing and substantiated
arguments as Foucault to prove that this process corresponds to the development of the theory and practice of
liberalism through history3 and that the main purpose of this effort is precisely the depoliticization
of the public sphere, i.e. the public as the key locus of the political. Namely, where biopolitical techniques of
government enter the scene, life comes to the foreground and its politicization – the most
representative example of which in the modern context are biometric techniques – directly leads to
the depoliticization of politics as a public sphere. Foucault’s basic idea is that multiple instrumentalizaiton of
life representing a paradigm of biopolitical practice implies another concept of power – entirely
different from that of the traditional sovereign power, i.e. suggest that the issue at hand is the one of
power relations that are not centered in classical political categories of e.g. territory or state . Foucault
calls this capillary power and points out that his own research aims at microphysics or microstrategy of power which is essentially desubstantiated and precisely as
such appears as power with a totalitarian potential. Its
objects may be individuals and groups and people, or all these
together and at the same time. One of the best examples of this power’s functioning is Foucault’s
model of panopticon in his Discipline and Punish4. Borrowing Bentham’s idea of panopticon (a system of prison surveillance and observation), Foucault
takes this model metaphorically, presenting it as a paradigm of something he calls development of disciplinary i.e.
government techniques whereby the entire society, the whole populace, is placed in an invisible
prison and under observation where everybody is always potentially guilty.

The registration of each biological and physical part of a person is essential to the
disciplinary mechanism.
Foucault ’75 [Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," published in 1975, translated
in 1977, pages 196-198]

This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the
intendants to the magistrates or mayor. At the beginning of the ‘lock up’, the role of each of the inhabitants present in the
town is laid down, one by one; this document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his condition’: a
copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits –
deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities – is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and
magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no
apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note ‘to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with
those sick of the contagion, unknown to the magistrates’. The
registration of the pathological must be constantly
centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the
representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it. Five or six days after
the beginning of the quarantine, the process of purifying the houses one by one is begun. All the inhabitants are made to leave; in each room ‘the furniture and goods’
are raised from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured around the room; after carefully sealing the windows, doors and even the keyholes with wax,
the perfume is set alight. Finally, the entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those who have carried out the work are searched, as they were on entry,
This
‘in the presence of the residents of the house, to see that they did not have on entering’. Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter their homes.
enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed
place, in which the slightest movement are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which
an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised
without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is
constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all
this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out
every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome
It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-
prohibitions.
being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular,
 Jaguar Debate 59

uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him,
of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which
is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling
together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different
truth to appear. But there
was also a political of the plague, which was exactly it reverse: not the collection festival, but
strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of
everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary
functioning of power; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of
everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary
functioning of power; not masks that were put on and take off, but the assignment of each individual of his ‘true’
name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of
disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory
of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.

Biometric data creates a modern panopticon by categorizing populations, and

functions as a mechanism of control that indexes every citizen and non-citizen as an
automatic member of the state to be surveyed and spied on.
Falconer-Flint ’06 [“SURVEILLANCE AND BIOMETRIC TECHNOLOGIES: BEYOND THE
PANOPTICON?”, A dissertation submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Sociological
Research in the Faculty of Humanities 2006, James Paul Falconer-Flint, pHD at University of the Highlands
specializing in Anthropological Linguistics, Cultural Anthropology, Historical Anthropology]

The metaphor of the

panopticon and the establishment of Biometric Identity Cards exemplifies how
society’s dependency on information infrastructures, especially electronic ones, breeds more
everyday surveillance. But surveillance also increases the more people seek privacy, and do things at a distance. Personal data are
gathered by many means - digital, video, biometric, genomic - and are processed to create categories by which risks
and opportunities are assessed, and through which people’s life chances and life choices are
influenced and managed. Boundaries between what can be considered public and what should be private have
become blurred and uncertain. The new technologies of surveillance further distort individual privacy. Closed circuit television
monitoring, especially of public spaces, seems like a solution to a problem but may well be nothing more than a panacea (Selwyn, 2002). Media exaggerations of
crime create a climate of fear exploited by the purveyors of surveillance equipment. Popular entertainment on television and in the cinema acculturates society into
accepting surveillance as normal. Equally, questions of power appear: what are the consequences for consumers, citizens, travellers and workers of everyday
surveillance? (Salter, 2003; Zureik, 2001; Torpey, 1999) Surveillance of individuals and populations in the modern
capitalist liberal democratic state is not a novel phenomenon, but one that is intimately entwined with the historical
development of the nation-state and modernity (Giddens, 1987; Dandeker, 1990; Lyon, 2002). Surveillance, however, is
also about separation as well as gathering information, a form of ‘border control’ within society, a
way of reducing risk throughout social and commercial interactions (Boyne, 2000). What is of interest is who is entering specified

spaces and whether they are entitled . The spaces are not only across national borders, private
enclosed communities, or even certain rooms in buildings, but can also comprise mental, political, commercial,
demographic, social and symbolic spaces. Surveillance determines who is entitled to welfare aid and who
is not; who is an efficient worker and therefore entitled to payment or promotion; who may receive credit and who is a credit risk; who should be
marked ‘deviant’ and what activities can be called ‘normal’; who may enter and, often, who may or may not exit. It can be used as a
mechanism of preventive power of control, excluding potential rule breakers (Dandeker, 1990). Surveillance
categorises, labels, sorts, positions, indexes and records individuals within a framework which
could be commercial, social, legal, medical, or any number of sub-sets, often crossing boundaries as
information is commoditised and cross-indexed (Fitzpatrick, 2002). The sociological perspectives and theories adopted primarily
demonstrate that there is relationship between the state, the individual and surveillance. This manifests

itself in terms of embodiment via the use of biometrics , state control and the pervasive use of
surveillance in panoptical terms and also with the relationship between the social actor and forms of interaction and resistance towards
 Jaguar Debate 60

surveillance. Thisform of structuration of surveillance can be further developed in terms of habitus,

field and capital. There are social actors who do not possess the techniques to fully interact and to
resist surveillance; there are social actors on the margin of society whilst under full surveillance
that again do not possess the dispositions to fully engage with this information and technological
society. These ideas can also be reflected in the theories of risk and trust where the actor has, not only to be reflexive in their life trajectory, but also be reflexive
whilst negotiating their way through the risk society. Not all surveillance is a sinister and invasive construct, the research needs to acknowledge and reflect upon the
fact that many surveillance techniques were developed to aid and support privacy, to facilitate growing consumer cultures and to secure individual banking and
monetary transactions. The perspectives used are not above criticism themselves and no doubt would appear to be inappropriate to some sociologists of surveillance,
such as adherents of the Deleuze theories of rhizomatic surveillance.

Biometric surveillance reduces people to their biological identity.

Agamben ’14 [Giorgio – Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of Philosophy at Collège International de Philosophie in
Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, “From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power,”
transcript of lecture delivered by Agamben in Athens, 11-16-13, published on Roarmag, 2-4-14,
http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/]

One important sphere in which the axiom is operative is that of biometrical security apparatuses,
which increasingly pervade every aspect of social life. When biometrical technologies first appeared
in 18th century in France with Alphonse Bertillon and in England with Francis Galton, the inventor of finger prints, they were obviously
not meant to prevent crimes but only to recognize recidivist delinquents . Only once a second crime has occurred, you
can use the biometrical data to identify the offender. Biometrical technologies, which had been invented for recividist criminals, remained for a long time their
exclusive privilege. In 1943, US Congress still refused the Citizen Identification Act, which was meant to introduce for every citizen an Identity Card with finger
prints. But according to a sort of fatality or unwritten law of modernity, the technologies which have
been invented for animals, for criminals, strangers or Jews, will finally be extended to all human
beings . Therefore, in the course of 20th century, biometric technologies have been applied to all citizens,
and Bertillon’s identification photographs and Galton’s fingerprints are currently in use everywhere for ID cards. The De-politicization of Citizenship But the
extreme step has been taken only in our days and it is still in the process of full realization . The
development of new digital technologies, with optical scanners which can easily record not only
finger prints but also the retina or the eye’s iris structure, biometrical apparatuses tend to move
beyond the police stations and immigration offices and spread into everyday life. In many countries, the access to
student’s restaurants or even to schools is controlled by a biometric apparatus on which the student just puts his or her hand. The European industries in this field,
which are quickly growing, recommend that citizens get used to this kind of control from their early youth. The phenomenon is really disturbing, because the
European Commissions for the development of security (like the ESPR, European Security Research Program) include among their permanent members the
representatives of the big industries in the field, which are just the old armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System, that have converted to
the security business. It is easy to imagine the dangers represented by a power that could have at its
disposal the unlimited biometric and genetic information of all its citizens . With such a power at
hand, the extermination of the Jews, which was undertaken on the basis of incomparably less efficient documentation, would have
been total and incredibly swift. But I will not dwell on this important aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you
concern rather the transformation of political identity and of political relationships that are involved in security technologies. This transformation is
so extreme that we can legitimately ask not only if the society in which we live is still a democratic
one, but also if this society can still be considered political. Christian Meier has shown how in the 5th century a transformation of
the conceptualization of the political took place in Athens, which was grounded on what he calls a “politicization” (politisierung) of citizenship. While until that
moment the fact of belonging to the polis was defined by a number of conditions and social statuses of different kind — for instance belonging to nobility or to a
certain cultural community, to be a peasant or merchant, a member of a certain family, etc. — from now on citizenship became the main criterion of social identity.
“The result was a specifically Greek conception of citizenship, in which the fact that men had to behave as citizens found an institutional form. The belonging to
economic or religious communities was removed to a secondary rank. The citizens of a democracy considered themselves as members of the polis only in so far as
they devoted themselves to a political life. Polis and politeia, city and citizenship, constituted and defined one another. Citizenship became in that way a form of life,
by means of which the polis constituted itself in a domain clearly distinct from the oikos, the house. Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to
the private space, which was the reign of necessity.” According to Meier, this specifically Greek process of politicization was transmitted to Western politics, where
citizenship remained the decisive element. The hypothesis I would like to propose to you is that this
fundamental political factor has
entered an irrevocable process that we can only define as a process of increasing de-politicization .
What was in the beginning a way of living, an essentially and irreducibly active condition, has now become
a purely passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and the public are progressively blurred and become indistinguishable.
 Jaguar Debate 61

This process of the de-politicization of citizenship is so evident that I will not dwell on it . Rise of the State of
Control I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the security apparatuses have
played a decisive role in this process. The growing extension to citizens of technologies which were
conceived for criminals inevitably has consequences for the political identity of the citizen . For the first
time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social personality and its recognition by
others, but rather a function of biological data, which cannot bear any relation to it, like the arabesques of the fingerprints or the
disposition of the genes in the double helix of DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive factor of
social identity, which loses therefore its public character. If my identity is now determined by
biological facts that in no way depend on my will and over which I have no control, then the
construction of something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic . What relationship can I
establish with my fingerprints or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics loses its
sense and must be thought again from the ground up. While the classical Greek citizen was defined through the
opposition between the private and the public, the oikos, which is the place of reproductive life, and the polis, place of political action,
the modern citizen seems rather to move in a zone of indifference between the private and the
public, or, to quote Hobbes’ terms, the physical and the political body. The materialization in space of this zone of
indifference is the video surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities . Here again an
apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a
video-recorded place is no more an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private; a zone of indifference
between the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space is certainly a complex
phenomenon that involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a
special place. The primacy of the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to
the politicization of bare life in modern states . But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity begun
with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the normal relationship
between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion, police filing and control. The unspoken
principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential terrorist . But what
is a state ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic state? Can we even consider it as something political? In what
kind of state do we live today? You will probably know that Michel Foucault, in his book Surveiller et Punir and in his courses at the Collège de
France, sketched a typological classification of modern states. He shows how the state of the Ancien Regime, which he calls the territorial or sovereign state and
whose motto was faire mourir et laisser vivre, evolves progressively into a population state and into a disciplinary state, whose motto reverses now into faire vivre et
laisser mourir, as it will take care of the citizen’s life in order to produce healthy, well-ordered and manageable bodies. The
state in which we live
now is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze suggested to call it the État de contrôle, or control state ,
because what it wants is not to order and to impose discipline but rather to manage and to control.
Deleuze’s definition is correct, because management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has told it so clearly as the Italian
police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001 declared that the government did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder. From
Politics to Policing American
political scientists who have tried to analyze the constitutional
transformation involved in the Patriot Act and in the other laws which followed September 2001
prefer to speak of a security state . But what does security here mean? It is during the French
Revolution that the notion of security – sureté, as they used to say — is linked to the definition of police. The laws of
March 16, 1791 and August 11, 1792 introduced thus into French legislation the notion of police de sureté (security police), which was doomed to have a long history
in modernity. If you read the debates which preceded the vote on these laws you will see that police and security define one another, but no one among the speakers
(Brissot, Heraut de Séchelle, Gensonné) is able to define police or security by themselves. The debates focused on the situation of the
police with respect to justice and judicial power. Gensonné maintains that they are “two separate and distinct powers,” yet, while the
function of the judicial power is clear, it is impossible to define the role of the police. An analysis of the debate shows that the place and function of
the police is undecidable and must remain undecidable, because, if it were really absorbed in the
judicial power, the police could no more exist. This is the discretionary power which still today defines the actions of police officer, who,
in a concrete situation of danger for the public security act, so to speak, as a sovereign. But, even when he exerts this discretionary power, the policeman does not
really take a decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judge’s decision. Every decision concerns the causes, while the police acts on effects, which are by
definition undecidable. The
name of this undecidable element is no more today, like it was in 17th century, raison d’État, or state reason. It
is rather “security reasons”. The security state is a police state, but, again, in the juridical theory, the police
 Jaguar Debate 62

is a kind of black hole. All we can say is that when the so called “science of the police” first appears in the 18th century, the “police” is brought back to
its etymology from the Greek politeia and opposed as such to “politics”. But it is surprising to see that “police” coincides now with the true political function, while
the term politics is reserved for foreign policy. Thus Von Justi, in his treatise on Policey-Wissenschaft, calls Politik the relationship of a state with other states, while
he calls Polizei the relationship of a state with itself. It is worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: “Police is the relationship of a state with itself.” The hypothesis I
would like to suggest here is that, placing
itself under the sign of security, the modern state has left the domain of
politics to enter a no man’s land, whose geography and whose borders are still unknown. The
security state, whose name seems to refer to an absence of cares (securus from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about
the dangers it involves for democracy , because in it political life has become impossible, while
democracy means precisely the possibility of a political life.

Biometrics biologizes life, entrenching violent biopolitics.

Muller ’10 [Benjamin J. – Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Theory at the University of
Western Ontario, Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast, Security, Risk and the Biometric State: Governing
Borders and Bodies, p. 22-23]

In exposing what he calls “virtual security politics,” Dillon notes the extent to which security
measures such as biometrics are not
only charged with having to specify the attributes of their subjects, but also indicate their own
fallibility (Dillon 2003: 554). One could phrase this differently as follows: like all security measures, the characteristics of the
subject of security require description; however, the extent to which the technological system itself is
a potential threat must be recognized. In this political space of biometrics where, as Dillon suggests, “the physical
and the virtual meet,” there is a definite fortification of “biological life” over political life and the further

entrenchment of the biopolitical . Here, the introduction of biometric technologies is a cogent example
of Agamben’s suggestion that security is imposing itself as the basic principle of state activity,
leading to the gradual neutralization of politics (Agamben 2002). Underscoring the extent to which the
relationship between the collected data and the subject of that collection is markedly different from
traditional analogue procedures for data collection, this discussion of the introduction of biometric
technologies as constituent of virtual security (and thus, virtual borders), the move towards the state of exception as
the rule, and the general biologization of life, indicate a dramatic difference between digital data
collection and analogue vis-à-vis security, subjectivity and sovereignty. In fact, arguments insensitive to
such phenomena – as exemplified in the biometrics literature, the CIC forum, and to a lesser extent the European Commission report –
misleadingly focus on the policy of biometrics rather than the politics of biometrics .

The concept of citizenship acts as a mechanism for biopower

Houdt ’08 [Friso van Houdt is Assistant Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He
studied criminology and sociology at the same university. Inspired by the governmentality perspective he worked on
a dissertation that studied the striking changes in the government of crime, citizenship and migration in the
Netherlands and the EU., Citizenship as an instrument of bio-power: Identifying changes in the functioning of
citizenship in the Netherlands, 2008]

What has been argued so far is that citizenship

can be used strategically by different types of power, for example
the nation-state (as a power) or society (as a power) in different types of situations. In the situation of the crisis
of the welfare-state and migration the nation-state reacts by using formal citizenship to exclude people from its soil or from entrance to the welfare state whereas
citizenship was used before as a mechanism of inclusion. In the situation of the decoupling of the nation/state and society as a consequence of immigration,
‘society’ uses citizenship as social closure, first to define itself as a moral space and second for
purposes of integration and homogenization. With this in mind it can be argued citizenship is a mechanism to
regulate a population, something Foucault has called ‘bio-power’ (Foucault, 1976). Bio-power has developed
from the 18th century onwards and can be described as the situation in which the control of the ‘social body’ becomes the end of political power. Political power
means for Foucault not only the power of the state, he therefore goes beyond Marx and Weber because the state is merely one manifestation of political power: ‘power
constitutes and expresses itself through multiple sources, of which the state is merely one’ (Cohen, 2006, p.252-253). Next to the state for example also society ‘has’
power. Bio-power works both on a micro-level were it tries to influence the individual body (anatomic-politics) as well as on a meso/macro-level were it influences
the ‘social body’ (bio-politics). Foucault argues it is sexuality which is positioned at the crossroad of both anatomic- and bio-politic. It is interesting to notice that
maybe citizenship too holds this position. Next to sexuality also citizenship holds a junction point of the two politics of bio-power (anatomic- and bio-politics). Next
 Jaguar Debate 63

to sexuality citizenship too is a mechanism of regulating the social body. In this paper it has been showed that citizenship
is an instrument with which it becomes possible to manage a population for example by
differentiating them (c.f. Hindess, 2000). This paper also showed that bio-power is not only working in the nation-state
but it can also be working in society. Bio-power of the state in relation to citizenship was illustrated
by the use of formal citizenship by the nation-state. After a period in which the formal dimension of citizenship was used to include
people and as a consequence of the crisis of the welfare state and immigration as a social problem, formal citizenship is used to exclude
people. Consequently a differentiation of persons has taken place. Based on citizenship it has become possible to
differentiate between: citizens (full formal citizenship); denizens (bounded citizenship); aliens (full
citizenship in other nation-states) (Hammar, 1990) and; illegals (Entzinger & Engbersen, 2004). In a glocalizing world the
nation-state tries to operate and make itself useful by transforming the functioning of citizenship and regulating the population on its soil. Bio-power of
society in relation to citizenship was illustrated by the use of moral citizenship . In a period society
has trouble defining itself it uses citizenship to create a moral space and to differentiate between
real citizens and unreal citizens. Moral citizenship of society means active participation in society, to contribute to the health of society (social
cohesion). Next to (moral) citizenship as political participation in the nation-state stands bio-political participation in society.

All attempts to digitize blackness have failed- in particular biotechnological

innovations continue to ignore the complexity of blackness and gender– only
adopting a critical biometric consciousness is key to attuning ourselves to ways
black bodies disrupt this project of whiteness and digital epidermilization
Browne ’13 [Dr. Simone Browne; “Dark Sousveillance: Race, Surveillance, and Resistance,” a talk given on December 9, 2013, hosted
at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the Digital Praxis Seminar and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative; https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=IsMFdiLsqbg, 26:08-33:51, video published March 21, 2014; transcribed by Ameena Ruffin]

Simply put, biometrics is the idea that the body will reveal the truth about the subject despite the subject’s claim. So the idea that I
might say my name is Rob Ford, but my body—whether it’s my DNA, my fingerprint, my iris scan, or some other piece or part of my body will reveal my true identity. So with

the concept of digital epidermalization, I’m suggesting here that biometrics research and development
continues to rely on certain practices of what I’m calling prototypical whiteness, as well as
prototypical maleness, prototypical able-bodied-ness, prototypical youthness, as well. This speaks to the ways in which biometric
information technologies are sometimes inscribed in racializing schemas that see certain bodies privileged, or at least
whiteness might be privileged or lightness in some of these enroll measurements and enrollment
processes. So I’m going to look here at a few findings in research and development coming out of the biometric industry
to kind of make sense of this for you all in the audience because I think that these research and development publications tell us a lot about industry concerns and

specifications and they also tell us a lot about who these technologies, or what kind of bodies these technologies, are
designed to suit best. And so one such study examined how facial recognition technology could be employed in a multi-ethnic environment to classify facial features by race and also by gender—yes that’s
Will Smith right there. So a technology like this could be applied , for example, in shopping malls, casinos, amusement

parks, or something like the photo-tagging application that might be used in Facebook or so. So the authors of the study found that,
when they programmed the gender classification system generically for “all ethnicities,” the system
was “inclined to classify Africans as males and mongoloids as females.” So the racial nomenclature of
“mongoloid” is seemingly archaic, I know, but not uncommon in some of the R and D coming out of this
industry. With this gender classification system, what happened here is that Black women were read as male most of
the time and Asian men were read as female most of the time with this particular study. In this way it mirrored
earlier pseudoscientific racist and sexist discourse that sought to define racial categories and gender
categories in order to regulate these artificial boundaries that can never be fully maintained . Think here of the
Black woman as surrogate man or the feminized Asian man. Interestingly, in this particular study, the gender classifier was made ethnicity specific for the

category African and they found that images of the African female would be classified as females 82% of the time and while that same African classifier would find images of Asian females 95% of the time and
for what they call “Caucasoid” females 96% of the time. This is a study that came out around 2010. These kind of languages of “Caucasoid,” “Mongoloid” as well. So meaning that with this particular

female classifier when its calibrated to detect Black women, African classifier’s better suited as
classifying Asian women as well as Caucasian women or White women. So using actor Will Smith’s face as a model for generic Black masculinity, the study’s authors
 Jaguar Debate 64

the accuracy of gender classifier on Africans is not as high

are left to conclude that “ as on ‘Mongoloid’ or ‘Caucasoid’.” Another study—I’m going to talk a
little bit about failure to enroll—this came out in 2009 a Nikon camera, and the idea that some bodies fail to enroll in these technologies. And these things change once these failures reveal themselves and sometimes through twitter

and public ways like this. In another study we can see how epidermalization—and what I mean by that is the imposition of race on the skin—is
present, for example, in comparative testing with control groups with higher failure to enroll rates than others. The study states—I’m just going to read. This is a popular quote that’s
often used in people that research biometric technologies, but it says here: “Elderly users often have very faint
fingerprints and may have poorer circulation than younger users. Construction workers and
artisans are more likely to have highly worn fingerprints to the point where ridges are nearly
nonexistent. Users of Pacific Rim/Asian descent may have faint fingerprint ridges, especially female
users.” What his quote is telling us is that the elderly; people who come in contact with corrosive or caustic chemicals, such as mechanics, or nail technicians, or manicurists, often have unmeasurable fingerprints. Think of
message therapists too, or people that have heavy hand-washing n their job like nurses or people in the healthcare profession. This should lead us to ask questions about can

these technologies be calibrated to determine gender and race or class differentiation . In the same study that I just
quoted, the authors note that facial scan technology may produce higher failure to enroll rates for very

dark skin users because of the quality of images provided for the facial scan system by video
cameras are often optimized for lighter skinned users. So what research and development is telling
us is that certain technologies come to privilege whiteness, or at least lightness in the ways in which they are
lit in the enrollment process, or at least how some bodies are lit in the enrollment process . So you can see the logic of

prototypical whiteness operating here and also with this Canon camera—I’m sorry, Nikon camera. With this the possibilities of racializing surveillance are revealed. This is especially
so in facial recognition technologies calibrated only to find matches from within specific racial and gender groupings leading to higher failure to enroll rates for some groupings. So the application of

surveillance technologies in this way leads to questions concerning the idea that “Can gender and race, which are
social constructs, be specified by these technologies or programmed so?” And also, “How do
transgendered people fit within this algorithmic equation?” So they are unaccounted for in the
algorithm. These research and development reports and articles make clear there’s a certain assumption
that with these technologies that categories of gender identity and race are clear-cut and that a machine can
be programmed to assign gender categories or what bodies and body parts “should signify.” Such
technologies can then possibly be applied to determine who has access to movement and stability and to other
rights. So given this there’s important questions that I think need to be asked, such as: How do we understand the body once it’s converted into
data? What are the underlying assumptions with surveillance technologies such as passport verification machines, facial recognition
software, and fingerprint template technology? Well there’s the notion that these technologies are infallible, that they’re objective,

and that they are based on mathematical precision without error or bias on the part of the
computer programmers who calibrate the search parameters of these machines or on the part of
those who read these templates to make decisions.
 Jaguar Debate 65

Impacts
The biopolitics resulting from the biologization of life and resulting calculability
renders some fit to live and others fit to die.
Dillon 5 [Michael – Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, “Cared to Death:
The Political Time of Your Life,” in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876]

One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of biopolitics. In the process of reducing life to stuff, biopolitics
must determine the
quality of the stuff so that investment in its extraction, promotion and refinement may itself be
continuously assessed. It follows that some life will be found to be worth investment, some life less worth investment,
while other life may prove intractable to the powers of investment and the demands it makes on life.
Here, assaying morphs into evaluating the eligibility and not simply the expected utility of life forms. Ultimately, some life may turn out to be
positively inimical to the circulation of life in which this investment driven process of biopolitics
continuously trades, and have to be removed from life if its antipathy to biopoliticised life cannot
otherwise be adapted, correctedor contained. Behind the life-charged rhetoric of biopolitics, lies the
biologisation of life to which biopolitics is committed, the violence of that biologisation and the
reduction of the classical political question concerning the good life (and the good death) to that of the
endlessly extendable, fit and adaptable life. The good life Agamben refigures in terms of the pure - he also says 'profane' but note that
there is no profanity without sanctity - immanence of 'happy life'.

Biopower causes eradication of entire populations

Dean ‘01 [Mitchell Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics,
and sovereignty.” Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 55-58]
Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in the first volume of the History of Sexuality that
contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled "Right of Death and Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrastbetween the two registers
of government is thus between one that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this
right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the
fostering of life. Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken down. The right of death can also be understood as "the right to
take life or let live"; the power over life as the power "to foster life or disallow it." Sovereign power
is a power that distinguishes between political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is
included in the constitution of sovereign power by Its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to
include zoe in bios: stripped down mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and
sovereignty is not one of a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different
forms of power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus,
biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and
different form that attempts to include what had earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in
political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his enemies but
to disqualify the life—the mere existence—of those who are a threat to the life of the population, to
disallow those deemed "unworthy of life," those whose bare life is not worth living. This allows us, first, to
consider what might be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 136—37). In Foucault's account , biopolitics does not put an
end to the practice of war: it provides it with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These
machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations. Wars become genocidal
in the twentieth century. The same state that takes on the duty to enhance the life of the population
also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons of
this process of the power to put whole populations to death. We might also consider here the aptly
named biological and chemical weapons that seek an extermination of populations by visiting
plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in which they live to the point at which bare life is no
 Jaguar Debate 66

longer sustainable. Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of one's own
populations. Rather, it intensifies that killing—whether by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits
holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the Utopia to be
achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is only occasionally exercised as the right to
kill and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest
in the refraining from the right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence wars will be
waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate
connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of
modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power
is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of
population" (1979a: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more notice: "massacres become vital." There is thus a kind
of perverse homogeneity between the power over life and the power to take life characteristic of biopower. The emergence of a biopolitical
racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which this
homogeneity always threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be
approached as a fundamental mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler
1995: 84—85). For Foucault, the primary function of this form of racism is to establish a division between those who must live and those who must die, and to
distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion and techniques of population had given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new
linkage among population, the internal organization of states, and the competition between states. Darwinism, as an imperial social and political program, would plot
the ranking of individuals, populations, and nations along the common gradient of fitness and thus measure eflicienqp6 However, the series "population, evolution,
and race" is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the "white races" or of justifying colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates
and the abnormals in one's own population and prevent the further degeneration of the race. The second and most important function for Foucault of this biopolitical
racism in the nineteenth century is that "it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life" (Stoler 1995: 84). The
life of the
population, its vigor, its health, its capacities to survive, becomes necessarily linked to the
elimination of internal and external threats. This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated
in the injunctions of the eugenic project: identify those who are degenerate, abnormal,
feeble*minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to forced sterilization : encourage those who are superior, fit,
and intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but mere existence and disqualify their propagation: encourage those who can partake of a sovereign existence
and of moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a positive justification for the right to kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are
to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism, however, we need to take into account another kind of denouement between the biopolitical
management of population and the exercise of sovereignty. This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and democratized form founded on the liberty of
the juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further element of sovereignty, its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault 1979a:
148). For Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in blood—as a reality and as a symbol—just as one might say that sexuality becomes the key field on which biopolitical
management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised through repression and deduction, through a law over which hangs the sword, when it is exercised
on the scaffold by the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through alliance, "blood was a reality with a
symbolic function." By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigor, fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to
sexuality" (Foucault 1979a: 147). For Foucault (1979a: 149—50), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated "the oneiric exaltation of blood," of
fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an immensely cynical and naive fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the
detailed administration of the life of the population and the regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and education.'Nazism
generalized biopower
without the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of right, but it could not do away with
sovereignty. Instead, it established a set of permanent interventions into the conduct of the
individual within the population and articulated this with the "mythical concern for blood and the
triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into
the eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the themes of the purity of blood and the
myth of the fatherland. In such an articulation of these elements of sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the administration of life and the
right to kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It has become a necessary relation. The
administration of life
comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and therefore war, will be exercised at
the level of an entire population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life of other races
becomes necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of other races is only one face of the
purification of one's own race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other part is to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of death and total
destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an "absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state and an absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are
superimposed and converge on the Final Solution. With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through the Jews, all the other races, for whom the Jews were
the symbol and the manifestation. This
includes, in one of Hitler's last acts, the order to destroy the bases of bare
life for the German people itself "Final Solution for other races, the absolute suicide of the German
race" is inscribed, according to Foucault. in the functioning of the modern state (232).
 Jaguar Debate 67

Biopower and biopolitics regulate every part of the social body. Biopower was the
root cause to developments of capitalism, where the body was reduced as an
instrument of the state, and of segregation, which separated the racial and classist
‘abnormal’ from the ‘normal’. This creates an ultimately calculative approach to
human life.
Foucault ’76 [Michel Foucault, “The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction” Translated from the French
by Robert Hurley in 1978, published originally in 1976]

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism ; the latter would not ,
have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic
processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have
methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the
development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance
of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques
of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the
police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to
sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence
on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects
of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human
groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the
time indispensable. One knows how many times the question has been raised concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma" tion of capitalism; but what
occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps a
wider impact than the new morality; this
was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of
phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into
the sphere of political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this was the moment when the first contact between life and history was
brought about. On the contrary, the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very strong
for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always dominated by the menace of death.
But through a circular process, the economic-and primarily agricultural--development of the eighteenth century, and an increase in productivity and resources even
more rapid than the demographic growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the period of great
the
ravages from starvation and plague had come to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing to torment life so directly. But at the same time,
development of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agricultural
techniques, and the observations and measures relative to man's life and survival contributed to this
relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space for
movement thus conquered, and broadening and organizing that space, methods of power and
knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them.
Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual
and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history, no
doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence ; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate
that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and
power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death,
but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking
charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. If one can apply
the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-
power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and
made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. It is not that life has been totally integrated into
techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them. Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale than ever; and the biological risks
confronting the species are perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's "threshold of
modernity" has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as
a living being in question.
 Jaguar Debate 68

Constant surveillance is a technique of disciplinary control that creates the power

necessary to exclude the abnormal from the normal.
Foucault ’75 [Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," published in 1975, translated
in 1977, pages 196-198]

They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the nineteenth
century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant
(beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of power proper to disciplinary
partitioning Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused
space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution proper to power,
individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion – this is what
was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the
psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital. Generally speaking, all authorities
exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and
branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential
distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to
be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of
individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of
disciplinary controls makes it possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring into play against him the
dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to
which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary banding and exile of the leper
to quite different objects the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervision
and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise.
All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand hin
and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive. Bentham’s Panopticon is the
architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was base: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this
tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the
building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one
end to the other. All that is need, then, is to place a supervisor, in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a
schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the
The panoptic
periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.
mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it
reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – preserves only the first and
eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

Constant government surveillance has a normalizing function --- we seek to fit an

‘average’ created through aggregate data analysis --- this violently destroys
individualism --- when we take away government surveillance, disciplinary power
loses its efficacy
Hall ’07 [5/7/2007 – Master of Arts in Political Science (Lindsay, “Death, Power, and the Body: A Bio-political
Analysis of Death and Dying”, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, p. 15-17)//roetlin]
Foucault labeled this new type of power as “disciplinary,” and while he acknowledged its earlier presence in isolated examples, his point was that, in modernity, this
type of disciplinary power extended its influence from society’s army barracks and monasteries to nearly every social institution. Disciplinary
mechanisms, he contended, infiltrated the whole of society in the late seventeenth century when the first concerted efforts to arrange and
control specific and identifiable groups of people took place. According to Foucault, the forces that are used to arrange and classify
groups of people also render those people as individual units. The individual, he argued, is thus a
construction of power created only when that individual is recognized as part of a larger and identifiable group–a group is not created
by a mass of individuals, but vice versa . According to Foucault, it is only through discipline that modern individuals are created out of a
 Jaguar Debate 69

Disciplinary power, he claimed, differs from preexisting power mechanisms in that it is applied “primarily to bodies and
mass.
what they do rather than to the land and what it produces.” As a result of the propagation of disciplinary power, it at once
becomes possible to “extract time and labor, rather than commodities and wealth” from individual bodies (2003a, 35). An important step, Foucault points out, for the
budding capitalist economies of the time. Thus, for Foucault, this new mechanism of power was essentially “one of the basic tools for the establishment of industrial
capitalism and the corresponding type of society” that we now associate with capitalist economies (2003a, 36). In fact, it can be argued that the pressing need to
produce a labor force in the late seventeenth century sparked a refinement of existing disciplinary techniques–and the invention of others–in order to shape the bodies
of individuals into the exact type of laborers that would be appreciated by capitalists. The benefits of disciplinary power, Foucault explained, lie
in its precise manipulation of the body so as to render bodies “both useful and docile ” (Foucault 16 2003c,
249). “In short, [disciplinary power] dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an
‘aptitude,’ a ‘capacity,’ which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result
from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection ” (Foucault 1977, 138). All of this takes place, Foucault maintains,

through the meticulous regulation of the body’s movement and the time and space in which it moves. Specifically, there are three
elements of disciplinary power that Foucault claims train the bodies of individuals to become both “useful and docile;” hierarchical observation,
examination, and normalizing judgment. According to Foucault, the possibility of constant observation is
crucial for disciplinary power to be effective . For capitalist factories to succeed, he maintained, they need to be architecturally and
managerially structured so as to facilitate constant observation. Hierarchies must be established and workers must be monitored by those
in positions above their own, thus inducing good work habits without the threat of physical violence. Moreover, Foucault theorized that it was not
specifically constant observation that produced these results, for such observation of every worker would be both inefficient and impossible. It was merely the
possibility of being observed that shaped the behavior of laborers–the mere possibility that someone, somewhere might be watching. According to Foucault, those that
are being observed need to be evaluated in an effective way. Thus a second element of disciplinary power is the examination. Workers are periodically tested on their
abilities and their habits, however, the results of such tests matter little without some sort of standard of comparison. The
third element of disciplinary
power is normalizing judgment–this element is linked to Foucault’s earlier interest in the development of statistics; the

gathering of knowledge about individuals . Through compiling such information, Foucault points out, it is
possible to identify an “average,” a standard by which to compare individual behavior. For Foucault, it is
ultimately the desire to be “normal,” that shapes individuals, their bodies and their minds. And “thanks to a
whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reports–all technology that
can be described as the disciplinary technology of labor,” the power to define what qualifies as
normal is taken completely out of the hands of those to which the standard is applied (Foucault 2003c, 242).
It is no accident that this form of power appears to be linked with another sense of the word “discipline,” meaning an academic field of study. In fact, for Foucault,
disciplinary power is inextricably bound to knowledge itself, particularly the fields of knowledge that make the individual the object of study–psychiatry, criminology,
sociology, psychology, and medicine. Together, the human sciences create a regime of power that, according to Foucault, controls, describes, and monitors human
behavior in terms of norms. By
setting out what is “normal,” the human sciences thus also intentionally create the idea
of abnormality or deviation. The more abnormal and excluded you are, the more individual you become.
Individuality is thus, for Foucault, not the desirable individuality of Liberalism–it is the mark of the mental
patient , the convict , and the over-comatose . It has nothing to do with taking control over one's own life and
everything to do with being controlled .

This inscription within biopolitics is at the heart of violence allowing every ‘citizen’
to be devalued and eliminated in the name of sovereign management.
Agamben 98 [Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
Stanford UP, p. 139-140]
<3.3. It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain coun¬tries, occupies a substantial position
in medical debates and provokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with which Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of
the sovereignty of the living man (person) over his (their) own
euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that
life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to
have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide. The new
juridical category of "life devoid of value" (or "life unworthy of being lived") corresponds exactly-even if in an apparently
different direction-to the bare life of homo sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every
valorization and every "politicization" of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence)
 Jaguar Debate 70

necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be
politically relevant, becomes only "sacred life," and can as such be eliminated without punishment.
Every society sets this limit; every society-even the most modern-decides who its "sacred men"(people) will be. It is even
possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceptio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but
extend itself in the history of the West and has now-in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national
sovereignty-moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a
definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.> <139-140>

Individualizing and identity forming methods of governance are the new

predominant forms of power. The production and administration of life lead to the
maneuvering of subjects in ways that culminate in violence, war, and genocide.
Foucault ’78 [Michel – late philosopher, History of Sexuality An Introduction Vol. 1, Vintage Books, p. 135-
137]
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient
patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could
take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classi¬cal theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form .
It was no longer
considered that this power of the sovereign over his (their) subjects could be exercised in an
absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in
jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who sought to over-throw him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately
wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without "directly proposing their death," he was empowered to "expose their life": in this
sense, he wielded an "indirect" power over them of life and death.' But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct
power over the offender's life: as punishment, the latter would be put to death. Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was
conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by
every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the formation of that
new juridical being, the sovereign?' In any case, in its modern form-relative and limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a
The sovereign exercised his (their) right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by
dissymmetrical one.
refraining from killing; he (they)evidenced his power over life only through the death he was
capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in
reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referred to a historical type of
society in which power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of
products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately
the West has undergone a very
life itself; it culminated, in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it. Since the classical age
profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major
form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize,
and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and
ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying
them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the
exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of
the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure,
maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth
century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations.
But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits -now
presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to adminis¬ter, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
controls and comprehensive regulations.
defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized
for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It
is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to
wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused
them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked
question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to
guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable
 Jaguar Debate 71

of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the
existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the
dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and
exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
 Jaguar Debate 72

Studious Play Solvency

Rather than reading the resolution as a question of policy, we approach it from the
political --- only our affirmation of studious play can reclaim politics from the state
of exception
Morgan 7 [Benjamin, University of California, Berkeley, “Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin's and
Giorgio Agamben's Aesthetics of Pure Means”, Journal Of Law And Society, volume 34, Number 1, March,
www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_Aesthetics
_of_Pure_Means]

Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception paints an ominous picture.

Agamben asks whether law can regulate its own
suspension not because this is an interesting, if abstract, legal problem, but because the state of
exception has become a worldwide `paradigm of government'. According to Agamben, a global state of
exception is the only way to explain our current state of affairs, in which: law can ... be obliterated
and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that, while ignoring international law
externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally, nevertheless still claims to be
applying the law. The state of exception enables this contradiction since it is neither inside nor outside law. On the one hand, it is not a
`special kind of law' since it is `a suspension of the juridical order itself'; on the other, it is not merely the absence of law, since law contains
provisions for its suspension. This topographical paradox means that law functions unusually within the
state of exception. The state of exception doesn't create chaos or anarchy; it sepa-rates the law's
force from its application. Law's purely formal applicability comes loose from its direct impact on life. As a result, acts that are
not authorized by any law can employ the force of legal action: in extreme situations `force of law'
floats as an indeterminate element that can be claimed by both the state authority ... and by a
revolutionary organization. Agamben argues that this ultimately makes law and life indistinguishable:
every action is potentially a legal action. Unfortunately, however, we can't simply return to a situation prior
to the state of exception: from the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return
to the state of law, for at issue now are the very concepts of `state' and `law'. If we take Agamben's claims
about the reach of the state of exception seriously, we are left to grapple with the odd solution that Agamben suggests. This
solution is what I would like to interrogate here. Agamben argues that to get beyond the state of exception we must
do something more radical than modify the law, since the exception has revealed that the normal
functioning of law depends on violent force. As a consequence, we must pursue `the only truly political
action ... which severs the nexus between violence and law'. B ut it is difficult to imagine how we might actually take
this `truly political' action , which Agamben calls `play' : One day, humanity will play with law just as children play with disused
objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good... . [ T]his studious play is the passage
that allows us to arrive at ... justice. `Play' is a surprising answer to the problems that Agamben has dramatically sketched: it
seems simultaneously too abstract and not serious enough. But can we take play seriously ? Play might be able to counteract the
law's violent application to life because of its lack of seriousness: play suspends both
instrumentality and normativity. In this sense, play deinstrumentalizes what Agamben frequently
calls the `machine' or `apparatus' of the state of exception.
 Jaguar Debate 73

Refugee Solvency
The concept of the refugee, which biometric technologies survey and define,
separates the rights of the citizen from the rights of the non-citizen, radically calling
into question the fundamental assumptions of the nation-state. The refugee puts
modern sovereignty in crisis.
Agamben ’95 [Giorgi Agamben “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life” (1995), translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Part III: The Camp As Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern - Chapter 2, Sections 3 & 4, pages 131-
134]

2.3. If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such
a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all because by breaking
the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern
sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes
the secret presupposition of the political domain - bare life - to appear for an instant within that
domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly "the man of rights," as Arendt suggests, the first and only real appearance of
rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always covers them over. Yet this is precisely what makes the figure of the
refugee so hard to define politically. Since the First World War, the birth-nation link has no longer been capable of
performing its legitimating function inside the nation-state, and the two terms have begun to show themselves to be irreparably
loosened from each other. From this perspective, the immense increase of refugees and stateless persons in Europe
(in a short span of time 1,500,000 White Russians, 700,000 Armenians, 500,000 Bulgarians, 1,000,000 Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of Germans, Hungarians,
and Rumanians were displaced from their countries) is
one of the two most significant phenomena. The other is the
contemporaneous institution by many European states of juridical measures allowing for the mass
denaturalization and denationalization of large portions of their own populations. The first introduction of such rules into the juridical order took place in
France in 1915 with respect to naturalized citizens of "enemy" origin; in 1922, Belgium followed the French example and revoked the naturalization of citizens who
had committed "antinational" acts during war; in 1926, the fascist regime issued an analogous law with respect to citizens who had shown themselves to be "unworthy
of Italian citizenship"; in 1933, it was Austria's turn; and so it continued until the Nuremberg laws on "citizenship in the Reich" and the "protection of German blood
and honor" brought this process to the most extreme point of its development, introducing the principle according to which citizenship was something of which one
had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question. And oneof the few rules to which Nazis
constantly adhered during the course of the "Final Solution" was that Jews could be sent to the
extermination camps only after they had been fully denationalized (stripped even of the residual citizenship left to them
after the Nuremberg laws). These two phenomena - which are, after all, absolutely correlative - show that the
birth-nation link, on which the declaration of 1789 had founded national sovereignty, had already lost its mechanical force and
power of self-regulation by the time of the First World War. On the one hand, the nation-states become greatly concerned with
natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every
political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other hand, the very rights of
man that once made sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressively
separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake of the supposed
representation and protection of a bare life that is more and more driven to the margins of the
nation-states, ultimately to be recodified into a new national identity. The contradictory character of these processes is certainly one of
the reasons for the failure of the attempts of the various committees and organizations by which states, the League of Nations, and, later, the
United Nations confronted the problem of refugees and the protection of human rights, from the Bureau Nansen (1922) to the
contemporary High Commission for Refugees (1951), whose actions, according to statue, are to have not a political but rather a "solely humanitarian and social"
mission. What is essential is that, every time refugees represent not individual cases but - as happens more and more often today -
a mass phenomenon, both these organizations and individual states prove themselves, despite their solemn
invocations of the "sacred and inalienable" rights of man, absolutely incapable of resolving the problem and even of
confronting it adequately. 2.4. The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are
experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the
citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations - which today are more and more supported by international commissions -
 Jaguar Debate 74

can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves,
maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the
recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively
considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life - which is to say, as life that can be killed but not sacrificed - and that
only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. The "imploring eyes" of the Rwandan
child, whose photograph is shown to obtain money but who "is now becoming more and more
difficult to find alive," may well be the most telling contemporary cipher of the bare life that
humanitarian organizations, in perfect symmetry with state power, need. A humanitarianism
separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of
sovereignty, and the camp - which is to say, the pure space of exception - is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot
master. The concept of the refugee (and the figure of life that is concept represents) must be resolutely separated from
the concept of the rights of man, and we must seriously consider Arendt's claim that the fates of human rights and the nation-state are bound
together such that the decline and crisis of the one necessarily implies the end of the other. The refugee must be considered for what he
is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of
the nation-state, from the birth-nation to the man-citizen link, and that thereby makes it possible to
clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life
is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights.
 Jaguar Debate 75

Refugees
 Jaguar Debate 76

Inherency / Uniqueness
The United States surveys refugees using biometrics at every point from when they
first arrive and for the rest of their lives.
Farraj ’11 [Achraf Farraj, JD candidate for Columbia Law and on Columbia Human Right Law Review,
“REFUGEES AND THE BIOMETRIC FUTURE: THE IMPACT OF BIOMETRICS ON REFUGEES AND
ASYLUM SEEKERS,” 2011]

The United States makes widespread use of biometrics in identifying and verifying the identity of
refugees and asylum seekers. Refugees’ fingerprints are collected prior to their entry into the United States, either while obtaining a visa
or at a port of entry.15 DHS operates the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program,
which collects fingerprints from nearly all international visitors to the United States, including
refugees.16 By 2007, US-VISIT had collected nearly 100 million fingerprints,17 and its data had been used for
various purposes, such as checking the identity of visa applicants against the terrorist watch list18 and being introduced into evidence to show that aliens overstayed
their visas.19 The anticipated benefits of US-VISIT include: “[i]mproved biometric identification of foreign national travelers who may present threats to public safety
and the national security of the United States,” “ensuring the integrity of the United States immigration system through enhanced enforcement of immigration laws,”
and “reductions in fraud, undetected imposters and identity theft.”20 Refugees’ fingerprints may also be collected during their
stay in the United States. The Refugees, Asylum, and Parole System (RAPS) of the U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS) tracks and monitors the processing of asylum applications.21
To verify the identity of asylum applicants and to conduct a background check, RAPS schedules
applicants for fingerprinting at an Application Support Center.22 The fingerprints are then sent to DHS and the
FBI for comparison to those stored in other databases.23 No fingerprints are stored in RAPS.24 Applicants’ failure to submit to
fingerprinting without good cause may result in dismissal of their asylum application or waiver of adjudication
before an asylum officer.25 Such failure also automatically stops the Clock Query, which would further delay
applicants’ procurement of Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) and thus their ability to find work.26 Refugees and
asylum seekers who refuse to provide fingerprints are further disadvantaged because EADs must contain
fingerprints.27 Biometric information is stored in a number of databases. The Integrated Automated Fingerprint
Identification System (IAFIS), established in 1999, is the largest database of fingerprints in the world and is
maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 28 DHS maintains the Automatic Biometric Identification System (IDENT),
which is a database of biometric information that is used for various DHS functions, including the
enforcement of immigration laws. 29 Information stored in IDENT may be collected by organizations within DHS,
such as US-VISIT, and by agencies external to DHS.30 Fingerprints recorded by Application
Support Centers are held in the Biometric Storage System (BSS), the repository of all USCIS biometrics.31
PostSeptember 11 legislation and inter-departmental cooperation have made IDENT and IAFIS significantly interoperable; both are now
searchable by officers at over 150 ports of entry.32 BSS also interfaces with IAFIS and IDENT and is
notified if its fingerprints appear in either database.33

The U.S. fingerprints and biometrically surveys refugees even though they are
already the most intensely screened immigrants to the U.S.
Worth 12/2 [Katie Worth is a 2015 graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Katie Worth is FRONTLINE's
inaugural FRONTLINE-Columbia Tow Journalism Fellow., 12/2/15, “Can Biometrics Solve the Refugee Debate?”,
PBS Frontline]

Of all the doors into the United States, the one that refugees must pass through is perhaps the most
closely guarded of all: The years-long application process involves long interviews, background checks and health screenings. Refugees’
inked fingerprints are checked against databases maintained by the FBI, the Department of
Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. New developments in biometrics may add yet
more steps to this process: An eyeball scan is likely to become protocol within weeks, and
Homeland Security is developing a quick-turnaround DNA test that can be used in field offices . These
 Jaguar Debate 77

technological advances are arriving just as the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe and last month’s deadly attack on Paris has stirred a national debate over whether the
U.S. should accept refugees from Syria. Already, more than two dozen U.S. governors have said they do not want Syrian refugees to relocate into their states. And
following the attack, a bipartisan majority in the House passed legislation that would require the Department of Homeland Security, the Director of National
Intelligence and the FBI to each sign off on security clearances for every refugee applying for entry to the U.S. from Iraq and Syria. But President Barack Obama has
more
promised to veto the bill if it clears the Senate, touting as recently as last week the nation’s “intense security checks, including biometric screening.” In all,
than 4 million refugees have poured out of Iraq and Syria due to the fighting in each country.
Because many refugees flee their homes without papers, or lose documentation in their shuffle
through borders and camps, they can be difficult to identify and track. Until recently, fingerprinting was the United
Nations’ favored identification technique. That changed in October 2013, when the U.N.’s refugee agency adopted iris scanners. Other than very young children,
whose eyes are still evolving, and people with certain kinds of eye damage, any individual can be identified in this way with tremendous accuracy and speed. In the
last two years, the agency has scanned the eyeballs of more than 1.6 million refugees in nations across the Middle East and Europe, with the notable exception of
Turkey, which still insists on fingerprints, said Larry Yungk, a senior resettlement officer with the U.N. The U.N. now has a “fairly complete biometric database”
cataloging the iris patterns and identity of the Syrians and Iraqis who have fled their homelands, Yungk said. Using the scanners, the agency can track where and when
refugees check into camps and offices. It also deters fraud, confirming the identity of applicants for aid, services or relocation. In some countries, the U.N. has even
made deals with banks to attach iris scanners to ATMs, so that only those authorized for assistance can make withdrawals. While some have worried
about the security and privacy implications of the massive trove of biometric data, Yungk said the system has
several layers of security. “The great benefit is the ability to confirm identity without relying on pieces of plastic or paper,” Yungk said. “The scans are quick,
painless, and require less technology and skill than you need for fingerprints.” Currently the
U.S. doesn’t use iris scanners to identify
refugees — it still uses fingerprints. But that will likely change. Before the Paris attacks, talks were already underway
between the State Department, DHS and the U.N. to share biometric data. Once the legal language is hammered out, U.S. agencies will have access to U.N. iris scans
to verify the identities and travel histories of refugee applicants. That could happen within weeks, Yungk said. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been
prepping for another technological leap: so-called “rapid” DNA testing. DNA tests for refugees and
other immigrants are controversial because they can reveal deeply buried family secrets about
parentage — for example, if a child is the product of infidelity or rape. Critics also say they impose
a narrow, “nuclear” conception of family that is tone-deaf to the reality of refugee life, where
people often care for unrelated children whose parents may be dead or missing. The U.N. has said
DNA testing should be used as a last resort for refugees. Nonetheless, DNA testing has been
embraced by U.S. refugee and immigration agencies to determine whether people within a family
are indeed genetically related, with the aim of stymying fraud and child trafficking. Traditional DNA testing can be expensive and take weeks or
months to process at a lab. So U.S. authorities have been funding the development of rapid DNA systems —
miniature DNA labs about the size of a microwave, that can be deployed in the field and operated by people with little training, and at low cost. Their
development was largely funded by a $15 million grant from the DOD, DHS and the FBI. Each
agency has its own plans for the technology; Homeland Security has paid for the development of
software specifically tailored for use in refugee camps . The machines would test DNA off of a buccal swab – a Q-tip rubbed on
the inside of the mouth. The goal, said Christopher Miles, biometrics program manager for Homeland Security, is for the final product to cost about $100 per DNA
test, to take less than 90 minutes, and to prove kinship with a 99.5 percent accuracy. The machines are “ruggedized,” so they do not have to be handled delicately —
they can be dropped up to a foot in their case with no damage, he said. The software does not produce typical DNA results that must be read by a technician. Instead,
it simply confirms whether there is direct kinship between two individuals. The technology was supposed to have been launched in 2014, but ran into delays. An
initial pilot program is expected to deploy in refugee camps in Thailand early in 2016; another may take place in Turkey,
where the tests would be conducted on refugees from Iraq and Syria. Even if such new technologies fail to gain widespread adoption, refugees admitted
into the U.S. are already the most stringently screened of any visitor group in the country , according to
Yungk. Yungk said he’s somewhat baffled by the overwhelming concern about security risks
associated with refugees coming to America, since refugees are already rigorously screened. The U.N.
Refugee Agency reports that as of mid-2014 there were more than 13 million refugees around the world. That year, the U.S. allowed 70,000 of them, or around half a
percent, to enter the country. The process takes about two years, he noted, and entails detailed interviews, three levels of background checks, three fingerprint
screenings, contagious disease screening, and cultural orientation. And Iraqis
and Syrians already must leap through hoops that
their counterparts elsewhere do not: Their cases are reviewed at U.S. immigration headquarters,
and in some cases are referred for additional review by DHS. “I’ve really never met a Homeland Security person who takes
national security lightly — that’s not the first description that comes to mind,” Yungk said. “We don’t fault people from worrying about security, but at the same time
this is a highly secure process.”
 Jaguar Debate 78

The United States collects biometric information on refugees entering from war-
torn countries.
Planet Biometrics 11/18 [Planet Biometrics is a news agency that tracks technological developments and
uses of biometric technologies, 11/18/15, “State dept confirms how biometrics used to vet refugees”]

The US State department has confirmed that refugees arriving in the country from war-torn Syria
will need to undergo multiple identity checks, including biometrics . In a background briefing on the matter, a
spokesperson said: “The safeguards that are used include biometrics, or fingerprint and biographic checks,
and a lengthy in-person overseas interview that is carried out by specially trained DHS – Department of
Homeland Security – officers”. These officers scrutinize the applicant’s explanation of individual
circumstances to ensure the applicant is a bona fide refugee and is not known to present security
concerns to the United States, said an unnamed senior administration official. “So refugee applicants of all nationalities
go through both biographic – that’s name and date of birth and other biographic elements – and also biometric security
checks . So we check fingerprints for all refugee applicants. Collecting that information and
coordinating those checks is a shared responsibility between the Department of State and DHS. “And
then, as I mentioned, the – it’s other agencies within the federal government, including the FBI, the Department of Defense, and others, who actually vet the
information of the refugee applicants against those other holdings. “With respect to the biometric checks, there really are sort
of three partners behind the biometric checks. So we check against FBI holdings – so if anyone had been in the United States, if a
criminal record, for example, had been committed in – been recorded in the United States, we would have that information. “ The DHS also
coordinates another set of biometric holdings, which are not necessarily criminal, but have various
types of civil information. So if a refugee applicant had applied, for example, for a visa overseas, gone to a U.S. embassy or
consulate, their biometric could be captured at that time. That’s not necessarily derogatory, but it gives us information about whether
the person’s been consistent in terms of their identity, the location, their nationality, so that’s information that we’re very interested in. And then the third piece is the
Department of Defense. We check against some Department of Defense biometric holdings as well.” Currently, the approval rate is a little over 50 percent, but the
other half of that – the other 50 percent includes both denials and cases that are still pending, said the official.
 Jaguar Debate 79

Links
DNA tests and biometric requirements by the U.S. tear apart families, make it hard
for legitimate refugees to enter the U.S., and impose a false ‘nuclear family’ concept
on refugees.
Worth 10/19 [Katie Worth is a 2015 graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Katie Worth is FRONTLINE's
inaugural FRONTLINE-Columbia Tow Journalism Fellow., 10/19/15, “For Some Refugees, Safe Haven Now
Depends on a DNA Test”, PBS Frontline]

When Muna Guled, her husband and youngest daughter were granted refugee status in America
two-and-a-half years ago, their first priority was to bring over Guled’s three other children, still
stranded in Ethiopia after escaping famine and violence in Somalia. That dream will soon become
reality — but for only two of the children. The third, 17-year-old Roda, is not technically Guled’s daughter.
She is her niece, who Guled unofficially adopted after the girl’s mother went missing and her father and grandparents died. In the
past, this might not have been an obstacle. But the United States now requires refugees hoping to
reunite with their families to prove that they’re related — either through a DNA test, or with
official adoption paperwork, which can be impossible to obtain in war-torn countries . So when
Guled’s two biological children board a plane to meet their mother and sister in Ohio in the coming
months, Roda will likely be left behind. This has been devastating news for the family. “Roda doesn’t have
anybody else. She is scared of what will happen to her alone. She is scared she will be kidnapped by bad people,” said Guled through her 16-year-old daughter Awo,
who translated by phone. “Roda has said she will kill herself if she cannot come.” Awo paused. “Just a second, my mother is crying again,” she said. The
family’s story highlights the complications that have arisen as the federal government has tightened
constraints on the main program refugees have used to reunite with family in the U.S. Through the
late 1990s, the program was responsible for 15 to 20 percent of all refugee arrivals in America, but
because of a series of restrictions imposed since then, it currently accounts for less than 1 percent.
The changes have stymied fraud — as they were intended to. But at a time when the U.S. is bracing for thousands of new
applications for shelter from refugees displaced by war in Syria, the restrictions have slowed — and
in some cases outright denied — legitimate entries into the country. SCALING BACK War can scatter
families across continents — a reality long recognized by U.S. refugee policy. Shortly after the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was signed into
existence by President Ronald Reagan in 1980, the agency established a family reunification program for refugees — now known as the P-3 program — allowing
immigrants to bring over family members fleeing crisis. In the years before 9/11, as many as 13,000 refugees a year joined
relatives in the U.S. through the program, according to State Department statistics. Suspecting fraud, immigration officials began to rein in
the program. Starting in 1999, they no longer allowed extended families — siblings, grandparents, nieces
and nephews — to apply for entry, confining the program to spouses, children and parents. In
2004, the Bush administration curbed the program further. Instead of making the program
available to any immigrant who arrived in the U.S. legally, it would only be available to those who
had been granted refugee status or asylum. But the war in Syria, which has displaced more than 4
million from their homes, is fueling calls for the Obama administration to ease some of those
restrictions. The U.S. has announced plans to absorb at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, and
once they arrive in America, those refugees will be able to use the P-3 program. Until then, though, t he tens of thousands of Syrians already
in the U.S. through other immigration programs are barred from using it to reunite with family
members displaced by the violence. Instead, their primary alternative is a separate visa program that currently has an eight-year waiting list.
Earlier this month, 84 members of Congress sent a letter to the Obama administration asking it to expand P-3 eligibility. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.), one of the
letter’s authors, told FRONTLINE in a statement that it made sense to accept refugees who already have support in the U.S. “These families would have a home ready
for them, a source of financial support, and the commitment to return to help rebuild Syria after the war is over,” he said. A State Department official confirmed
receiving the letter but declined to comment further. DNA TESTING Even
if those restrictions are loosened, refugees applying
for family reunification will face another hurdle to clear: DNA testing . The inspiration for this
requirement was born in East Africa, where more than 1 million Somalians have been displaced
 Jaguar Debate 80

from their country by civil war and famine. In the mid-2000s, the U.S. was providing refuge to about 10,000 Somalians a year — many
of whom went on to apply to the family reunification program to bring over relatives. Immigration officials suspected that some were inventing “ghost children,” and
filling out applications for children not related to them. There had even been some reports of brokers who sold the ghost children’s slots for profit, according to a U.S.
Department of State official who spoke to FRONTLINE but asked not to be named. So in
early 2008, the State Department launched a
pilot program to determine the extent of fraud by testing relationships using DNA. In the initial pilot of 476 applicants in Nairobi,
Kenya, only 16 percent were genetically related to every person they said was in their family. Another 39 percent tested false for at least one family member. In the
remaining 45 percent of cases, applicants either refused to participate or didn’t show up for the test. Officials interpreted these results as proof of widespread fraud.
The P-3 program was suspended, and did not reopen for more than four years. This
stunned refugees around the world, many of
whom had spent years waiting for P-3 applications to be approved. Most were told to apply for an
alternate visa, but it was even more restrictive than P-3 and soon had a multi-year waiting list. The suspension was likewise
criticized by refugee advocates, who argued that fraud wasn’t the only explanation for the pilot program’s results. For example, if a family had five children and just
one tested false, they would all be counted as fraudulent. And if any member of the family didn’t show up for a test, that family would also be considered fraudulent,
even if the no-show was for a legitimate reason. DEFINING FAMILY Critics also took aim at the narrow “nuclear family”
concept that DNA tests impose, noted a report by the Immigration Policy Center, a nonpartisan immigration research group. During war,
children whose parents are dead or missing are usually taken in by relatives or neighbors. Official
adoption paperwork is not the norm. “It’s completely tone-deaf to the realities that refugees face,”
says Jen Smyers, director of policy and advocacy with the Church World Service Refugee and Immigration Program, a refugee resettlement agency. “In
Nairobi there are women who, when they were fleeing their village that was being burned,
encountered a small child on the side of the road and picked it up and ended up raising it for the
next five years. They know if they’re asked, ‘Did this child come out of your body?’ and say ‘No,’
they won’t be able to bring the child with them. So they say yes. That’s fraud, but it’s not gaming
the system.” There can be problems even when a child does belong to the mother, noted attorney Emily Holland
in “Moving the Virtual Border to the Cellular Level,” published in the California Law Review: DNA tests can turn up “long-buried

instances of infidelity and rape, often concealed due to fear, stigma and shame.” Uncovering them
can introduce new crises to already traumatized families . The United Nations Refugee Agency has
recommended that refugee workers confirm relationships with documents, interviews and other tools, and argues that DNA tests should be
used only as a “last resort.” But when the P-3 program was finally reinstated in 2012, it came with the
requirement that all parent-child relationships be proved through DNA tests, or by official
adoption papers. Refugees pay for the DNA tests, which can cost several hundred dollars , but are
reimbursed for positive tests. Since then, fewer than 100 people have arrived in the U.S. each year through the family reunification program, while hundreds of
additional openings went unfilled. The State Department official said it’s possible those figures could grow as more people work through the new requirements, but
that family reunification was unlikely to return to its former numbers. David Martin, a law professor at the University of Virginia who helped shape the Refugee Act
of 1980 and has worked with every administration since then to refine it, noted that there is no easy approach to the problem. Even those cases that are fraudulent are
often “living lives of desperate privation” and badly in need of relocation, he said. But so are thousands of others, and it is beyond the capacity of the U.S. refugee
program to take them all. “So you make choices, and when the choice is to reserve some spots for family members, it makes sense to make sure they’re really family
members,” he said. He noted that the system does have some flexibility and can make exceptions to the DNA rule on a case by case basis to accommodate
extraordinary circumstances. Muna Guled hopes her family’s circumstances will allow them to find a way to bring her niece to America. Her other two children had
been living in Mogadishu with their biological father, but they and Roda have now moved to Ethiopia because it will be easier to join their family in the U.S. from
there. Guled’s two biological children have passed the DNA test and they may be able to fly to Ohio before the end of the year. Guled’s daughter, Awo, has become
fluent in English in her two-and-a-half years in Columbus. She says she likes her new life in America. “I think my life is just starting now, I’m getting a good
education, I feel good in America,” Awo said. “I just wonder when my brother and my sisters can come and enjoy with me this beautiful life.”
 Jaguar Debate 81

AT Alt Causes / UNHCR

The U.N. collects fingerprints, but dispenses them to the United States. The U.S.
drives such collection of biometric data.
Worth 12/2 [Katie Worth is a 2015 graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Katie Worth is FRONTLINE's
inaugural FRONTLINE-Columbia Tow Journalism Fellow., 12/2/15, “Can Biometrics Solve the Refugee Debate?”,
PBS Frontline]

Of all the doors into the United States, the one that refugees must pass through is perhaps the most
closely guarded of all: The years-long application process involves long interviews, background checks and health screenings. Refugees’
inked fingerprints are checked against databases maintained by the FBI, the Department of
Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. New developments in biometrics may add yet
more steps to this process: An eyeball scan is likely to become protocol within weeks, and
Homeland Security is developing a quick-turnaround DNA test that can be used in field offices . These
technological advances are arriving just as the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe and last month’s deadly attack on Paris has stirred a national debate over whether the
U.S. should accept refugees from Syria. Already, more than two dozen U.S. governors have said they do not want Syrian refugees to relocate into their states. And
following the attack, a bipartisan majority in the House passed legislation that would require the Department of Homeland Security, the Director of National
Intelligence and the FBI to each sign off on security clearances for every refugee applying for entry to the U.S. from Iraq and Syria. But President Barack Obama has
more
promised to veto the bill if it clears the Senate, touting as recently as last week the nation’s “intense security checks, including biometric screening.” In all,
than 4 million refugees have poured out of Iraq and Syria due to the fighting in each country.
Because many refugees flee their homes without papers, or lose documentation in their shuffle
through borders and camps, they can be difficult to identify and track. Until recently,
fingerprinting was the United Nations’ favored identification technique. That changed in October
2013, when the U.N.’s refugee agency adopted iris scanners. Other than very young children, whose
eyes are still evolving, and people with certain kinds of eye damage, any individual can be
identified in this way with tremendous accuracy and speed. In the last two years, the agency has
scanned the eyeballs of more than 1.6 million refugees in nations across the Middle East and
Europe, with the notable exception of Turkey, which still insists on fingerprints, said Larry Yungk, a senior
resettlement officer with the U.N. The U.N. now has a “fairly complete biometric database” cataloging the iris

patterns and identity of the Syrians and Iraqis who have fled their homelands , Yungk said. Using the
scanners, the agency can track where and when refugees check into camps and offices. It also
deters fraud, confirming the identity of applicants for aid, services or relocation. In some countries,
the U.N. has even made deals with banks to attach iris scanners to ATMs, so that only those
authorized for assistance can make withdrawals . While some have worried about the security and
privacy implications of the massive trove of biometric data, Yungk said the system has several layers of security. “The great
benefit is the ability to confirm identity without relying on pieces of plastic or paper,” Yungk said. “The scans are quick, painless, and require less technology and skill
than you need for fingerprints.” Currently the
U.S. doesn’t use iris scanners to identify refugees — it still uses
fingerprints. But that will likely change. Before the Paris attacks, talks were already underway
between the State Department, DHS and the U.N. to share biometric data. Once the legal language
is hammered out, U.S. agencies will have access to U.N. iris scans to verify the identities and travel
histories of refugee applicants. That could happen within weeks, Yungk said. Meanwhile , the U.S.
has been prepping for another technological leap: so-called “rapid” DNA testing. DNA tests for
refugees and other immigrants are controversial because they can reveal deeply buried family
secrets about parentage — for example, if a child is the product of infidelity or rape. Critics also
say they impose a narrow, “nuclear” conception of family that is tone-deaf to the reality of refugee
life, where people often care for unrelated children whose parents may be dead or missing. The
 Jaguar Debate 82

U.N. has said DNA testing should be used as a last resort for refugees. Nonetheless, DNA testing has
been embraced by U.S. refugee and immigration agencies to determine whether people within a
family are indeed genetically related, with the aim of stymying fraud and child trafficking. Traditional DNA testing can be expensive and take
weeks or months to process at a lab. So U.S. authorities have been funding the development of rapid DNA systems
— miniature DNA labs about the size of a microwave, that can be deployed in the field and operated by people with little training, and at low cost. Their
development was largely funded by a $15 million grant from the DOD, DHS and the FBI. Each
agency has its own plans for the technology; Homeland Security has paid for the development of
software specifically tailored for use in refugee camps . The machines would test DNA off of a buccal swab – a Q-tip rubbed on
the inside of the mouth. The goal, said Christopher Miles, biometrics program manager for Homeland Security, is for the final product to cost about $100 per DNA
test, to take less than 90 minutes, and to prove kinship with a 99.5 percent accuracy. The machines are “ruggedized,” so they do not have to be handled delicately —
they can be dropped up to a foot in their case with no damage, he said. The software does not produce typical DNA results that must be read by a technician. Instead,
it simply confirms whether there is direct kinship between two individuals. The technology was supposed to have been launched in 2014, but ran into delays. An
initial pilot program is expected to deploy in refugee camps in Thailand early in 2016; another may take place in Turkey,
where the tests would be conducted on refugees from Iraq and Syria. Even if such new technologies fail to gain widespread adoption, refugees admitted
into the U.S. are already the most stringently screened of any visitor group in the country , according to
Yungk. Yungk said he’s somewhat baffled by the overwhelming concern about security risks
associated with refugees coming to America, since refugees are already rigorously screened. The U.N.
Refugee Agency reports that as of mid-2014 there were more than 13 million refugees around the world. That year, the U.S. allowed 70,000 of them, or around half a
percent, to enter the country. The process takes about two years, he noted, and entails detailed interviews, three levels of background checks, three fingerprint
screenings, contagious disease screening, and cultural orientation. And Iraqis
and Syrians already must leap through hoops that
their counterparts elsewhere do not: Their cases are reviewed at U.S. immigration headquarters,
and in some cases are referred for additional review by DHS. “I’ve really never met a Homeland Security person who takes
national security lightly — that’s not the first description that comes to mind,” Yungk said. “We don’t fault people from worrying about security, but at the same time
this is a highly secure process.”
 Jaguar Debate 83

Framework
 Jaguar Debate 84

Structural Violence First

Structural violence outweighs – it creates the necessary conditions for all “large
scale” impacts to occur
Scheper-Hughes and Burgois ’04 [Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely, and Bourgois Professors of
Anthropology @ UPenn, Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22,
2004]
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal
violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in
Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their
olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine
and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized
(Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter
35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of
categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close
attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures,
habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender
inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced
into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are
positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the
normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers,
and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans
are capable of reducing the socially
vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring
to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and
for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing
and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of
abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into
spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there
is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize
ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens.
Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the
evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the
“small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore,
Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the
opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard,
Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the
normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the
exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday
life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between
wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war
crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of
public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape
during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus
the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a
certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally
applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime
crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the
phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone
collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man,
the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What
can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African
American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it
is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough
humans and that we need to exercise
a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts
of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions),
perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization,
depersonalization, pseudo-speciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of
constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are
trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-
century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental
hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the
willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish
people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense
of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the
very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo-
 Jaguar Debate 85

speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed
during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and
misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles.
The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who
prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats
who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in
particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-
recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to
reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds
domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the
various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it
invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and
progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes,
2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and
physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and
symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are
presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as
encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize
these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences
of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In
this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators,
bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions
from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton,
ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life
and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented
immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal
security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).

Low probability should be no probability – don’t fall for cognitive biases that make
the neg’s internal link chains appear coherent
Sunstein ’02 [Cass, Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, Law School and
Department of Political Science, Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law,
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/112-1/SunsteinFINAL.pdf]
If someone is predisposed to be worried, degrees of unlikeliness seem to provide no comfort, unless one can prove that harm is absolutely impossible, which itself is
not possible.1 [A]ffect-rich outcomes yield pronounced overweighting of small probabilities . . . .2 On Sept. 11,
Americans entered a new and frightening geography, where the continents of safety and danger seemed forever shifted. Is it safe to fly? Will terrorists wage germ
warfare? Where is the line between reasonable precaution and panic ? Jittery, uncertain and assuming the worst, many people
have answered these questions by forswearing air travel, purchasing gas masks and radiation detectors, placing frantic calls to pediatricians demanding vaccinations
against exotic diseases or rushing out to fill prescriptions for Cipro, an antibiotic most experts consider an unnecessary defense against anthrax.3 I. RISKS,
NUMBERS, AND REGULATION Consider the following problems: • People live in a community near an abandoned hazardous waste site. The community appears
to suffer from an unusually high number of deaths and illnesses. Many members of the community fear that the hazardous waste site is responsible for the problem.
Administrative officials attempt to offer reassurance that the likelihood of adverse health effects, as a result of the site, is extremely low.4 The reassurance is met with
skepticism and distrust. • An airplane, carrying people from New York to California, has recently crashed. Although the source of the problem is unknown, many
people suspect terrorism. In the following weeks, many people who would otherwise fly are taking trains or staying home. Some of those same people acknowledge
that the statistical risk is exceedingly small. Nonetheless, they refuse to fly, in part because they do not want to experience the anxiety that would come from flying. •
An administrative agency is deciding whether to require labels on genetically modified food. According to experts within the agency, genetically modified food, as
such, poses insignificant risks to the environment and to human health. But many consumers disagree. Knowledge of genetic modification triggers strong emotions,
and the labeling requirement is thought likely to have large effects on consumer choice, notwithstanding expert claims that the danger is trivial. How should we
understand human behavior in cases of this sort? My principal answer, the thesis of this Essay, is that when intense emotions are engaged, people tend to focus on
the adverse outcome, not on its likelihood. That is, they are
not closely attuned to the probability that harm will occur. At
the individual level, this phenomenon, which I shall call “probability neglect,” produces serious difficulties of various sorts,
including excessive worry and unjustified behavioral changes. When people neglect probability, they may also treat some risks as
if they were nonexistent, even though the likelihood of harm, over a lifetime, is far from trivial. Probability neglect can produce significant problems for law
and regulation. As we shall see, regulatory agencies, no less than individuals, may neglect the issue of probability, in a way that can lead to either indifference to real
risks or costly expenditures for little or no gain. If agencies are falling victim to probability neglect, they might well be violating relevant law.5 Indeed, we shall see
that the idea of probability neglect helps illuminate a number of judicial decisions, which seem implicitly attuned to that idea, and which reveal an implicit behavioral
rationality in important pockets of federal administrative law. As we shall also see, an understanding of probability neglect helps show how government can heighten,
or dampen, public concern about hazards. Public-spirited political actors, no less than self-interested ones, can exploit probability neglect
so as to promote attention to problems that may or may not deserve public concern. It will be helpful to begin, however, with some general background on individual
and social judgments about risks. A. Cognition On the conventional view of rationality, probabilities matter a great deal to reactions to risks. But emotions, as such,
are not assessed independently; they are not taken to play a distinctive role.6 Of course, people might be risk-averse or risk-inclined. For example, it is possible that
people will be willing to pay $100 to eliminate a 1/1000 risk of losing $900. But analysts usually believe that variations in probability should matter, so that there
would be a serious problem if people were willing to pay both $100 to eliminate a 1/1000 risk of losing $900 and $100 to eliminate a 1/100,000 risk of losing $900.
 Jaguar Debate 86

Analysts do not generally ask, or care, whether risk-related dispositions are a product of emotions or something else. Of course, it is now generally agreed that in
thinking about risks, people rely on certain heuristics and show identifiable biases.7 Those who emphasize heuristics and biases are often seen as attacking the
conventional view of rationality.8 In a way they are doing just that, but the heuristicsand- biases literature has a highly cognitive focus, designed to establish how
people proceed under conditions of uncertainty. The central question is this: When people do not know about the probability associated with some risk, how do they
think? It is clear that when people lack statistical information, they rely on certain heuristics, or rules of thumb, which serve to simplify their inquiry.9 Of these rules
of thumb, the “availability heuristic” is probably the most important for purposes of understanding risk-related law.10 Thus, for example, “a class whose instances are
easily retrieved will appear more numerous than a class of equal frequency whose instances are less retrievable.”11 The point very much bears on private and public
responses to risks, suggesting, for example, that people will be especially responsive to the dangers of AIDS, crime, earthquakes, and nuclear power plant accidents if
examples of these risks are easy to recall.12 This is a point about how familiarity can affect the availability of instances. But salience is important as well. “The impact
of seeing a house burning on the subjective probability of such accidents is probably greater than the impact of reading about a fire in the local paper.”13 So, too,
recent events will have a greater impact than earlier ones. The point helps explain much risk-related behavior. For example, whether people will buy insurance for
natural disasters is greatly affected by recent experiences.14 If floods have not occurred in the immediate past, people who live on flood plains are far less likely to
purchase insurance.15 In the aftermath of an earthquake, the proportion of people carrying earthquake insurance rises sharply—but it declines steadily from that point,
as vivid memories recede.16 For purposes of law and regulation, the problem is that the availability heuristic can lead to serious errors of fact, in terms of both
excessive controls on small risks that are cognitively available and insufficient controls on large risks that are not.17 The cognitive emphasis of the heuristics-and-
biases literature can be found as well in prospect theory, a departure from expected utility theory that explains decision under risk.18 For present purposes, what is
most important is that prospect theory offers an explanation for simultaneous gambling and insurance.19 When given the choice, most people will reject a certain gain
of X in favor of a gamble with an expected value below X, if the gamble involves a small probability of riches. At the same time, most people prefer a certain loss of
X to a gamble with an expected value less than X, if the gamble involves a small probability of catastrophe.20 If expected utility theory is taken as normative, then
people depart from the normative theory of rationality in giving excessive weight to lowprobability outcomes when the stakes are high. Indeed, we might easily see
prospect theory as emphasizing a form of probability neglect. But in making these descriptive claims, prospect theory does not specify a special role for emotions.
This is not a puzzling oversight, if it counts as an oversight at all. For many purposes, what matters is what people choose, and it is unimportant to know whether their
choices depend on cognition or emotion, whatever may be the difference between these two terms. B. Emotion No one doubts, however, that in many domains, people
do not think much about variations in probability and that emotions have a large effect on judgment and decisionmaking.21 Would a group of randomly selected
people pay more to reduce a 1/100,000 risk of getting a gruesome form of cancer than a similar group would pay to reduce a 1/200,000 risk of getting that form of
cancer? Would the former group pay twice as much? With some low-probability events, anticipated and actual emotions, triggered by the best-case or worst-case
outcome, help to determine choice. Those who buy lottery tickets, for example, often fantasize about the goods associated with a lucky outcome.22 With respect to
risks of harm, many of our ordinary ways of speaking suggest strong emotions: panic, hysteria, terror. People might refuse to fly, for example, not because they are
currently frightened, but because they anticipate their own anxiety, and they want to avoid it. It has been suggested that people often decide as they do because they
anticipate their own regret.23 The same is true for fear. Knowing that they will be afraid, people may refuse to travel to Israel or South Africa, even if they would
much enjoy seeing those nations and even if they believe, on reflection, that their fear is not entirely rational. Recent evidence is quite specific.24 It suggests that
people greatly neglect significant differences in probability when the outcome is “affect rich”—when it involves not simply a serious loss, but one that produces
strong emotions, including fear.25 To be sure, the distinction between cognition and emotion is complex and contested.26 In the domain of risks, and most other
places, emotional reactions are usually based on thinking; they are hardly cognition-free. When a negative emotion is associated with a certain risk—pesticides or
nuclear power, for example—cognition plays a central role.27 For purposes of the analysis here, it is not necessary to say anything especially controversial about the
nature of the emotion of fear. The only suggestion is that when emotions are intense, calculation is less likely to occur, or at least that form of calculation that involves
assessment of risks in terms of not only the magnitude but also the probability of the outcome. Drawing on and expanding the relevant evidence, I will emphasize a
general phenomenon here: In political and market domains, people often focus on the desirability of the outcome in question and pay (too) little attention to the
probability that a good or bad outcome will, in fact, occur. It is in such cases that people fall prey to probability neglect, which is properly treated as a
form of quasi-rationality.28 Probability neglect is especially large when people focus on the worst possible case or otherwise are subject to strong
emotions. When such emotions are at work, people do not give sufficient consideration to the likelihood that the worst case will actually occur. This is quasi-rational
because, from the normative point of view, it is not fully rational to treat a 1% chance of X as equivalent, or nearly equivalent,
to a 99% chance of X, or even a 10% chance of X. Because people suffer from probability neglect, and because neglecting probability is not fully
rational, the phenomenon I identify raises new questions about the widespread idea that ordinary people have a kind of rival rationality superior to that of experts.29
Most of the time, experts are concerned principally with the number of lives at stake,30 and for that reason they will be closely attuned, as ordinary people are not, to
the issue of probability. By drawing attention to probability neglect, I do not mean to suggest that most people, most of the time, are indifferent to large variations in
the probability that a risk will come to fruition. Large variations can, and often do, make a difference—but when emotions are engaged, the difference is far less than
the standard theory predicts. Nor do I suggest that probability neglect is impervious to circumstances. If the costs of neglecting probability are placed “on screen,”
then people will be more likely to attend to the question of probability.31 In this light it is both mildly counterintuitive and reasonable, for example, to predict that
people would be willing to pay less, in terms of dollars and waiting time, to reduce lowprobability risks of an airplane disaster if they are frequent travelers. An
intriguing study finds exactly that effect.32 For similar reasons, market pressures are likely to dampen the impact of probability neglect, ensuring that, say, risks of
1/10,000 are treated differently from risks of 1/1,000,000, even if individuals, in surveys, show relative insensitivity to such differences. Acknowledging all this, I
emphasize three central points. First, differences in probability will often affect behavior far less than they should or than conventional theory would predict. Second,
private behavior, even when real dollars are involved,33 can display insensitivity to the issue of probability, especially when emotions are intensely engaged. Third,
and most important, the demand for legal intervention can be greatly affected by probability neglect, so that government may end up engaging in extensive regulation
precisely because intense emotional reactions are making people relatively insensitive to the (low) probability that the relevant dangers will ever come to fruition. C.
Law It is not at all clear how the law should respond to probability neglect. But at a minimum, the phenomenon raises serious legal issues in administrative law, at
least under statutes banning agencies from acting unless they can show a “significant risk”34 or can establish that the benefits of regulation outweigh the costs.35 If
agencies are neglecting the issue of probability (perhaps because the public is doing so as well), they may well be acting unlawfully. Indeed, the law of judicial review
shows an inchoate understanding of probability neglect, treating it as a problem for which judicial invalidation is a solution.36 The only qualification is that the
relevant law remains in an embryonic state. There is much to be done, especially at the agency level, to ensure that government is alert to the probability that harm
will actually occur. Outside of the context of administrative law, an understanding of probability neglect will help us to make better predictions about the public
“demand” for law. When a bad outcome is highly salient and triggers strong emotions, government will be asked to do something about it, even if the probability that
the bad outcome will occur is low. Political participants of various stripes, focusing on the worst case, are entirely willing to exploit probability neglect. Those who
encourage people to purchase lottery tickets, focusing on the best case, do the same. An understanding of probability neglect simultaneously helps show why jurors,
and ordinary officials, are not likely to be moved much by a showing that before the fact, the harm was not likely to occur. For many people, what matters is that the
harm did occur, not that it was unlikely to do so before the fact. For law, many of the most difficult questions are normative in character: Should government take
account of variations in the probability that harms will occur? Should government respond to intense fears that involve statistically remote risks? When people suffer
from probability neglect, should law and policy do the same thing? At first glance, we might think that even if people are neglecting probability, government and law
at least should not—that the tort system and administrators should pay a great deal of attention to probability in designing institutions. If government wants to insulate
itself from probability neglect, it will create institutions designed to ensure that genuine risks, rather than tiny ones, receive the most concern. Such institutions will not
necessarily require agencies to discuss the worst-case scenario.37 And if government is attempting to increase public concern about a genuine danger, it should not
 Jaguar Debate 87

emphasize statistics and probabilities, but should instead draw attention to the worst-case scenario. If government is attempting to decrease public concern with a risk
that has a tiny probability of coming to fruition, it may be ineffective if it emphasizes the issue of probability; indeed, it may do better if it changes the subject or
stresses instead the affirmative social values associated with running the risk.38 On the other hand, public fear, however unwarranted, may be intractable, in the sense
that it may be impervious to efforts at reassurance. And if public fear is intractable, it will cause serious problems, partly because fear is itself extremely unpleasant
and partly because fear is likely to influence conduct, possibly producing wasteful and excessive private precautions. If so, a governmental response, via regulatory
safeguards, would appear to be justified if the benefits, in terms of fear reduction, justify the costs. II. PROBABILITY NEGLECT: THE BASIC PHENOMENON
When it comes to risk, a key question is whether people can imagine or visualize the worst-case outcome.39 When the
worst case produces intense fear, surprisingly little role is played by the stated probability that that outcome will occur.40 An important function of strong
emotions is thus to drive out quantitative judgments, including judgments about probability, by making the best
case or the worst case seem highly salient.41 But it is important to note that probability neglect can occur even when emotions are not involved. A great
deal of evidence shows that whether or not emotions are involved, people are relatively insensitive to differences in probabilities, at least when the relevant
probabilities are low. A. Insensitivity to Variations Among Low Probabilities Do people care about probability at all? Of course they do; a risk of 1/100,000 is
significantly less troublesome than a risk of 1/1000. But many people, much of the time, show a remarkable unwillingness to attend to the question of probability.
Several studies show that when people are seeking relevant information, they often do not try to learn about probability at all. One study, for example, finds that in
deciding whether to purchase warranties for consumer products, people do not spontaneously point to the probability of needing repair as a reason for the purchase.42
Another study finds that those making hypothetical, risky managerial decisions rarely ask for data on probabilities.43 Or consider a study involving children and
adolescents,44 in which the following question was asked: Susan and Jennifer are arguing about whether they should wear seat belts when they ride in a car. Susan
says that you should. Jennifer says you shouldn’t . . . . Jennifer says that she heard of an accident where a car fell into a lake and a woman was kept from getting out in
time because of wearing her seat belt . . . . What do you think about this?45 In answering that question, many subjects did not think about probability at all.46 One
exchange took the following form: A: Well, in that case I don’t think you should wear a seat belt. Q (interviewer): How do you know when that’s gonna happen? A:
Like, just hope it doesn’t! Q: So, should you or shouldn’t you wear seat belts? A: Well, tell-you-the-truth we should wear seat belts. Q: How come? A: Just in case of
an accident. You won’t get hurt as much as you will if you didn’t wear a seat belt. Q: Ok, well what about these kinds of things, when people get trapped? A: I don’t
think you should, in that case.47 These answers might seem odd and idiosyncratic, but we might reasonably suppose that some of the time, both children and adults
focus primarily on bad scenarios, without thinking a great deal about the question of probability. Many studies find that significant differences in low probabilities
have little impact on decisions. This finding is in sharp conflict with the standard view of rationality, which suggests that people’s willingness to pay for small risk
reductions ought to be nearly proportional to the size of the reduction.48 Perhaps these findings reflect people’s implicit understanding that in these settings, the
relevant probability is “low, but not zero,” and that finer distinctions are unhelpful. (What does a risk of 1/100,000 really mean? How different is it, for an individual,
from a risk of 1/20,000 or 1/600,000?) In an especially striking study, Kunreuther and his coauthors found that mean willingness to pay insurance premiums did not
vary among risks of 1/100,000, 1/1,000,000, and 1/10,000,000.49 They also found basically the same willingness to pay for insurance premiums for risks ranging
from 1/650, to 1/6300, to 1/68,000.50 The study just described involved a “between subjects” design; subjects considered only one risk, and the same people were not
asked to consider the various risks at the same time. Low probabilities are not likely to be terribly meaningful to most people, but most educated people would know
that a 1/100,000 risk is worse than 1/1,000,000 risk. When low-probability risks are seen in isolation and are not assessed together, we have an example of the
problem of “evaluability.”51 For most people, most of the time, it is very difficult to evaluate a low probability, and hence isolated decisions will pick up small or no
variations between people’s assessments of very different risks. But several studies have a “within subjects” design, exposing people simultaneously to risks of
different probabilities, and even here, the differences in probabilities have little effect on decisions. An early study examined people’s willingness to pay (WTP) to
reduce various fatality risks. The central finding was that the mean WTP to reduce such risks was, for over 40% of the respondents, unaffected by a large variation in
the probability of harm, even though expected utility theory would predict significant effects from such variations.52 A later study found that for serious injuries,
WTP to reduce the risk by 12/100,000 was only 20% higher than WTP to reduce the same risk by 4/100,000, even though standard theory would predict a WTP three
times as high.53 These results are not unusual. Lin and Milon attempted to elicit people’s willingness to pay to reduce the risk of illness from eating oysters.54 There
was little sensitivity to variations in probability of illness.55 Another study found little change in WTP across probability variations involving exposure to pesticide
residues on fresh produce.56 A similar anomaly was found in a study involving hazardous wastes, where WTP actually decreased as the stated fatality risk reduction
increased.57 There is much to say about the general insensitivity to significant variations within the category of low-probability events. It would be difficult to
produce a rational explanation for this insensitivity; recall the standard suggestion that WTP for small risk reductions should be roughly proportional to the size of the
reduction.58 Why don’t people think in this way? An imaginable explanation is that in the abstract, most people simply do not know how to evaluate low
probabilities. A risk of 7/100,000 seems “small”; a risk of 4/100,000 also seems “small.”59 Most people would prefer a risk of 4/100,000 to a risk of 7/100,000, and I
have noted that joint evaluation improves evaluability, which would otherwise be extremely difficult.60 But even when the preference is clear, both risks seem
“small,” and hence it is not at all clear that a proportional increase in WTP will follow. As suggested by the findings of Kunreuther and his coauthors, it is likely that
in a between-subjects design, WTP to eliminate a risk of 4/100,000 would be about the same as WTP to eliminate a risk of 7/100,000, simply because the small
difference would not matter when each risk is taken in isolation.

No risk of nuclear war — mutually assured destruction and economic

interdependence guarantee the risk of nuclear war is zero.
Aziz, ’15 [the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate editor
atPieria.co.uk. Previously his work has appeared on Business Insider, Zero Hedge, and Noahpinion.
(John, “Don't worry: World War III will almost certainly never happen”, The Week,
http://theweek.com/article/index/257517/dont-worry-world-war-iii-will-almost-certainly-never-happen)]
Next year will be the seventieth anniversary of the end of the last global conflict. There have been points on that timeline — such as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962,
and a Soviet computer malfunction in 1983 that erroneously suggested that the U.S. had attacked, and perhaps even the Kosovo War in 1999 — when a global conflict
was a real possibility. Yet today — in the shadow of a flare up which some are calling a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S. — I believe the
threat of
World War III has almost faded into nothingness. That is, the probability of a world war is the lowest
it has been in decades, and perhaps the lowest it has ever been since the dawn of modernity. This is certainly a view that current
data supports. Steven Pinker's studies into the decline of violence reveal that deaths from war have
fallen and fallen since World War II. But we should not just assume that the past is an accurate guide to the future. Instead, we must look at
the factors which have led to the reduction in war and try to conclude whether the decrease in war is sustainable. So what's changed? Well, the first
 Jaguar Debate 88

big change after the last world war was the arrival of mutually assured destruction. It's no coincidence that
the end of the last global war coincided with the invention of atomic weapons. The possibility of
complete annihilation provided a huge disincentive to launching and expanding total wars. Instead,
the great powers now fight proxy wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan (the 1980 version, that is), rather than
letting their rivalries expand into full-on, globe-spanning struggles against each other. Sure, accidents could
happen, but the possibility is incredibly remote. More importantly, nobody in power wants to be the cause of Armageddon. But
what about a non-nuclear global war? Other changes — economic and social in nature — have
made that highly unlikely too. The world has become much more economically interconnected since
the last global war. Economic cooperation treaties and free trade agreements have intertwined the
economies of countries around the world. This has meant there has been a huge rise in the volume of global trade since World War II, and
especially since the 1980s. Today consumer goods like smartphones, laptops, cars, jewelery, food, cosmetics, and medicine are produced on a
global level, with supply-chains criss-crossing the planet. An example: The laptop I am typing this on is the cumulative
culmination of thousands of hours of work, as well as resources and manufacturing processes across the globe. It incorporates metals like tellurium, indium, cobalt,
gallium, and manganese mined in Africa. Neodymium mined in China. Plastics forged out of oil, perhaps from Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or Venezuela. Aluminum
from bauxite, perhaps mined in Brazil. Iron, perhaps mined in Australia. These raw materials are turned into components — memory manufactured in Korea,
semiconductors forged in Germany, glass made in the United States. And it takes gallons and gallons of oil to ship all the resources and components back and forth
around the world, until they are finally assembled in China, and shipped once again around the world to the consumer. In
a global war, global trade
becomes a nightmare. Shipping becomes more expensive due to higher insurance costs, and riskier
because it's subject to seizures, blockades, ship sinkings. Many goods, intermediate components or resources — including energy
supplies like coal and oil, components for military hardware, etc, may become temporarily unavailable in certain areas. Sometimes — such as occurred in the Siege of
Leningrad during World War II — the supply of food can be cut off. This is why countries hold strategic reserves of things like helium, pork, rare earth metals and oil,
coal, and gas. These kinds of breakdowns were troublesome enough in the economic landscape of the
early and mid-20th century, when the last global wars occurred. But in today's ultra-globalized and
ultra-specialized economy? The level of economic adaptation — even for large countries like Russia and the United States
with lots of land and natural resources — required to adapt to a world war would be crushing, and huge numbers of business and
livelihoods would be wiped out. In other words, global trade interdependency has become, to borrow a phrase from finance, too big
to fail.

Nuclear war doesn’t cause extinction.

Seitz ’06 [former associate of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University’s Center for
International Affairs (Russell, “The' Nuclear Winter ' Meltdown Photoshopping the Apocalypse”,
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2006/12/preherein_honor.html)]

history is full of prophets of doom who fail to deliver , not all are
All that remains of Sagan's Big Chill are curves such as this , but

without honor in their own land. The 1983 'Nuclear Winter " papers in Science were so politicized that even the eminently liberal President

of The Council for a Liveable World called " The worst example of the misrepesentation of science to the public in

my memory." Among the authors was Stanford President Donald Kennedy. Today he edits Science , the nation's major arbiter of climate science--and
policy. Below, a case illustrating the mid-range of the ~.7 to ~1.6 degree C maximum cooling the 2006 studies suggest is superimposed in color on the Blackly
Apocalyptic predictions published in Science Vol. 222, 1983 . They're worth comparing, because the range of soot concentrations in the new models overlaps with
"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be
cases assumed to have dire climatic consequences in the widely publicized 1983 scenarios --
taken seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not as great." wrote Sagan in
Foreign Affairs , Winter 1983 -84. But that "evidence" was never forthcoming. 'Nuclear Winter' never existed

outside of a computer except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a PR firm - Porter Novelli Inc. Yet Sagan
predicted "the extinction of the human species " as temperatures plummeted 35 degrees C and the world froze in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Last year,
Sagan's cohort tried to reanimate the ghost in a machine anti-nuclear activists invoked in the depths of the Cold War, by re-running equally arbitrary scenarios on a
modern interactive Global Circulation Model. But the Cold War is history in more ways than one. It is a credit to post-modern computer climate simulations
do not reproduce the apocalyptic results of what Sagan oxymoronically termed "a sophisticated one dimensional model." The
that they
subzero 'baseline case' has melted down into a tepid 1.3 degrees of average cooling - grey skies do not a
Ragnarok make . What remains is just not the stuff that End of the World myths are made of. It is hard to exaggerate
how seriously " nuclear winter "was once taken by policy analysts who ought to have known better. Many were taken aback by the sheer force of Sagan's rhetoric
Remarkably, Science's news coverage of the new results fails to graphically compare them with the old ones Editor Kennedy and other recent executives of the
 Jaguar Debate 89

American Association for the Advancement of Science, once proudly co-authored and helped to publicize. You can't say they didn't try to
reproduce this Cold War icon. Once again, soot from imaginary software materializes in midair by the
megaton , flying higher than Mount Everest . This is not physics, but a crude exercise in ' garbage in, gospel out' parameter forcing designed to maximize and
extend the cooling an aeosol can generate, by sparing it from realistic attrition by rainout in the lower atmosphere . Despite decades of progress
in modeling atmospheric chemistry , there is none in this computer simulation , and ignoring photochemistry
further extends its impact. Fortunately , the history of science is as hard to erase as it is easy to ignore. Their past mastery of semantic agression cannot spare the
Dark smoke clouds in the lower atmosphere don't last
authors of "Nuclear Winter Lite " direct comparison of their new results and their old.
long enough to spread across the globe. Cloud droplets and rainfall remove them. rapidly washing them
out of the sky in a matter of days to weeks- not long enough to sustain a global pall. Real world weather brings down particles much as soot is scrubbed
out of power plant smoke by the water sprays in smoke stack scrubbers Robock acknowledges this- not even a single degree of cooling results when soot is released
at lower elevations in he models . The workaround is to inject the imaginary aerosol at truly Himalayan elevations - pressure altitudes of 300 millibar and higher ,
where the computer model's vertical transport function modules pass it off to their even higher neighbors in the stratosphere , where it does not rain and particles
linger..The new studies like the old suffer from the disconnect between a desire to paint the sky black
and the vicissitudes of natural history. As with many exercise in worst case models both at invoke rare phenomena as commonplace,
claiming it prudent to assume the worst. But the real world is subject to Murphy's lesser known second law- if everything must go wrong,
don't bet on it. In 2006 as in 1983 firestorms and forest fires that send smoke into the stratosphere rise to alien
prominence in the modelers re-imagined world , but i the real one remains a very different place, where though every month
sees forest fires burning areas the size of cities - 2,500 hectares or larger , stratospheric smoke injections arise
but once in a blue moon. So how come these neo-nuclear winter models feature so much smoke so far aloft for so long?

You should privilege everyday violence for two reasons- A) social bias
underrepresents its effects B) its effects are exponential, not linear which means
even if the only causes a small amount of structural violence, its terminal impacts
are huge
Nixon ’11 [Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3]

Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-
what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed
destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into
instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor
instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of
temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed
by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification,
deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly
unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can
hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and
ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in
human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions
of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of
slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow
violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as
a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the
temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social
afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise
arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just
 Jaguar Debate 90

attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term,
proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but
gradually degraded.

Prioritizing everyday violence is key - responding to it later causes error replication

and movement burn out, only re-orienting focus away from macro-level violence
produces sustainable political coalitions
Cuomo ’96 [Chris, Prof. of Political Science @ U of Cincinnati, “War is not just an event: reflections on the
significance of everyday violence”, Hypatia, vol. 11, no. 4 Fall (1994)]

Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the
depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on members of military
institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct
gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities
during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results
in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as
Ethical
nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems.
approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very
fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to
resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because they
distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of
domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism
allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace , the polar opposite of war. It is
particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities
of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to
militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance
is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally
occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond
in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war
might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as
necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is
happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state.

Systemic impacts outweigh their extinction impacts

Martin ’84 [physicist whose research interests include stratospheric modelling. He is a research associate in the
Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, and a member of SANA. (Brian,
“Extinction politics”, SANA Update, May, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/84sana1.html)]

There are quite a number of reasons why people may find a belief in extinction from nuclear war to
be attractive.[8] Here I will only briefly comment on a few factors. The first is an implicit Western chauvinism The effects of
global nuclear war would mainly hit the population of the United States, Europe and the Soviet
Union. This is quite unlike the pattern of other major ongoing human disasters of starvation,
disease, poverty and political repression which mainly affect the poor, nonwhite populations of the
Third World. The gospel of nuclear extinction can be seen as a way by which a problem for the rich
white Western societies is claimed to be a problem for all the world. Symptomatic of this
orientation is the belief that, without Western aid and trade, the economies and populations of the
Third World would face disaster. But this is only Western self-centredness. Actually, Third World
 Jaguar Debate 91

populations would in many ways be better off without the West: the pressure to grow cash crops of sugar, tobacco and so on
would be reduced, and we would no longer witness fresh fish being airfreighted from Bangladesh to Europe. A related factor linked with
nuclear extinctionism is a belief that nuclear war is the most pressing issue facing humans. I disagree,
both morally and politically, with the stance that preventing nuclear war has become the most
important social issue for all humans. Surely, in the Third World, concern over the actuality of massive
suffering and millions of deaths resulting from poverty and exploitation can justifiably take
precedence over the possibility of a similar death toll from nuclear war. Nuclear war may be the greatest threat to
the collective lives of those in the rich, white Western societies but, for the poor, nonwhite Third
World peoples, other issues are more pressing. In political terms, to give precedence to nuclear war as an
issue is to assume that nuclear war can be overcome in isolation from changes in major social
institutions, including the state, capitalism, state socialism and patriarchy. If war is deeply
embedded in such structures - as I would argue[9] - then to try to prevent war without making
common cause with other social movements will not be successful politically . This means that the antiwar movement
needs to link its strategy and practice with other movements such as the feminist movement, the workers' control movement and the environmental movement. A
focus on nuclear extinction also encourages a focus on appealing to elites as the means to stop nuclear war, since there seems no other means for quickly overcoming
the danger. For example, Carl Sagan, at the end of an article about nuclear winter in a popular magazine, advocates writing letters to the presidents of the United
States and of the Soviet Union.[10] But if
war has deep institutional roots, then appealing to elites has no chance of
success. This has been amply illustrated by the continual failure of disarmament negotiations and appeals to elites over the past several decades.
 Jaguar Debate 92

Utilitarianism is Bad
Utilitarianism is a flawed system. It is impossible to measure and to predict the
benefits and/or harms resulting from a course of action or a moral rule.
McCarthy and Lysaught ’07 [What’s wrong with utilitarianism?, “The Moral Course of Thinking” in
Gathered for the Journey: Moral Theology in Catholic Perspective, Rapids: Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2007. http://theophilogue.com/2009/11/19/utilitarianism-what-is-it-why-does-it-not-work/]

utilitarianism, for which I have given my own articulation and creative names. They
McCarthy and Lysaught rehearse some of the standard criticisms of
run as follows: The Inevitability of Arbitrariness—It has no way to objectively determine the nature, importance, and
value of consequences. To put it another way: How do we know what are “good” and “bad” consequences? What consequences
count most? Whose opinion of what are “good” consequences and what are “bad” consequences
counts most? Failure to give coherent and rational criterion for answering such questions spells
decisive defeat for the whole theory of exclusive utilitarianism. It seems to need something else to help it out. That is why I
personally think that the utilitarian factor is legitimate when considered as part of the picture, but exclusive utilitarianism always leads to arbitrary judgment of
Contrary Intuition—It often undermines our common sense and
consequences, and therefore arbitrary ethics. The
moral intuitions, often demanding certain actions that rub our conscience the wrong way. For example,
what if I knew I could cheat on my wife with my female boss without her ever finding out in order to get a raise, which would have “good” consequences for my
family (less financial stress, my wife could cut back to part time to spend more time with the kids, the kids could benefit from more parental care, I could save more
utilitarianism tells me it’s [works] like a
money for the kids for college, etc.)? My gut tells me: Don’t do this, it is wrong, wrong, wrong. But
math problem (good consequences = good action). The Omniscience Requirement— sometimes it is
impossible to know the totality of the potential (much less the actual) consequences of one’s actions.
Sometimes what looks to us to be a disaster turns out to be a blessing in disguise? We get fired only to later realize that the new job we attain as a
consequence pays better and is more enjoyable. On the flip side, sometimes we think something is going to turn out
great, but in the end is a big letdown. If these small scale experiences in the lives of ordinary people demonstrate how difficult it
is to know the consequences of certain actions—how much more difficult must it be for people whose decisions effect an entire nation (e.g. the
President) to judge the full weight of the consequences of their decisions?

Utilitarianism can justify any barbarity

Anderson ’04 [National Director of Probe Ministries International 2004 “Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for
the Greatest Number” http://www.probe.org/theology-and-philosophy/worldview--philosophy/utilitarianism-the-
greatest-good-for-thegreatest-number.html]

One problem with utilitarianism is that it leads to an "end justifies the means" mentality. If any
worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it, a true ethical foundation is lost. But we all know that the end
does not justify the means. If that were so, then Hitler could justify the Holocaust because the end was to purify the
human race. Stalin could justify his slaughter of millions because he was trying to achieve a
communist utopia. The end never justifies the means. The means must justify themselves . A particular act
cannot be judged as good simply because it may lead to a good consequence. The means must be judged by some objective and
consistent standard of morality. Second, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights of minorities if the
goal is the greatest good for the greatest number. Americans in the eighteenth century could justify
slavery on the basis that it provided a good consequence for a majority of Americans. Certainly the majority
benefited from cheap slave labor even though the lives of black slaves were much worse. A third problem with utilitarianism is predicting the consequences. If
morality is based on results, then we would have to have omniscience in order to accurately predict
the consequence of any action. But at best we can only guess at the future, and often these educated
guesses are wrong. A fourth problem with utilitarianism is that consequences themselves must be
judged. When results occur, we must still ask whether they are good or bad results. Utilitarianism
provides no objective and consistent foundation to judge results because results are the mechanism
used to judge the action itself.inviolability is intrinsically valuable.
 Jaguar Debate 93

Their framework condones mass slaughter – Util normalizes atrocities

Holt ’95 [Jim Holt, New York Times, August 5, 1995 “Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic”
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/05/opinion/morality-reduced-to-arithmetic.html]

Can the deliberate massacre of innocent people ever be condoned? The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, resulted in the deaths of 120,000 to 250,000 Japanese by incineration and radiation poisoning. Although a small fraction of the
victims were soldiers, the great majority were noncombatants -- women, children, the aged. Among
the justifications that have been put
forward for President Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb, only one is worth taking seriously -- that it saved lives.
The alternative, the reasoning goes, was to launch an invasion. Truman claimed in his memoirs that this would
have cost another half a million American lives. Winston Churchill put the figure at a million. Revisionist historians have cast doubt on
such numbers. Wartime documents suggest that military planners expected around 50,000 American combat deaths in an invasion. Still, when Japanese casualties,
military and civilian, are taken into account, the overall invasion death toll on both sides would surely have ended up surpassing that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Scholars will continue to argue over whether there were other, less catastrophic ways to force Tokyo to surrender. But given the fierce obstinacy of the Japanese
militarists, Truman and his advisers had some grounds for believing that nothing short of a full-scale invasion or the annihilation of a big city with an apocalyptic new
weapon would have succeeded. Suppose they were right. Would
this prospect have justified the intentional mass killing of
the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the debate over the question, participants on both sides have been
playing the numbers game. Estimate the hypothetical number of lives saved by the bombings, then add up
the actual lives lost. If the first number exceeds the second, then Truman did the right thing; if the
reverse, it was wrong to have dropped the bombs. That is one approach to the matter -- the utilitarian approach.
According to utilitarianism, a form of moral reasoning that arose in the 19th century, the goodness or evil of an action is
determined solely by its consequences. If somehow you can save 10 lives by boiling a baby, go ahead
and boil that baby. There is, however, an older ethical tradition, one rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, that takes a quite different view. The
gist of it is expressed by St. Paul’s condemnation of those who say, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” Some actions, this tradition holds, can never be
justified by their consequences; they are absolutely forbidden. It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved thereby . Applying
this absolutist morality to war can be tricky. When enemy soldiers are trying to enslave or kill us, the principle of self-defense permits us to kill them (though not to
slaughter them once they are taken prisoner). But what of those who back them? During World War II, propagandists made much of the “indivisibility” of modern
warfare: the idea was that since the enemy nation’s entire economic and social strength was deployed behind its military forces, the whole population was a legitimate
target for obliteration. “There are no civilians in Japan,” declared an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force shortly before the Hiroshima bombing, a time when the
Japanese were popularly depicted as vermin worthy of extermination. The boundary between combatant and noncombatant can be fuzzy, but the distinction is not
meaningless, as the case of small children makes clear. Yet is wartime killing of those who are not trying to harm us always tantamount to murder? When naval
dockyards, munitions factories and supply lines are bombed, civilian carnage is inevitable. The absolutist moral tradition acknowledges this by a principle known as
double effect: although it is always wrong to kill innocents deliberately, it is sometimes permissible to attack a military target knowing some noncombatants will die
as a side effect. The doctrine of double effect might even justify bombing a hospital where Hitler is lying ill. It does not, however, apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Transformed into hostages by the technology of aerial bombardment, the people of those cities were intentionally executed en masse to send a message of terror to the
rulers of Japan. The practice of ordering the massacre of civilians to bring the enemy to heel scarcely began with Truman. Nor did the bomb result in casualties of a
new order of magnitude. The earlier bombing of Tokyo by incendiary weapons killed some 100,000 people. What
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
did mark, by the unprecedented need for rationalization they presented, was the triumph of utilitarian thinking in
the conduct of war. The conventional code of noncombatant immunity -- a product of several centuries of ethical progress among nations, which had
been formalized by an international commission in the 1920’s in the Hague -- was swept away. A simpler axiom took its place: since war is hell, any means necessary
may be used to end, in Churchill’s words, “the vast indefinite butchery.” It is a moral calculus that, for all its logical consistency, offends our deep-seated
intuitions about the sanctity of life -- our conviction that a person is always to be treated as an end, never as a means. Left up to the warmakers,
moreover, utilitarian
calculations are susceptible to bad-faith reasoning: tinker with the numbers
enough and virtually any atrocity can be excused in the national interest. In January, the world commemorated the
50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where mass slaughter was committed as an end in itself -- the ultimate evil. The moral nature of Hiroshima is
the bomb’s
ambiguous by contrast. Yet in the postwar era, when governments do not hesitate to treat the massacre of civilians as just another strategic option,
sinister legacy is plain: it has inured us to the idea of reducing innocents to instruments and
morality to arithmetic.
 Jaguar Debate 94

No Risk of Wars
No Risk of Great Power Wars
Goldstein ’11 [Joshua- professor emeritus of international relations at American University and author of
the forthcoming book “winning the war on war”, “Think Again: War”, Foreign Affairs]

the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past
So far they haven't even been close. In fact,
100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of
the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in
the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the
1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a
hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population,
which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the
20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.Armed conflict has
declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed. Wars between big
national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War, taking with them the most horrific
kinds of mass destruction. Today's asymmetrical guerrilla wars may be intractable and nasty,
but they will never produce anything like the siege of Leningrad. The last conflict between two
great powers, the Korean War, effectively ended nearly 60 years ago. The last sustained territorial war between two
regular armies, Ethiopia and Eritrea, ended a decade ago. Even civil wars, though a persistent evil, are
less common than in the past; there were about a quarter fewer in 2007 than in 1990. If the
world feels like a more violent place than it actually is, that's because there's more information
about wars -- not more wars themselves. Once-remote battles and war crimes now regularly
make it onto our TV and computer screens, and in more or less real time. Cell-phone cameras
have turned citizens into reporters in many war zones. Societal norms about what to make of
this information have also changed. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker has
noted, "The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate
or glorify violence," so that we see today's atrocities -- though mild by historical standards -- as
"signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen."

There is an almost zero probability for great power shoot out- our evidence indicts
all of the negatives impact scenarios
Fettweis ‘8 [Christopher J.- PoliSci Proff @ Tulan University and Former Proff of U.S. foreign policy and
Grand strategy @ naval war college, “Losing Hurts Twice as Bad”, W.W. Norton & Company, p.190-94]
One can be fairly confident in making such an assertion in part because of what might be the single most significant yet under-reported trend in world politics:
The world is significantly more peaceful at the beginning of the twenty-first century than at any
time in recorded history. Although conflict and chaos may dominate the headlines, the incidence
of warfare has dropped to remarkably low levels. A far greater percentage of the worlds people live in societies at peace than at
any other time in history. Not only is the current era markedly better in most measurable categories of
international security than ever before, but it is growing more stable as time goes by. At the very
least, to a growing number of experts, a major clash of arms does not seem plausible. Major war may well
have become obsolete. Rather than a “clash of civilizations” a “coming anarchy,” or a step “back to the future”
toward multipolarity and instability, the new century may well prove to be far more peaceful
than any previous one. The number and intensity of all kinds of conflict, including interstate wars, civil wars, and
ethnic conflicts, declined steadily throughout the 1990s and into the new decade. This period of peace
may be due to some combination of nuclear weapons, complex economic interdependence, the spread of democracy, or , as many scholars believe, a
simple change in ideas about what is worth fighting for. These days, not much may be left. This
 Jaguar Debate 95

rather bold and perhaps counterintuitive claim may seem a bit utopian to those familiar with the long, dismal history of warfare . Is
not war an
innate part of human nature, an outgrowth of our passions and imperfections, like murder? Not necessarily, say many of
the scholars. After all, murder is an act of the individual, often of passion rather than reason:
war is a rational act of state, a symptom of the broader practices of the international system of
states. War is an institution, a tradition of dispute resolution, a method countries have chosen to
employ when their interests diverge. Granted, it has been with us since the beginning of time, but as political scientists John Mueller has
noted, “unlike breathing, eating or sex, war is not something that is somehow required by the human psyche, by
the human condition , or by the forces of history.” The eminent military historian John Keegan
reports being “impressed by the evidence that mankind, wherever it has the option, is distancing
itself from the institution of warfare.” If keegan is impressed, then maybe we should be, too. Overall, as the table below shows,
international and internal conflicts has steadily declined since the end of the cold war. Despite perceptions that the current wars “on terror” and in Iraq may have
There remains a human (and perhaps particularly
created, the world is a much safer place that it was in prior generations.
American) tendency to replace one threat with another, to see international politics as an arena
of dangerous competition, but this perception simply no longer matches the facts. The evidence
is apparent on every continent. At the beginning of 2008, the only conflict raging in the entire western hemisphere was the ongoing civil war
in Colombia, but even that was far less sever than it was a decade ago. Europe, which of course has been the most war-prone
continent for most of human history, was entirely calm, without even the threat of interstate conflict. The situations in
Bosnia and Kosovo were not settled, but they were at least stable for the moment. And in contrast to 1914, the great powers have shown no
eagerness to fill Balkan power vacuums- to the contrary, throughout the 1990’s they had to be shamed into intervention, and were on
the same side when they did. The entire Pacific Rim was currently experiencing no armed conflict. Even in the Middle East, where Iraq continued to burn, a
tenuous peace was holding between Arabs and Israelis, terrorism not withstanding, and no other wars seemed imminent . This trend was even
visible in Africa where , despite a variety of ongoing serious challenges, levels of conflict were the lowest they have ever been in the centuries of written
history we have about the continent. Darfur and the Congo were the only real extended tragedies still underway; the intensity of the internal conflicts simmering
in Algeria, Somalia, Senegal, and a couple of other places is in all cases lower than a decade ago. This can all change quite rapidly – Ethiopia and Eritrea might
soon decide to renew their pointless fighting over uninhabitable land, for instance, or Kenya could melt down into chaos – but right now, the continent seems
more stable than it has ever been. West Africa is quiet, at least for the moment, as is all of Southern Africa, despite the criminally negligent
governance of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. None of this is to suggest that these places are without problems, of course. But given the rapid increase in the
world population and number of countries (the League of Nations had 63 members at its peak between the wars, while the United Nations currently has 192), one
might expect a great deal more warfare than there currently is. We also are witnessing record low levels of the secondary
symptoms of insecurity, such as arms races, military rivalry, and “cold” wars. Either we are merely
experiencing another of the worlds occasional peaceful periods (and it would be by far the most remarkable such period ever), or something about
the nature of international politics has changed, and for the better. The twentieth century
witnessed an unprecedented pace of evolution in all areas of human endeavor, in science and medicine,
transportation and communication, and even in religion. In such an atmosphere, perhaps it is not difficult to imagine
that attitudes toward the venerable institution of warfare may also have experiences similarly
rapid evolution, to the point where its obsolescence could become plausible, even probable, in spite of
thousands of years of violent precedent. Perhaps the burden of proof should be on those who say that our rules of
governing war cannot change, and that it will someday return with a vengeance. Overall,
although the idea that war is becoming obsolete is gaining ground in academic circles, it has yet
to make much headway in those of policymaking. One need not be convinced of its wisdom, however, to believe that the United
States is an extremely safe country, or at the very least that its basic existence does not depend on an active presence abroad. No matter what
happens in the far corners of the globe, it would seem, America is going to survive the coming
century quite well. Even those who actively support internationalism have a hard time
demonstrating that there foreign adventures are truly necessary to assume the basic security of
the United States. The benefits of activist strategies must therefore manifestly outweigh the costs, since the United States could
easily survive inaction, no matter how dire any future situation appears.
 Jaguar Debate 96

Baudrillard DA
The images of mass catastrophe and destruction they present are like a drug, used
by the first world nations to feed off the suffering of the rest of the world. Their
arguments are coproductive with the disasters themselves, and this constant search
for new spectacle will lead to the destruction of the human species as the ultimate
reality TV show.
Baudrillard ‘94 [Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71]
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the
world' [['autre monde]. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty -
charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which
has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a
worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing
enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy
source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more
ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis ,
that material exploitation is only there to
extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological
nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no
longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of
the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural
producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing
of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New
Other people's destitution becomes our adventure
Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order.
playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to
crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of
the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our
own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely
function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral
profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental
equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it.
There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the
inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of
world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the
economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when
it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves
us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with
the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this
catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it
and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a
hundredfold by the moral gain.But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable
when we run out of disasters from
logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation,
elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be
forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that
voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for
food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great
Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from
the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat
out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes,
floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-
up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to
repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some
infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse:
the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic
advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will
break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly
decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should
refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so
by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of
a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is
 Jaguar Debate 97

supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the
superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or
under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of
progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no
longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and
their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the
routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred
years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of
pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms
of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards
them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their
whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift
the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white
race. No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the
overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the
drama of the excess of means over ends – calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of
catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness.Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress
much more quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are
already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-
programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is
our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us
there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted
with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.

Death and disaster are employed by the media to shock and titillate the viewer,
which turns the event itself into a form of mass entertainment that loses any
reference to the real world but must constantly be given credibility by new images of
destruction.
Baudrillard ‘94 [Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 55-58]
In the case of the Romanian revolution, it was the faking of the dead in Timisoara which aroused a kind of moral indignation and raised the problem of the scandal of
'disinformation' or, rather, of information itself as scandal.It was not the dead that were the scandal, but the corpses being
pressed into appearing before the television cameras, as in the past dead souls were pressed into
appearance in the register of deaths. It was their being taken hostage, as it were, and our being held
hostage too, as mystified TV viewers. Being blackmailed by violence and death, especially in a noble and revolutionary cause, was felt to be
worse than the violence itself, was felt to be a parody of history. All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of
the succulent imminence of death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees 'which, some time after this shot was
taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'. Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional blackmai l. It was the
same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the virtual,
that hysteria of the virtual - not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented,
in all bad faith, as real to be consumed as unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!',
'It's put on for the cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say, 'It's just TV!' Photographic or cinema images still pass through the
negative stage (and that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and
the
without reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke,
contagion of images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself
becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces information as
catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the problem of its indifference to the world, and
thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself up as a deadly self-reference, it
becomes a bachelor machine. The real object is wiped out by news – not merely alienated, but abolished. All that remains of it
are traces on a monitoring screen. Many Romanian eyewitness accounts speak of being dispossessed of the event in this way, deprived of the
lived experience they have of it by being submerged in the media network, by being placed under house arrest in front of their television screens. Spectators
then become exoterics of the screen, living their revolution as an exoticism of images, themselves
exogenous, touristic spectators of a virtual history. From the moment the studio becomes the strategic centre, and the screen the only
site of appearance, everyone wants to be on it at all costs, or else gathers in the street in the glare of the cameras, and these, indeed, actually film one another. The
street becomes an extension of the studio, that is, of the non-site of the event, of the virtual site of the event. The street itself becomes a virtual space. Site of the
definitive confusion of masses and medium, of the real-time confusion of act and sign. There is no will to communicate in all this. The only irresistible drive is to
occupy this non-site, this empty space of representation which is the screen. Representation (political representation too) is currently a trough of depression -
meteorological depression - which the media fill up with their turbulences, with the same consequences as occur when any kind of space is suddenly depressurized.
 Jaguar Debate 98

The highest pressure of news corresponds to the lowest pressure of events and reality [Ie reel]. The same unrealism in the Ceausescu trial. It is not the judicial
procedure itself which is scandalous but the video tape, unacceptable as the only, bloodless trace of a bloody event. In the eyes of the whole world, this will remain an
event forever suspect, for the sole reason of its - strangely obscene - scenic abduction. This hidden jury, its voice striking out against the accused, these defendants we
are forced to see even though they are virtually dead, these dead prisoners shot a second time to meet the needs of news. One might even wonder whether the actors in
this staged event were not deliberately trying to make themselves seem suspect in the eyes of world opinion, as though playing at sabotaging their image. At the same
time, the Ceausescu trial was pulled off perfectly as a video production, betraying a sharp sense of the image function, the blackmail-function, the deterrence-
function. Deep down, the intuitive grasp of these things has grown more sophisticated over there, in the shadow of dictatorship, than it has with us. We have nothing
to teach them. For, if the Romanians themselves got high on this media speculation which served them as a revolutionary aphrodisiac, they also dragged all the
Western media into the same news demagogy. By manipulating themselves, they caused us spontaneously to swallow their fiction. We bear the same responsibility as
they do. Or, rather, there is no responsibility anywhere. The question of responsibility cannot even be raised. It is the evil genius of news which promotes such staging.
When information gets mixed in with its source, then, as with sound waves, you get a feedback effect - an effect of interference and uncertainty .
When
demand is maximal (and everywhere today the demand for events is maximal), it short-circuits the initial situation and
produces an uncontrollable response effect. That is, ultimately, why we do the Romanians an injustice when we accuse them of
manipulation and bad faith. No one is responsible. It is all an effect of the infernal cycle of credibility . The actors and the media sensed
obscurely that the events in Eastern Europe had to be given credibility, that that revolution had to be lent credibility by an
extra dose of dead bodies. And the media themselves had to be lent credibility by the reference to the people. Leading to a vicious
circle of credibility, the result of which is the decredibilizing of the revolution and the events themselves. The
logical sequence of news and history turns back against itself, bringing, in its cyclical movement, a kind of deflation of historical consciousness. The Americans did
just the same in the Gulf War. By the excessive nature of their deployment and stagecraft, by putting their power and news control so extravagantly to the test, they
decredibilized both war and news. They were the Ubus of their wn power, just as the Romanians were the Ubus of their own mpotence. Excess itself engenders the
just as the principle of economics is wrecked by financial speculation, so
parody which invalidates the facts. And,
the principle of politics [Ie politique] and history is wrecked by media speculation.

Bereft of values, our society demands images of destruction from others to replenish
our moral sentiment. We exchange our pity for their pain, in a process that
guarantees the suffering must continue. We should instead interrogate suffering
from the standpoint of the individual, instead of depictions of mass destruction.
Baudrillard ‘94 [Jean, September 28, "No Reprieve For Sarejevo"]
The problem lies indeed in the nature of our reality. We have got only one, and it must be
preserved. Even if it is by the use of the most heinous of all paroles: "One must do something. One
cannot remain idle." Yet, to do something for the sole reason that one cannot do nothing never has
been a valid principle for action, nor for liberty. At the most it is an excuse for one's own powerlessness and a token of self-pity. The
people of Sarajevo are not bothered by such questions. Being where they are, they are in the absolute need to do what they do, to do the right thing. They harbour no
illusion about the outcome and do not indulge in self-pity. This is what it means to be really existing, to exist within reality. And this reality has nothing to do with the
so-called objective reality of their plight, which should not exist, and which we do so much deplore. This reality exits as such - it is the stark reality of action and
destiny. This is why they are alive, while we are dead. This is why we feel the need to salvage the reality of war in our own eyes and to impose this reality (to be
pitiable) upon those who suffer from it, but do not really believe in it, despite the fact they are in the midst of war and utter distress. Susan Sontag herself confesses in
her diaries that the Bosnians do not really believe in the suffering which surrounds them. They end up finding the whole situation unreal, senseless, and unexplainable.
It is hell, but hell of what may be termed a hyperreal kind, made even more hyperreal by the harassment of the media and the humanitarian agencies, because it
renders the attitude of the world towards them even less unfathomable. Thus, they live in a kind of ghost-like war - which is fortunate, because otherwise, they would
never have been able to stand up to it. These are not my words, by the way: they say it so. But then Susan Sontag, hailing herself from New York, must know better
than them what reality is, since she has chosen them to incarnate it. Or maybe it is simply because reality is what she, and with her all the Western world, is lacking
the most.
To reconstitute reality, one needs to head to where blood flows. All these "corridors" , opened by
are in fact our lifelines along which we suck their moral strength and the
us to funnel our foodstuffs and our "culture"
energy of their distress. Yet another unequal exchange. And to those who have found in a radical delusion of reality (and this includes the belief in
political rationality, which supposedly rules us, and which very much constitutes the principle of European reality) a kind of alternative courage, that is to survive a
senseless situation, to these people Susan Sontag comes to convince them of the "reality" of their suffering, by making something cultural and something theatrical out
of it, so that it can be useful as a referent within the theatre of western values, including "solidarity". But Susan Sontag herself is not the issue. She is merely a societal
toothless intellectuals swap their distress with the misery of the
instance of what has become the general situation whereby
poor, both of them sustaining each other, both of them locked in a perverse agreement. This parallels the
way the political class and civil society are swapping their respective misery: one throwing up corruption and scandals, the other its purposeless convulsions and its
inertia. Thus, not so long ago, one could witness Bourdieu and Abbe Pierre offering themselves as televisual slaughtering lambs trading with each other pathetic
language and sociological garble about poverty. Our whole society is thus on its way towards "commiseration" in the most literal sense of the word (under the cloak of
we are in the midst of an immense feeling of guilt, shared by intellectuals
ecumenical bathos). It looks like as if
and politicians alike, and which is linked to the end of history and the downfall of values. Then, it
has become necessary to replenish the pond of values, the pond of references, and to do so by using
that smallest common denominator which is the suffering of the world, and in doing so, replenishing our game
reserves with artificial fowls. "At the moment, it has become impossible to show anything else than suffering in the news broadcasts on television", reports David
 Jaguar Debate 99

society is merely expressing its own disappointment and longing

Schneidermann. Ours is a victim-society. I gather that
for an impossible violence against itself. Everywhere, a New Intellectual Order is following on the heels of the New World Order.
Everywhere, we see distress, misery and suffering becoming the basic stuff of the primitive scene. The status of victimhood, paired with human rights is the sole
funeral ideology. Those who do not directly exploit it do it by proxy - there is no dearth of mediators who take some surplus value of financial or symbolic nature
Loss and suffering, just like the global debt, are negotiable and for sale on the speculative market, that is, the
along the way.
intellectual-political market - which is in no way undermining the military-industrial complex of
old & sinister days.
 Jaguar Debate 100

Definitions
Resolved means to reduce by analysis.
Merriam Webster ‘10 [Merriam Webster Dictionary 2010]
re·solved Full Definition of RESOLVE transitive verb 1 obsolete : dissolve, melt 2 a : break up, separate <the prism resolved the light into a play of color>;
also : to change by disintegration b : to reduce by analysis <resolve the problem into simple elements> c : to distinguish between or make
independently visible adjacent parts of d : to separate (a racemic compound or mixture) into the two components 3 : to cause resolution of (a pathological state) 4 a : to
deal with successfully : clear up <resolve doubts> <resolve a dispute> b : to find an answer to

Surveillance is the collection, collation, analysis, and dissemination of data.

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

Surveillance isn’t static and can manifest itself in any relationship.

Shawki 9 (Sharif, Professor @ Illinois Western University "Surveillance and Foucault: Examining the
Validity of Foucault's Notions Concerning Surveillance through a Study of the United States and the
United Kingdom" (2009). Honors Projects. Paper 23. http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/socanth_honproj/23)
Before the application sections commence, Foucault's definition of surveillance will be given to provide a clear picture as to what the term encompasses. First of all,
the French word that Foucault utilizes is surveiller. As the translator to Discipline and Punish notes, there is no proper English equivalent The English correspondent
Foucault defines surveillance as a potentially aggressive
of surveiller, "surveillance," is too restricted and too technical.86 Thus,
action. It is clearly not neutral and can be used by one side to subjugate another. There are always motives
behind surveillance and these motives are usually self-serving. Foucault defines surveillance as a watch kept over a person
or a group. But one must realize that this simple definition contains several components. Foucault considers surveillance in both a
personal and complex manner. Surveillance can take place between two people such as neighbors.
This type of surveillance is very simple and usually involves insignificant issues . At the same time,
surveillance can involve many people as well as institutions. Thus, commanders can surveille many soldiers because these
commanders have been given the authority to do so. Therefore, surveillance is not considered as one static entity . This is a benefit
because Foucault allows himself to consider personal self-surveillance as well as institutional surveillance.

Surveillance is a form of disciplinary power.

Fuchs 10 (Christian, Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University, “The Internet
& Surveillance - Research Paper Series,” October 1, 2010,
http://www.sns3.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/The-Internet-Surveillance-Research-Paper-Series-1-
Christian-Fuchs-How-Surveillance-Can-Be-Defined.pdf)
For Foucault, surveillance is an instrument of disciplinary power. He has stressed that “the term ‘power’ designates
relationships” (Foucault 1994, 337), “it brings into play relations between individuals” (337). Surveillance is a social relationship
between humans that involves disciplinary power and makes use of instruments for producing knowledge about these humans in
order to coerce and dominate the. To reduce surveillance to the level of surveillance technologies not only robs it
of its social dimension, it is a form of techno-deterministic reductionism and fetishism that reifies
surveillance and thereby destroys the concept’s critical potential.
 Jaguar Debate 101

AT: Policymaking
Policymaking Bad
Makau 96 (Josina., Ph.D. in Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkeley, Responsible
Communication, Argumentation Instruction in the Face of Global Perils)
Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation instruction . Like the Nazi doctors,
students
in traditional argumentation courses are taught "how to reduce life and the mystery of life to
abstraction." Weisel urges educators to teach students what the Nazi doctors never learned – that people are not abstractions. Weisel urges
educators to learn from the Nazi experience the importance of humanizing their charges, of teaching students to view
life as special, 'with its own secrets, its own treasures, its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph.' Trained as
technocrats with powerful suasory skills but little understanding , students participating in traditional argumentation courses
would have difficulty either grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly, they would have difficulty grasping or appreciating Christian's
framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above all, openness, trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these
trained technocrats. Traditionally trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues. Trained to view problems in black and white terms and
conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and traditional courses become subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not
necessarily an evil or unprincipaled person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional debaters, deprived of
true dialogic encounter , fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the 'multiplicity of viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc.
which constitute a situation'. They are thus inclined to lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and perspicacious judgment.'
Encouraging student to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept uncritically a sovereign view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and
others 'situatedness,' the traditional argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious resources. It would appear, in fact,
that the
argumentation course foster precisely the 'aggressive and manipulative intellect bred by
modern science and discharged into the administration of things' associated with most of the
world's human made perils. And is therefore understandable that feminist and others critics would write so harshly of traditional argumentation of
debate.
 Jaguar Debate 102

AT: Cede Political

Politics has already been ceded by the elites.
Rancière’14 (Jaques, “The Hatred of Democracy” , pg 72-74 , Jaques Rancière is a Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate
School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris)

We can now return to the initial terms of our problem: we live in societies and States known as
'democracies', a term by which they are distinguished from societies governed by States without
law or with religious law. How are we to understand that, at the heart of these 'democracies', a
dominant intelli-gentsia, whose situation is not obviously desperate and who hardly aspire to live
under different laws, day in day out blame all of humanity's misfortunes on a single evil they call
democracy? Let's take things in order. What is meant when it is said that we live in democracies? Strictly speaking, democracy is not a form of State. It is
always beneath and beyond these forms. Beneath, insofar as it is the necessarily egalitarian, and ne-cessarily forgotten, foundation of the oligarchic state.
Beyond, insofar as it is the public activity that counteracts the tendency of every State to
monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere. Every State is oligarchic. One of the theoreticians of
the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism quite happily acknowledges it: 'It is
impossible to conceive of a regime which in one sense is not oligarchic."7 But oligarchy can give
democracy more or less room; it is encroached upon by democratic activity to a greater or lesser
extent. In this precise sense, the constitutional forms and practices of oligarchic governments can be said to be more or less democratic. Usually the mere
existence of a representative system is re-garded as the crucial criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of
opposing forces. It tends toward democracy only to the extent that it moves nearer to the power of anyone and everyone. Withthis in mind, we can
specify the rules that lay down the minimal conditions under which a representative system can be
declared democratic: short and non-renewable electoral mandates that cannot be held
concurrently; a monopoly of people's representatives over the formulation of laws; a ban on State
functionaries becoming the representatives of the people; a bare minimum of campaigns and
campaign costs; and the monitoring of possible interference by economic powers in the electoral
process. Such rules have nothing extravagant about them and in the past many thinkers and legislators, hardly moved by a rash love of the people, have carefully
considered them as potential means to maintain a balance of powers, to dissociate the representation of the general will from that of particular interests, and to avoid
what they considered as the worst of governments: the governments of those who love power and are skilled at seizing it. All one has to do today to provoke hilarity is
list them. With good reason — for what we call democracy is a statist and governmental functioning that is exactly the contrary: eternally elected members holding
coministerial functions and whose essential link to the people is that of the representation of regional interests; governments which make laws themselves;
representatives of the people that largely come from one administrative schoo1;48 ministers or their collaborators who are also given posts in public or semi¬public
companies; fraudulent financing of parties through public works contracts; businesspeople who invest colossal sums in trying to win electoral mandates; owners of
private media empires that use their public functions to monopolize the empire of the public media. In
a word: the monopolizing of la chose
publique by a solid alliance of State oligarchy and economic oligarchy. We see why those who
despise 'democratic individualism' do not reproach this system of predation of the public interest
and public goods for anything. In fact, these forms of over-consumption of public functions do not
come within the province of democracy. The evils of which .our 'democracies' suffer are primarily
evils related to the insatiable appetite of oligarchs.

The current order derives its ontological consistency in opposition to blackness,

trying to work within this system is definitionally impossible. Instead, striving for
impossible reparations is the only way to create a politics beyond current
comprehension.
Wilderson and Howard 10 [Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies, Percy,
Psychotherapist, “Frank Wilderson, Wallowing in the Contradictions, Part 1”
http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/frank-b-wilderson-%E2%80%9Cwallowing-in-the-
contradictions%E2%80%9D-part-1/ //liam]
FW Reparations suggests a conceptually coherent loss. The loss of land, the loss of labor power, etc. In other words, there has
to be some form of articulation between the party that has lost and the party that has gained for
 Jaguar Debate 103

reparations to make sense. No such articulation exists between Blacks and the world. This is, ironically,
precisely why I support the Reparations Movement; but my emphasis, my energies, my points of attention are on the word “Movement” and not on the word
“Reparation.”I support the movement because I know it is a movement toward the end of the world; a
movement toward a catastrophe in epistemological coherence and institutional integrity —I support the
movement aspect of it because I know that repair is impossible; and any struggle that can act as a stick up artist to
the world, demanding all that it cannot give( which is everything ), is a movement toward something so
blindingly new that it cannot be imagined. This is the only thing that will save us. PH As a Psychotherapist, I
was very interested to see your contrasting Frantz Fanon and Lacan concerning their conceptualizations of potential paths to “emancipation in the libidinal economy”,
as you put it. I am ashamed to admit that I have never read Fanon, but have read Lacan. Please illuminate your idea that the stark difference in their
conceptualizations of conflict/antagonism differ are based on the fact that Lacan would still see Blacks as fundamentally situated in personhood, but that Fannon (and
yourself) see Blacks as “situated a priori in absolute dereliction”. FW This is a big question, too big for a concise answer—I think I take about thirty to forty pages to
try and get my head around this in the book. But the key to the answer lies in the concept of “contemporaries.” Fanon rather painfully and meticulously shows us how
the human race is a community of “contemporaries.” In addition, this community
vouchsafes its coherence (it knows its borders)
through the presence of Blacks. If Blacks became part of the human community then the concept of
“contemporaries” would have no outside; and if it had no outside it could have no inside. Lacan assumes
the category and thus he imagines the analysand’s problem in terms of how to live without neurosis among ones contemporaries. Fanon interrogates the category
itself. For Lacan the analysands suffer psychically due to problems extant within the paradigm of contemporaries. For Fanon, the analysand suffers due to the
existence of the contemporaries themselves and the fact that s/he is a stimulus for anxiety for those who have contemporaries. Now ,
a contemporary’s
struggles are conflictual—that is to say, they can be resolved because they are problems that are of-
and in the world. But a Blacks problems are the stuff of antagonisms: struggles that cannot be
resolved between parties but can only be resolved through the obliteration of one or both of the
parties. We are faced—when dealing with the Black—with a set of psychic problems that cannot be resolved
through any form of symbolic intervention such as psychoanalysis—though addressing them psychoanalytically we can begin to explain
the antagonism (as I have done in my book, and as Fanon does), but it won’t lead us to a cure.

Progressive movements are too timid and fail- inevitably adopt they underlying
tenets of racism
Martinot and Sexton 03- *prof at San Francisco State University**PhD in ethnic studies from
UC Berkeley, Director, African American Studies at UC Irvine (Steve and Jared, “The Avant-garde of white
supremacy,” http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm//MGD)

There are oppositional political movements of course; some are progressive, fewer are radical. But each
encounters a certain internal limitation. For instance, there are movements seeking to make the police more
accountable to legal and communal standards of conduct; but their role then becomes one of making the state work
better and more efficiently. They work, perhaps unwittingly, at reconstructing and not dismantling the white
state. What they fail to understand or accept is that the police are already accountable, but to something out
of reach of the principles of justice or democracy. There is a (largely symbolic) multiracial or mixed race movement
that understands itself to be the very transcendence of race but, in mixing and matching races supposed to really exist, it
subsumes the products of racism in ways that recall many dimensions of white supremacist thinking. The ethic of
retribution that legitimates the expanding prison-industrial complex in the US and beyond is one of these products. Even political opposition to
that ethic outside the prison wall falls prey to certain acceptance of criminal law; in other words, it assumes that the prison is essential to social
order. This acceptance is unacceptable from the point of view of the violence and violation engendered by the prison regime. Political (or
politicized) prisoners demand an epistemology of a different order, one that challenges the internal limits of opposition in a radical way—the
dream of prison abolition. How can one critically discuss policing and imprisonment without interrogating the very
notions of freedom, citizenship, and democracy? How is one to think seriously about (the ends of) race without rethinking gender,
sexuality, and the body? How can any economic questions be raised in this country—where movements for reparations and
against sweatshops and prisons are becoming paramount on the left—without confronting the specter of slavery? How can we
think political economy without also disturbing even radical critique and its historicist narratives of development, progress, and the primacy of
production?
 Jaguar Debate 104

Notions of leftist solidarity with radicals merely maintain distance that inhibits
political change
El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos “BEYOND
RESISTANCE: EVERYTHING,”libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf//MGD)

In our efforts to forge a new path, we found that an old friend—the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National
Liberation, EZLN)—was already taking enormous strides to move toward a politics adequate to our time, and that it was thus necessary to
despite the fresh air that
attempt an evaluation of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real ‘event’ of their appearance. That is,
the Zapatista uprising had blown into the US political scene since 1994, we began to feel that even the inspiration
of Zapatismo had been quickly contained through its insertion into a well-worn and untenable narrative:
Zapatismo was another of many faceless and indifferent “third world” movements that demanded and
deserved solidarity from leftists in the “global north.” From our position as an organization composed in large part by
people of color in the United States, we viewed this focus on “solidarity” as the foreign policy equivalent of “white
guilt,” quite distinct from any authentic impulse toward, or recognition of, the necessity for radical social change. The
notion of “solidarity” that still pervades much of the Left in the U.S. has continually served an intensely
conservative political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of the latest rebellion in the “darker
nations” while carefully maintaining political action at a distance from our own daily lives, thus producing a
political subject (the solidarity provider) that more closely resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a
participant or active agent, while simultaneously working to reduce the solidarity recipient to a mere object
(of our pity and mismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the process of solidarity ensures that subjects
and political action never meet; in this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility. In other words, this
practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its perverse logic by accepting the narrative that power tells us about itself:
that those who could make change don’t need it and that those who need change can’t make it. To the extent
that human solidarity has a future, this logic and practice do not! For us, Zapatismo was (and continues to be) unique exactly because it has
provided us with the elements to shatter this tired schema. It has inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the necessity, of always viewing
ourselves as dignified political subjects with desires, needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With the publication of The 2 Sixth Declaration of
the Lacandón Jungle in June of 2005, the Zapatistas have made it even clearer that we must move beyond appeals to this stunted
form of solidarity, and they present us with a far more difficult challenge: that wherever in the world we may be located, we must
become “companer@s” (neither followers nor leaders) in a truly global s truggle to change the world. As a direct response to this call,
this analysis is our attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the rough draft of a manual for contemporary political action
that eventually must be written by us all.

Reform within the political system is futile- engagement with the state props up
inequality
El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos “BEYOND
RESISTANCE: EVERYTHING,”libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf//MGD)

Second, we must reassess the grounds for potential political change. If we are to take the Zapatistas seriously and
conclude that the politics of the politicians is a sphere that functions through the simulation of public
opinion—through polls and the circulation of sound bites and images—to administer the interests of transnational capital, it would be
near suicide to continue to do politics as a competition for influence within that spher e. No matter how well-
intentioned or “progressive” a given party or platform may be, the proximity of politicians to the vertical
structure and logic of the State today assures only their complete functionality to the larger system of
inequalities. In addition, we must remind ourselves that these politicians are not there to simulate for just any power; they are there to
simulate social peace for a global power that is today greater than the collective power of any particular state. Thus, any opposition that
limits itself to the level of a single state, no matter how powerful, may be futile. Yet, at the same time that these futilities
surface, other strategies and tactics simultaneously emerge within this new situation, strategies that rise to the challenge of the contemporary
impasse faced by our previous social visions. Consider for example the tremendous inspiration provided by the following lines written by
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos; what appears at first as poetic license should be read more carefully as the outline of a brilliant strategy for
our times: “The social ship is adrift, and the problem is not that we lack a captain. It so happens that the rudder
 Jaguar Debate 105

itself has been stolen, and it is not going to turn up anywhere. There are those who are devoted to imagining that the
rudder still exists and they fight for its possession. There are those who are seeking the rudder, certain that it must have been
left somewhere. And there are those who make of an island, not a refuge for self-satisfaction but a ship for
finding another island and another and another…”11

The left’s efforts are nothing more than crisis management- they forego
opportunities at abolition of total war in the US by embracing flawed state
knowledge production
Rodriguez 09- PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, prof at UC Riverside (Dylan, “The Terms of
Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,” Critical Sociology, vol. 36 no. 1 p. 151-173//MGD)

Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law,
and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist,
ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the
mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering , guided
by the logic of normalized and mundane black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the American
(global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and
violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the USA) really
does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its
structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. The non-profit and NGO left, in
particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties
of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically
addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. In so many ways, the US progressive/left
establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the violent ‘abandonments’ of the state, which
forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while
transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities – which Gilmore (2007b: 44–5)
says are guided by a ‘frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice’. Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly
galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle against strategically targeted local populations, the
establishment left remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social
survival, grass roots mobilization, radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and
everyday terms of the very domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the
premises of its own coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and concrete material
production of the state, the question remains as to why the establishment left has not understood this statecraft as
the state of emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally e ncompasses (war!). Perhaps it is because critical
intellectuals, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are underestimating the skill and reach of the
state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, that they have generally undertheorized how the state so
skillfully generates (and often politically accommodates) sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that
engulf ‘dissent’ and counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing.
 Jaguar Debate 106

AT: Predictability
Everything is chaos
Der Derian 98 [James, “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard,” in On
Security ed. Ronnie Lipschutz. http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html]
Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbes’s and Marx’s interpretations of security through a genealogy of
modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional
identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and to affirm the creative differences
which might yield new values for the future.33 Originating in the paradoxical relationship of a
contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a
resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief, the history is one of individuals
seeking an impossible security from the most radical “other” of life, the terror of death which, once
generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from
alien others–who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on
the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect in
international theory, his reinterpretation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must begin with Nietzsche’s idea of the will
to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security . In
Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power: “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation
as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life
itself is will to power; self-
preservation is only one of the most frequent results.”34 The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian
perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche’s view, to a triumph of nihilism.
But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and effective force of becoming, from which values and meanings – including self-preservation – are
produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life, for “… life itself is essentially appropriation, injury,
overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation – but why
should one always use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages.”35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life:
But the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to
“life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.”36
disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects
of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of
difference– that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-
driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of
difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of
the reader: “Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that
no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a
sense of security?”37 The
fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a
domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the
surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything
reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and
is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative
relationship in The Twilight of the Idols: The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The “why?” shall, if at all possible, not give
the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause–a cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving. … That
which is new and
strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of
explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation–that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the
A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the
strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38
alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility–
recycling the desire for security. The “influence of timidity,” as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing
to subordinate affirmative values to the “necessities” of security: “they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a
straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences.”39 The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world.
“Trust,” the “good,” and other common values come to rely upon an “artificial strength”: “the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in
being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god.”40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false
sense of security can come from false gods: “Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or
truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes.”41 Nietzsche’s interpretation of the origins
of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of
fear and indebtedness to one’s ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists–and that
 Jaguar Debate 107

one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their
continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.42 Sacrifices, honors, obedience are given but it is never enough, for the
ancestors of the most powerful tribes are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede into the darkness
of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god. 43 As the ancestor’s debt becomes embedded in
institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: to rely upon an “artificial strength”: “the feeling one
lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today), one dwells protected, cared for, in peace
and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and hostile acts to which the man outside, the “man without peace,” is exposed … since one has bound and pledged
The establishment of the community is dependent
oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44
upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by written treaty, however, and distant
gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to
power becomes the object of a collective resentment. The result? The
fear of the external other is transvalued into the “love of
the neighbor” quoted in the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured
through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original source long ago. This
powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness, generates the values which uphold the
security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security: My rights
are that part of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence
and fear and caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would
be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance
with them in opposition to a hostile third power. Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsche’s critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions
that created the security imperative – and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it – have diminished if not disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: “Our century
denies this perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment,
the tyranny
recreation and evaluation.”46 Nietzsche’s worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger:
of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and
rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of
ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox – all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche’s lament for this lost life is captured
at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions: Of future virtues – How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of
every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious
and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown less fearful?
With the diminution of our fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness, not also diminished?47 It is of course in Nietzsche’s lament, in his
deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age. Dismissive
of utopian engineering, Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward only so far as to sight the emergence of “new philosophers”
(such as himself?) who would restore a reverence for fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-Socratic era
to find the exemplars for a new kind of security. In The Genealogy of Morals, he holds up Pericles as an example, for lauding the Athenians for their “rhathymia” – a
It is perhaps too much to expect Nietzsche’s
term that incorporates the notion of “indifference to and contempt for security.”48
message to resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most
uncertain and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a stimulus for improvement rather
than cause for retrenchment. Yet Nietzsche would clearly see these as opportune times, when fear
could be willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of difference, rather than canalized into a
cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks and benefits.
 Jaguar Debate 108

AT: Roleplaying
They vacate individual agency to politics proper, weakening politics and
overdefining the value in life
Influxus 7 (Major contributor, Foucault blog, http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/05/13/dividing-
the-individual/)
When you say that the individual is not un-political are you agreeing with Craig’s point that liberal political theory, cannot recognise the
political, because it vacates all dividing practices from the domain of politics proper? Taking the individual as object, as base unit, is
precisely not the disciplinary pole of anatomo-politics. Disciplinary power , as Foucault articulates it in HoSv1,
is about dividing and sharing the body through a series of drives, impulses etc. The relationship between liberal political
theories, that take the individual as base point, and a management of the body, that divides the anatomy into a series of potentials,
should be antagonistic to say the least. Which might be why disciplinary techniques often come as challenges to liberal
rights – to privacy and bodily integrity. The standard move of declaring someone pathological or deviant, “in
serious need of help”, is to exclude them from the liberal body, from being a candidate for ordinary ethical relations between citizens.
In other words if politics is taken to appropriately be concerned with the individual person, then it can only
be a form of biopolitics. It is a way of organising the mass-population as though it were a
collection of atomic particles. As you point out through Hacking the person is an entity that is generated and categorised through many forms
of auto-management. However, if politics takes the relevant aspects of personhood to be attributes that all persons (supposedly) share-alike, such as reason,
autonomy and universal rights then the only division that matters is the original division of the population into individual persons. Hence, once liberal political
theory is taken up, all relevant decisions of division are already made for it.
 Jaguar Debate 109

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

Since dialogue is intersubjective, it necessitates interpretation and understanding by all parties

involved. Dialogue necessitates that all participants are willing to exert themselves on the part of others in a dialogue
to understand often- diverse positions. Commitment to interpretation also means that efforts are made to
grasp the positions, beliefs, and values of others before their positions can be equitably evaluated (Gadamer,
1994; Ellul, 1985; Makay & Brown, 1972).
 Jaguar Debate 110

AT: Agonism
A politics of agonism presupposes an essentialist categorization of antagonism
versus agonism which systematically brackets out ideological challenges
Oksala 12 (Johanna, Academy of Finland Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, History,
Culture and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, 2012 “Foucault, Politics, and Violence” p. 63-66)
It is my contention that we do not have to accept Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy to argue that democracy necessarily implies
exclusion, Ma moment of closure." As Mouffe effectively argues through a post-structuralist framework, like- any other regime, modern pluralist
democracy constitutes a system of relations of power. Consensus in a liberal-democratic society is—
and always will be—the expression of hegemony and the crystallization of power relations . Consensus is
the effect of physical violence, however, only when this hegemony is established through violent means. The frontier that establishes the
distinction between inclusion/exclusion is always a political one, but is not necessarily the result of physical violence. The
democratic-liberal society is a contingent and hegemonic articulation of the "people" through a
particular political regime of inclusion-exclusion, but it is not founded on the ontological necessity to distinguish the enemy. As I
argued in the previous chapter, the foundational violence of modern states is historical and contingent, not ontological. The conceptualization of necessary exclusion
in terms of friend and enemy leads, moreover, to a problematic narrowing the political arena. The agonism that Mouffe advocates cannot be, understandably, violent
confrontation between enemies. For Schmitt, the hostility inherent in the friend-enemy distinction ultimately leads to the transformation of the political into war
because no amount of discussion, compromise, or exhortation can settle issues between enemies.20 To avoid this, Mouffe has to introduce the
important distinction between "antagonism" and "agonism." Antagonism takes place between
enemies, that is, persons who have no common symbolic space and who are therefore perceived as
negating each other's identity. Agonism, on the other hand, involves a relation not between enemies
but between "adversaries." Adversaries share a common symbolic space, but they want to organize
this space in a different way."1 The aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into
agonism by "providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough
possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary" (Monde 2000, 103). In other words, agonism does not result in violence
Mouffe
because the democratic-liberal state and the possibilities it otters for legitimate opposition prevent antagonism from escalating into violent conflict.
defines an adversary in terms of two substantial features in addition to sharing a common symbolic
space. The first one is normative: adversaries share an adhesion to the ethico-political principles of
liberal democracy—liberty and equality. They must agree on the importance of "liberty and
equality for all" while disagreeing about their meaning and the way in which they should be implemented. The second one is formal:
adversaries are recognized as having the right to defend their beliefs and ideas . They comprise the legitimate
opponent whom we are not entitled to coerce, exclude, discipline, or punish. An adversary is somebody "whose ideas we combat,
but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question" (Mouffe 2000, 102). Roth features raise important
questions for political theory and practice. The unproblematic acceptance of liberty and equality as the pre-given
ground of politics raises the question of whether the questioning of their ultimate value, through
nonviolent means, necessarily makes one an enemy. Should we not also give a recognized political
voice to the critics of these essentially Western political values instead of labeling them terrorists?
Would an open political contest not strengthen and re- invigorate rather than weaken these values?
The assumption that adversaries are already in the position of a legitimate opponent in the political
field, on the other hand, compels us to ask whether political struggles are ever simply debates
between existing interpretations of our under- lying values and principles, and not simultaneously
struggles for one's voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner . Should
asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, prisoners, and nomads be excluded from the political debate
because they have no legitimate position in it? Who has the right to be recognized and heard as an adversary in this political debate?
Mouffe’s binary logic of enemy versus adversary ultimately becomes a limiting framework for
conceptualizing political conflicts and struggles. The agonism she advocates is essentially embodied in the confrontation between the
political left and right. She has repeatedly argued against "the illusion" that democratic politics could organize itself with- out them, in terms of some kind of "third
way," for example." Instead of understanding agonism as characterizing the field of myriad conflicts over
 Jaguar Debate 111

varied issues and identities—at times organized on clear platforms, bin also consisting of
fragmented and vaguely formulated dissent, activ- ism, and lifestyle choices—politics is understood
very traditionally as the party politics of citizens who are entitled to vote . Although Mouffe does not
explicitly ground her problematic distinction between enemy and adversary on the question of
violence, it is my contention that it is upheld by this "constant" of her political ontology —the hostility and
violence inherent in politics. The category of the "adversary" becomes the key to envisaging the specificity of
modern pluralist politics because it is the only means of removing the ever-present hostility and
violence from the sphere of politics. The narrowing of the range of the political thus becomes the
price we pay for having to keep the irreducible violence at bay. The category of adversary does not eliminate violence
from modern democracies, however. It only shifts it to the margins, to corrective institutions and detention centers. While Foucault's thought
effectively questions the idea of founda- tional physical violence on the level of the ontological, it exposes it on the level of the ontic. In chapters 5, (3, and 8 I go on
to argue that he fundamentally challenges the idea that the liberal-democratic state only aims to positively channel primordial hostility into legitimate opposi- tion in
the form of conflicts between adversaries. Instead, he claims that the state produces and sustains historically specific practices
of violence through its monopoly on it. Violence in modern societies has largely been eradicated
from open encounters between enemies, but it is practiced in the name of improvement in
institutions of discipline, correction, and punishment. The reason why conflicts between adversaries
do not escalate into violence in modern democracies is thus not because there are effective and
legitimate channels through which they are de- fused—such as democratic political participation—
but because the state has an insurmountable monopoly. A lot of conflicts are not defused, but in fact
are produced, and then simply contained within prison walls. It is my contention that a consistently
anti-essentialist approach to political thinking would mean understanding violence nominalistically,
and not as a primordial, irreducible essence. Appropriating Foucault's thought, we should then also question "the repressive
hypothesis"38 in connection with political violence: the idea that political order functions only to repress a primordial hostility. Instead, it effectively
produces and sustains historically specific practices of violence.
 Jaguar Debate 112

AT: Decision Making

No terminal impact to decision making – any action will be ignored by Congress
Strøm, 11 – Masters in Political Science from Politihøgskolen (Kari Milner, “TERRORISM,
DEMOCRACY, AND THE APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE,” 2011, Masters Thesis,
http://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/174775/terrorism%20democracy.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
The question of whether we can trust politics informed by GWOT is highly relevant . Arguing the case against
Wikileaks in a television debate Carl W. Ford, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR) during the Bush era, listed the elaborate procedures set
up to oversee the executive, concluding that existing checks and balances are sufficient (BBC 5 February 2011a). Telling a different story, albeit not limited to the
post-9/11 era, is the fact that we
at regular intervals are informed that governments and politicians are
unaware of illegal surveillance activities and counter-terrorism operations taking place on their
watch, as it were. The regularity of breaches of public trust therefore points to another conclusion than that drawn by Ford,
suggesting instead that existing democratic checks and balances are both insufficient and inefficient. As far as
US policy in the area of terrorism is concerned Crenshaw notes that American counterterrorism policy is
not just a response to the threat of terrorism, whether at home or abroad, but a reflection of the
domestic political process. Perceptions of the threat of terrorism and determination and
implementation of policy occur in the context of a policy debate involving government institutions,
the media, interest groups, and the elite and mass publics. The issue of terrorism tends to appear prominently on the national
policy agenda as a result of highly visible and symbolic attacks on Americans or American property. However, the threat is interpreted through a political lens created
by the diffused structure of power within the American government. (2006b: 183).

Apathy now – no one will care

Zurcher 14 (Anthony, ed. BBC “echo chambers”, “Obama's NSA speech reflects American apathy”, http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-25787468)
The US public's reaction to the US surveillance program is in marked contrast to the European
view, particularly in Germany, where opinion is decidedly negative. In a November 2013 poll, 70% of
Germans objected to government collection of phone and internet data for national security
purposes.¶ "Europeans still operate under the assumption that it is critical to uphold the rule of
law," write Globalist editor Stephan Richter and German MEP Jan Philipp Albercht for the Guardian. "The US government is more than
flexible with the rule of law by turning any notion of privacy into Swiss cheese. The dangerous
implications this holds for the core ideas of democracy are obvious."¶ It's a diplomatic bone, tossed with the
understanding that our allies should applaud but not expect us to change too much about what we do¶ Ed Morrissey, Hot Air¶ They continue :¶ American
citizens themselves, to a stunningly large extent, have bought into the notion that the "war on
terror" and "Islamic extremism" justify all means. Their acquiescence, if not active tolerance, is what allows Washington to
operate above the law, from drones to routinely spying on the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Spanish people, to name but a few of the targets. ¶ If
Americans are relatively unconcerned about the US government monitoring their own population,
they're even less worried about what it does in other countries.
 Jaguar Debate 113

Switch Side Debate Bad

Switch-side debate causes uncertainty and indecision—this undermines political
participation
Mutz ’06 [Diana C. Mutz is Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the
Annenberg Public Policy Center, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, ebook]

There are at least two potential social psychological mechanisms that might explain wh y cross-cutting
exposure discourages
participation. First, political inaction could be induced by the ambivalence that crosscutting exposure
is likely to engender within an individual. If citizens are embedded in networks that do not
reinforce their viewpoints, but instead tend to supply them with political information that
challenges their views, then cross-cutting exposure could make people uncertain of their own
positions with respect to issues or candidates and therefore less likely to take political action as a result. In this case it is an
internal (i.e., intrapersonal) conflict that drives the effect. The chain of events leading to suppressed participation would be
one in which crosscutting exposure leads to ambivalent attitudes, which, in turn, reduce political
participation because these individuals do not have views that are sufficiently definite or strong to
motivate them to political action. No character has been criticized more for inaction that results from ambivalence than Hamlet, prince of
Denmark. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet is described simply as “The Prince who could not make up his mind.”35 Readers of Shakespeare’s famous play have long
criticized Hamlet for indecisiveness and they frequently cite that quality as the cause of his ultimate downfall. His failure to kill Claudius when he had the chance
resulted in a tragic series of events that ultimately led to his own death, as well as his mother’s. And yet, could one not also argue that his extensive weighing of the
pros and cons was entirely appropriate under the circumstances? Hamlet is painfully self-aware, as are many of Shakespeare’s characters. His
motives may be noble, but his constant questioning of himself is not practical, and he experiences a
paralyzing ambivalence as a result. His slow, plodding, deliberative decision-making process produces ambivalence and leads him to act “with
wings as swift as meditation,” which is to say, not swiftly at all. Although Hamlet might be the poster child for the
deliberative process, the price he pays for it is enormous. In today’s popular parlance, the very kind of
deliberation that theorists advocate – one that involves careful, time-consuming weighing of pros
and cons, and exposure to a multitude of different viewpoints – is popularly chided as the antithesis of
action. As H. Ross Perot put it, “I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it.” He contrasts this with the more
deliberative style of corporations such as General Motors (GM): “At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a
consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of
years. The likely course of action is – nothing. You figure the snake hasn’t bitten anybody yet, so
you just let him crawl around on the factory floor.”36

Switch-side debate hurts political participation by causing delayed opinion

formation
Mutz ’06 [Diana C. Mutz is Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the
Annenberg Public Policy Center, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, ebook]

Yet another way in which cross-pressures have been argued to reduce political participation is by promoting political
decisions that are made later in the campaign season. If people make up their minds late in an
election year, then there is little time or opportunity for actively partisan forms of political
participation. In Figure 4.4, I illustrate the effects of network composition on the timing of presidential voting decisions. Although this figure looks a bit
more complicated, it tells essentially the same story: Exposure to dissonant views encourages people to make up their minds later in the campaign, thus discouraging
partisan forms of participation. As illustrated, the probability of deciding only the week before the election increases dramatically with greater cross-cutting exposure
in a person’s network. The
likelihood of deciding on a presidential candidate early, say, before or during the summer,
declines with more heterogeneous networks. Although this measure does not directly tap participation, it seems inevitable
that the later one makes up his or her mind, the less time there is for actively promoting one’s
political preferences. In Figure 4.5 I draw on a completely different national survey and find that intent
 Jaguar Debate 114

to vote in a preelection survey – this time in the 1996 presidential election – is also negatively influenced by cross-cutting
exposure. Even employing the more stringent controls included in this survey (political knowledge in addition to
political interest), crosscutting exposure encourages respondents to report no intent to vote. Drawing on
every available indicator of political participation across these two surveys, my findings are extremely
consistent: crosscutting exposure discourages political participation. This pattern of findings is
extremely robust even when using two different surveys with slightly different ways of tapping
network composition and participation. Nonetheless, given that these are cross-sectional surveys, it is important to
acknowledge the possibility that causality might run in the reverse direction. In other words, is it plausible that
participating in political activities could lead one to associate with a more politically homogeneous group of contacts? If so, political participation could be causing
lower levels of cross-cutting exposure rather than the other way around. If we call to mind highly social participatory acts such as working on a campaign or attending
a fundraiser, it is relatively easy to entertain this possibility; through these kinds of events, one would make more like-minded friends and acquaintances . But for
the remaining, equally supportive results, reverse
causation makes no theoretical sense. The act of voting or of
making up one’s mind does not require a person to be in a particular social environment that is
more conducive to like-minded views. Thus the bulk of evidence so far supports the idea that the
degree of supportiveness of people’s social environments influences their likelihood of political
participation.

Switch-side debate is bad even when it succeeds—exposure to other a broad range

of political views causes paralysis and decreases political participation
Mutz ’06 [Diana C. Mutz is Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the
Annenberg Public Policy Center, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, ebook]
In all of the examples provided thus far, the potential for negative outcomes from cross-cutting exposure occurs strictly because cross-cutting contact has failed to
produce the benefits that deliberative theory and intergroup contact ideally might bring about. For example, if conversations across lines of difference lead participants
to polarize their positions, then cross-cutting exposure has failed to create mutual understanding. Likewise, if contact among members of different groups only brings
about greater animosity and resentment, then communication across lines of difference has failed to improve intergroup relations. In contrast, this chapter examines
the potential for an
undesirable outcome that occurs as a result of the success of cross-cutting exposure in
giving people of opposing perspectives an understanding of the other side’s views. Although the potential
benefits of these interactions have received the most attention, other theories hint at the potential drawbacks of cross-cutting exposure for one democratic outcome in
particular – political participation. Within political science, exposure to those of differing political perspectives was first raised to the status of a research concept
under the designation of “cross-pressures.” Authors of some of the earliest research on American elections voiced concerns about the potentially deleterious impact of
cross-pressures, defined as the presence of people of inconsistent political views within an individual’s social environment. Interest in cross-pressures emerged from
observations of how neatly social groups mapped onto patterns of voting behavior. Indeed, one of the strongest messages conveyed by the earliest studies of American
voting was the theme of the social homogeneity of political behavior. For example, The People’s Choice and Voting both stressed the social nature of political
decisions. As Lazarsfeld and colleagues put it, “More than anything else, people can move other people.”6 They suggested that the social nature of political decisions
extended not only to decisions about whether to vote for a given candidate, but also whether to participate politically at all. The People’s Choice was the first study to
suggest that conflicts
and inconsistencies among the factors influencing an individual’s vote decision had
implications for political participation: “Whatever the source of the conflicting pressures, whether from social status or class identification,
from voting traditions or the attitudes of associates, the consistent result was to delay the voter’s final decision.”7 Subsequently, The American Voter more directly
The person who experiences some degree of
acknowledged the problem of conflicting considerations surrounding political choices:
conflict tends to cast his vote for President with substantially less enthusiasm . . . and he is somewhat less
likely to vote at all than is the person whose partisan feelings are entirely consistent . . . . If attitude conflict
leaves its impress on several aspects of behavior it also influences what we will call the individual’s involvement in the election.8 Likewise, Carl Hovland and
colleagues suggested that the effects of conflicting social influences included “vacillation, apathy, and loss of interest in conflict-laden issues.”9 Cross-pressures that
arise from affiliations with multiple groups had long been of interest in political sociology as well. Georg Simmel, for example, attributed great significance to the
“web of affiliations” and cross-cutting social relationships, as contrasted with the highly homogeneous kinship-linked groups of an earlier era.10 Those exposed to a
variety of different cues about appropriate social and political attitudes were assumed to experience discomfort as a result, though arguments about how people
personal associations that push individuals in
resolved this discomfort varied. More specifically, these researchers surmised that
opposite directions with respect to their vote choices cause a kind of paralysis with respect to
political action. Given that most people have multiple roles and identities, perfect consistency in the
social environment is unlikely, and citizens are likely to experience varying degrees of dissonance
when their various group identities have contradictory implications for their political preferences .
So, for example, a citizen who was white-collar and Catholic or Protestant and a member of a labor union was assumed to be crosspressured by this combination of
religion and occupational status.
 Jaguar Debate 115

Switch side debate discourages political participation—exposure to opposite views

causes quiescence and alienates others
Mutz ’06 [Diana C. Mutz is Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the
Annenberg Public Policy Center, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, ebook]

connective structures encourage participation particularly

A careful reading of social movement research suggests that these
when they form connections among those of similar opinion and experience. As Tarrow suggests, social
networks “lower the costs of bringing people into collective action, induce confidence that they are
not alone, and give broader meaning to their claims.”33 Thus it is not social networks per se that are
implicated in stimulating collective action, but networks among those who are like-minded. But how
exactly do interpersonal networks draw people into political activism? And why might heterogeneous networks discourage participation as the cross-pressures
hypothesis first suggested? The social movement literature casts this theory in a rational choice framework: “Refusing to respond to the call of network partners means
the potential loss of all the benefits provided by that tie. These benefits may be social, such as friendship or social honor, but they may also be material. Network ties
provide people with jobs, and people are tied, in network fashion, to those with whom and for whom they work.”34 Although one cannot deny that material benefits
often flow from social networks, it requires a highly cynical disposition to believe that all or even the majority of people’s social ties are formed on the basis of a
desire for material gain. That
people want to be liked by others and that they value their reputations are
sufficient to explain why members of their social networks might be effective in recruiting them
into participation. Extending this argument about the social costs of not cooperating with a network
partner to understand what happens when people are surrounded by those of opposing views
provides a logical explanation for why heterogeneity in the network should promote avoidance of
political involvement. Declaring one’s self partisan in a politically mixed setting puts one in a
position to potentially alienate others. Doing the same in a homogeneous environment does not
incur these same risks.

Debate won’t result in anything like a policy—switch-side debate doesn’t resolve

issues but requires structural dispute, which causes us to devalue the issues to
maintain social harmony
Mutz ’06 [Diana C. Mutz is Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the
University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the
Annenberg Public Policy Center, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, ebook]

There is already ample qualitative evidence in support of the idea that people avoid politics as a
means of maintaining interpersonal social harmony. For example, in the mid-1950s, Rosenberg noted in his in-depth interviews that
the threat to interpersonal harmony was a significant deterrent to political activity.48 More recent case studies have provided further support for this thesis. In her
study of New England town meetings and an alternative workplace, Mansbridge observed that conflict avoidance was an important deterrent to participation.49 Still
Likewise, in focus
others have described in great detail the lengths to which people will go in order to maintain an uncontroversial atmosphere.50
group discussions of political topics, people report being aware of, and wary of, the risks of political
discussion for interpersonal relationships.51 As one focus group participant put it, “It’s not worth it . . . to try and have an open discussion
if it gets them [other citizens] upset.”52 In the early 1970s, Verba and Nie applied a similar theoretical logic to a quantitative analysis of political participation by
differentiating activities on the basis of the extent to which conflict with others was involved. Their results were inconsistent on this finding,53 but in a more recent
people high in conflict avoidance were less likely to
analysis of national survey data analyzed from this same theoretical perspective,
participate in some ways, particularly in more public participatory acts such as protesting, working
on a campaign, and having political discussions.54 The idea that conflict avoidance discourages
participation is also consistent with social psychological studies of how people handle nonpolitical
interpersonal disagreements. When a person confronted with a difference of opinion does not shift
to the other person’s views or persuade the person to adopt his or her own views, the most common
reaction is to devalue the issue forming the basis of the conflict.55 By devaluing politics and avoiding
political controversy, people effectively resolve the problem. One experiment aptly illustrates the problem of social
accountability. Subjects were told they would be asked to justify their opinions either to a group that was in consensus on an issue or to a group with mixed views on
the same issue. The subjects who anticipated the crosspressured group engaged in many decision-evasion
 Jaguar Debate 116

tactics (including buckpassing, procrastination, and exit from the situation) in order to avoid accountability to contradictory
constituencies.56 If we generalize these findings outside the laboratory, we would expect those with
high levels of cross-cutting exposure in their personal networks to put off political decisions as long
as possible or indefinitely, thus making their political participation particularly unlikely.
 Jaguar Debate 117

Binary DA
The binary established by the AFF to differentiate between who is and isn’t the
USFG is a biopolitical method of creating an included class and an excluded class
and reduces us to bare-life
Agamben ’00 [Giorgio – Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of
Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of Philosophy at Collège International de Philosophie in
Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, p. 30.1]

Any interpretation of the political meaning of the term people ought to start from the peculiar fact
that in modern European languages this term always indicates also the poor, the underprivileged, and the

excluded. The same term names the constitutive political subject as well as the class that is
excluded – de facto, if not de jure – from politics. The Italian term popolo, the French term people, and the Spanish term pueblo – along with the
corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popular – and the late-Latin terms populus and popularis from which they all derive, designate in common parlance and
in the political lexicon alike the whole of the citizenry as a unitary body politic (as in “the Italian people” or in giudice popolare” [juryman] as well as those who
belong to inferior class (as in homme du peuple [man of the people], rione polplare [working-class neighborhood], front populaire is more undifferentiated – does
retain the meaning of ordinary people as opposed to the rich and the aristocracy. In the American Constitution one thus reads
without any sort of distinction: “We, the people of the United States…”; but when Lincoln in the
Gettysburg Address invokes a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” the
repetition implicitly sets another people against the first. The extent to which such an ambiguity was
essential even during the French Revolution (that is, at the very moment in which people’s sovereignty was claimed as a principle) is
witnessed by the decisive role played in it by a sense of compassion for the people intended as the excluded class. Hannah Arendt reminds us that: The very
definition of the word was born out of compassion, and the term became the equivalent for misfortune and unhappiness – le peule,
les malbeureux m’applaudissent, as Robespierre was wont to say; le peuple toujours malbeureux, as even Sieyes, one of the least sentimental and most sober figures
of the Revolution, would put it. But this is already a double concept for Jean Boldin – albeit in a different sense – in the chapter of Les Six Livres de la Republique in
which he defines Democracy or Etat Popular: while the menu peuple is that which is wise to exclude from political power, the peuple en corps is intended as entitled
to sovereignty. Such a widespread and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it surely
reflects an ambiguity inherent in the nature and function of the concept of people in Western
politics. It is as if, in other words what we call people was not actually a unitary subject but rather a
dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the People as a whole and as an
integral body politic and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and as a fragmentary
multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; on the one hand, an inclusive concept that pretends to be
without remainder while, on the other hand, an exclusive concept known to afford no hope; at one
pole, the total state of the sovereign and integrated citizens and, at the other pole, the banishment –
either court of miracles or camp – of the wretched, the oppressed, or the vanquished. There exists no single and compact
referent for the term people anywhere: like many fundamental political concepts (which, in this respect, are similar to Abel and Frueds
Urworte or to Dumont’s hierarchal relations), people is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relationship between two extremes. This
also means, however, that the constitution of the human species into a body politic comes into being
through a fundamental split and that in the concept of people we can easily recognize the conceptual pair identified earlier as the defining category
of the original political structure: naked life (people) and political existence (People), exclusion and inclusion, zoe
and bios. The concept of people always already contains within itself the fundamental biopolitical
fracture. It is what cannot in included in the whole of which it is a part as well what cannot belong to the whole in which it is always already include.
 Jaguar Debate 118

Surveillance DA
Framework is a strategy of cultivating dispassionate subjects who surveil and
disclipline one another
Reeves ’13 [Joshua – Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of Memphis, “If You See
Something, Say Something: Surveillance, Communication and Citizenship in American Life,” A dissertation
submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2013, p. 24-25,
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8762/1/etd.pdf]

An essential facet of the governmental process, then, is the set of actions by which various phenomena
are represented—in other words, how they are rendered intelligible as problems to be governed. Describing how rhetoric functions in the production of
knowledge and thus makes possible governmental activities, Ronald Greene points out that “rhetoric allows for a governing
apparatus to make judgments about what it should govern, how it should govern, as well as offering
mechanisms for evaluating the success or failure of governing” (1998, 22). Once human tendencies and
behaviors are given a stable life in the form of discourse (data, statistics, diagnoses, expert opinions, etc.), their
relationship to ideal or deduced norms can be addressed by various interventions—that is, by technologies of
governmental correction . As Miller and Rose have pointed out elsewhere, these technologies of government are characterized by “the complex of mundane
programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions”
(Rose and Miller 1992). As an instrument of representation, rhetoric takes form in discourses—including scientific articles, police reports, and 9/11 calls reporting
suspicious activities—and thus sets in motion various governmental responses by health officials, police agencies, non-profit organizations, and so on. Yet as an
instrument of intervention, rhetoric
has been envisioned as one of many possible governmental strategies to
persuade individuals to conduct their lives in accord with various norms of morality and responsibility. For example,
as I will show in chapter four, public address has long been used to enlist “moral crusaders” in the temperance cause, as preachers, politicians, and others have
encouraged individuals to police the immoral in their midst. Various other forms of deliberative rhetoric—such as publicly distributed pamphlets and one-on-one
conversion efforts—have played a similar role in constituting activist communities and guiding the moral entrepreneurialism of individuals in various sectors of the
public. Other rhetorical
strategies, such as public confrontations and violent attacks, have also been employed to discourage
certain disapproved activities and intimidate the offending individuals into changing their behavior.
In many instances, these two rhetorical styles—one liberal, and the other confrontational—create tensions among and within lateral policing institutions. As I show in
chapters four and five, these different forms of being-rhetorical are often a bone of contention within lateral policing groups, as factions disagree on rhetorical
strategy. Immigration policing groups, for example, have long been divided into factions of liberals and vigilantes, with the liberals insisting on surveillance and
contacting official law enforcement bodies, whereas vigilantes have arrested and abused immigrants and their enablers. This
division demonstrates
how deeply invested governing bodies are in cultivating certain kinds of rhetorical subjects , and
thus how different forms of being-rhetorical are privileged within different configurations of
governmental practice. In seeking to transform and engage the conduct of certain activist sectors of the population, some groups have sought to
cultivate patient, liberal, non-violent rhetorical subjects who use reasoning to persuade others to change their lives and their communities (see Keith 2008); other
groups have encouraged activists to adopt the rhetorical subjectivity of the ax-wielding puritan who threatens pimps and saloon keepers while destroying their wares;
and yet other
campaigns have sought to create the neighborhood snitch , the rhetorical subject who
closely watches his or her neighbors and dials 9-1-1 to report any suspicious activity.

Case turns framework --- it cultivates bare speech or the depoliticized discourse of
sovereign power
Reeves ’13 [Joshua – Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of Memphis, “If You See
Something, Say Something: Surveillance, Communication and Citizenship in American Life,” A dissertation
submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2013, p. 28-32,
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8762/1/etd.pdf]

Governing through communicative performance is a central element in the production of liberal

citizen-subjects. As Greene and Daryl Hicks have argued, a Foucaultian perspective on communicative production “reveals how
power works productively by augmenting the human capacity for speech/communication. . . . [An] under-
appreciated aspect of the productive power of cultural governance resides in the generation of subjects who come to understand
 Jaguar Debate 119

themselves as speaking subjects willing to regulate and transform their communicative behaviors for
the purpose of improving their political, economic, cultural, and affective relationships” (2005, 101). Greene and Hicks point out that the values of
deliberative communication comprise an essential aspect of liberal subject production . The authors analyze
switch-side debating as a cultural technology of liberal self-governance whereby speakers learn
socially conservative values of deracinated, liberal impartiality through disimpassioned rhetorical
practice. By placing the rise of switch-side debating within the Cold War, Greene and Hicks show how liberal American values of deliberation and empathy
were inculcated specifically as they contrasted with the autocratic values of the Soviet Union. While deliberation, citizen liberty, and communicative entrepreneurship
were purported to dominate the American cultural imagination, the Soviet Union was a place of coercion and severe intellectual homogeneity. Relatedly, the various
technē and programs of liberal government strive to cultivate values of deliberation and communication instead of radicality and violence (see Oksala 2011). This is
an important aspect of the regime- and status quo-conserving inertia of contemporary liberal governmentality. However, while liberal citizenship is quite clearly tied
to these deliberative-communicative democratic values, the cultural logic that opposes violence with communication far predates liberal government. Since Plato, in
fact, we have often heard that philosophy is violence’s other. From Kant and Hegel to Marx and Girard, and into the present with American liberals like Richard
Rorty, we have come to define the philosopher’s task as distinct from the rash violence of the politicians, generals, and revolutionaries (see Siebers 1998, 115–30). At
the level of philosophical praxis, it must be kept in mind that discourse, of course, is the traditional medium and method of philosophy: to do philosophy simply means
to be-rhetorical about philosophy. Philosophy, in other words, is the coming-into-speech of a particular kind of discourse. I say this not to colonize philosophy under
the rubric of communication or rhetoric—a position I do not advocate—but instead to illustrate how being-rhetorical, how being a speaking subject, is positioned
against other ways of being, in the same way that being philosophical has long been contrasted and defined vis-à-vis its competing ways of being-in-the-world. In
other words, being-rhetorical has frequently been endowed with certain political and social value, particularly as rhetorical practices contrast with other ways of being-
with-others. The speaking subject is thus a subject who speaks instead of carrying out other acts—the subject who gives a stump speech instead of starting a riot; the
subject who participates in an after-school debate program instead of selling drugs or playing football; the subject who negotiates with his boss rather than tossing a
Molotov cocktail through his or her shop window; the wise, mild-mannered subject of today who settles disputes with his mind and mouth instead of with his fists. Let
us say, then, that at a certain level of praxis communication is violence’s other. It is this relationship to violence, in fact, that provides communication/rhetoric with
much of its cultural currency. We might consider the oft-bemoaned fact—oft-bemoaned in rhetoric’s disciplinary circles, that is—that in public discourse “mere
rhetoric” is often contrasted with action. A recent editorial in The Hill by Kentucky US Senator Mitch McConnell regurgitated its variation on this theme: “Job
Creators Need Action, Not Rhetoric” (McConnell 2011). While many communication and rhetoric scholars would be annoyed to see one of their colleagues repeat this
naïve dichotomization, I would like to put aside the ontological status of rhetorical action for a moment in order to point out the rather obvious fact that speech—as a
prominent cultural practice—possesses within our liberal democracy a special status among political activities. One of the prerequisites of productive democratic
citizenship is practicing speech rather than violence—we must discuss rather than dismantle, we must speak rather than shoot. As
the motto of an
Atlanta-based u rban d ebate l eague—whose primary purpose is to enhance urban middle and high school
students’ potential by pulling them into debate programs and away from street and gang life—says
so succinctly, “Words, Not Weapons.” So while the firm ontological distinction between
communicative and violent action is certainly suspect, their polarization in the realm of liberal
democratic values is clear: urban debate leagues, of course, are only one example of how public and private institutions conspire to produce speaking
subjects that eschew personal and political violence. However, this divide between rhetoric and violence is not exclusive to contemporary liberal democracies. In fact,
in an important sense this contrast lies at the heart of rhetorical thinking throughout its history. For George Kennedy, rhetoric is not primarily a public activity that
developed in and around the democratic institutions of classical Greece; rather, it is a biological capacity that has been hardwired into animals’ genetic makeup
throughout most of our evolution on this planet. Kennedy offers the example of male red deer stags competing for the attention of potential mates. Although the stags
possess deadly antlers, they do not immediately resort to physical fighting: instead, they approach one another and howl, attempting to intimidate the other into
departing the scene. This serves as a fight-orflight ritual in which the stags attempt to settle their differences with “rhetoric” rather than violence. For Kennedy, “We
share a ‘deep’ natural rhetoric” (1998, 13) that finds expression in the stags’ posturing, a rhetoric that is “deep” in the sense that it provides an evolutionary advantage
to communities whose members attempt to persuade rather than devour one another: “it seems clear that nature has encouraged the evolution of rhetorical
communication as a substitute for physical encounters” (14). This
dichotomization of rhetoric and violence functions toward
the ongoing construction of the non-violent liberal subject. As Megan Foley (2013) has argued, we find precedents for this in
classical Greek democratic and rhetorical theory: Lysias and Isocrates, for example, claimed that men distinguished themselves from “wild beasts” through civic
persuasion. Yet this old rationality of rhetorical practice has assumed a different significance as the rhetoric/violence dichotomy has come to form a core element of
the liberal political project. Contra the democratic portrait that Lysias and Isocrates paint of rhetoric/violence in classical Greece, rhetoric is no longer solely or
primarily valued as a means of civic persuasion that is preferable to violent coercion. Rather, in
advanced liberalism the bare practice of
speech has in many cases reached its depoliticized, biopolitical nadir. That is to say, the material practice
of discourse production has become a value in itself, not as a correlate or condition of civic
persuasion, but purely as the other of violence. Liberal citizens are speaking subjects, not violent ones; as such,
in their everyday conduct they are governed to carry out various discursive practices as an
alternative to physical violence. This is perhaps best exemplified in the governance of neighborhood
watch volunteers who, perhaps more than any other citizens today, are charged with the ambivalent duty of carrying
out a traditionally violent task—a task, moreover, that often directly confronts the violence of others—by strictly nonviolent
means. Watch volunteers are governed to carry out the traditional surveillance duties of the police,
but rather than carrying out the police’s exclusive violent privileges —such as apprehending, arresting, pepper spraying,
tazing, shooting, or otherwise incapacitating suspects—they are given the task of calling 9-1-1, providing standard details, filing reports, testifying, and so forth.
Their speech, therefore, is not valuable as a means of enlivening democratic practice, but merely as a material reinscription of the
barrier between violent sovereign privilege and the speaking liberal subject (see chapter five).
 Jaguar Debate 120

The NEG’s ideal rhetorical citizen is that of the communicative-surveillant officer

who polices discourse
Reeves ’13 [Joshua – Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of Memphis, “If You See
Something, Say Something: Surveillance, Communication and Citizenship in American Life,” A dissertation
submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2013, p. 168-172,
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8762/1/etd.pdf]

The moral and legal codes that constrain neighborhood watch today arise from a peculiar historical
juncture in which centuries of community-based policing tradition is being transformed by
relatively recent evolutions in sovereign privilege. Upon the foundation of these tensions, certain actions are
deemed morally and legally responsible acts of citizenship while others are seen as threats to the
social order. Surveillance and communication are the privileged activities of today’s neighborhood
watch volunteers—a stark contrast, no doubt, from the days of watch-and-ward patrols and vigilante justice that characterized policing during the colonial
era and the settling of the western frontier. Until the early nineteenth century in the eastern United States, most communities organized compulsory watch-andward
policing patrols that were manned entirely by volunteers; and in the “Wild West” and the vigilante South, of course, citizen justice prevailed throughout much of the
nineteenth century, until “Wanted: Dead or Alive” was transformed into “Armed and Dangerous: Do Not Approach—Contact Authorities Immediately.” As
sovereign governance spread unevenly throughout the territories of the US, it asserted its right to a
monopoly on violence, thereby transforming the practices of community justice that citizens had historically enjoyed vis-à-vis their neighbors. This
sovereign intervention spawned a shift in the legitimate activities of lateral policing actors . While to
enforce the law professional police patrols still relied on the eyes , ears, and mouths of community
members, these community members would have to be governed toward a new ideal of rhetorical
citizenship . They were to fulfill this citizenship not through the capture and judgment of suspects, but instead by watching their neighborhoods and producing
highly circumscribed statements about their activities to law enforcement authorities. The duties of the citizen-officer—who for centuries had manned every level of
law enforcement and criminal investigation—were integrated into this new governmental arrangement based upon what Foucault calls “the formidable rights of the
sovereign” (1977, 47), characterized above all by the sovereign’s claim to the exclusive privileges of violence. As Kevin Stenson has argued, “a major task of the state
police [is] to uphold the power of juridical authority, which remains the cement binding governmental strategies together. It also involves the task of regulating the
shifting boundaries between legitimate community initiatives and illegitimate vigilanteism” (1993, 385). As a result, the public at large—and particularly lateral
policing volunteers, such as those active in Neighborhood Watch—have been endowed with new responsibilities as specifically rhetorical subjects: their new duties
include reporting suspicious activities, calling 9/11, filing police reports, and so on. This cultivation of rhetorical citizenship—which
reinscribes the citizen officer’s zone of practice within the bounds of the communicative-surveillant
—is a rather straightforward illustration of the governmental mechanisms that the liberal order
requires in order to keep civil society civil (see Hay and Andrejevic 2006, 335). Primarily, this chapter gives an answer to Ronald Greene’s
(2009) challenge to theorize the conditions that give rise to special modalities of rhetorical citizenship. While Greene’s analysis is basically
confined to the training of the traditional subjects of rhetorical production—such as debaters and
orators—I propose to push this one step further: evolutions of governance give rise to diverse
modalities of the speaking subject. In our current political juncture—in which neoliberal trends in
self-empowerment are promoted as the answer to decreased and reoriented public services— crime
control has come to increasingly rely on citizens’ communicative-surveillant capacities . Yet this
involves paring down citizens’ speech power to its barest mechanical utility , on depoliticizing the
domain of speech such that it can circulate only within the narrowest possible parameters of
information sharing. Protocols, commands, and anonymizing technologies dominate these citizen-officers’ speech experience, as they carry out the data
storage, processing, and transmission functions inherent to their mission as the eyes and ears of the neoliberal police apparatus. In this chapter, I would like to keep in
mind Agamben’s argument that the paradigm of modern political conflict is the distinction between what life is
bios and what life is zoon. To recall the discussion from chapter two, Agamben writes that bios characterizes the speaking
subject of public and political life, drawing from Aristotle’s (1984, 1.7.1098a 1–8) classic description of man as the zoon logon echon—the
animal who has speech/logos and is therefore fit for bios politicos. Zoon, however, is that form of speechless life that lies outside
the political space of public culture. As Agamben makes clear, this distinction—which for Aristotle marked the ontological rift between
humans and other animals—has given rise to divisions within human communities, as certain individuals’ speech is deprived of its

political potential . Moreover, as Agamben argues, the supreme ambition of biopower “is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the
 Jaguar Debate 121

living being and the speaking being, zoê and bios, the inhuman and the human” (1999, 156).29 The distinction between zoon and bios, then, also applies to a divide
This
within an individual subject, whose bare-biological capacities can be cultivated in the temporary articulation of a particular governmental apparatus.
phenomenon is particularly clear in the responsibilization of Neighborhood Watch’s citizen-officers, whose
speech is radically de-politicized and transformed into a basic, biological phenomenon distinct from the
public discourse of a zoon legon echon. All of the citizen-officer’s expressions are tightly regimented and controlled: dialing 9-1-1, reporting
suspicious activities, filing police reports, and so forth are all rhetorical activities that have been stripped to their barest data-
processing function—the US Department of Transportation even maintains a website with a “protocol” for dialing 9-1-1.30 Thus under the guise of
“self- empowerment” and “community safety,” citizens are transformed into the bare eyes, ears,
and mouths of their society’s security apparatuses. Inasmuch as they are allowed to participate in their community’s security, they
are biological resources valuable primarily as basic sensory extensions of police agencies. Deployed along a different governmental apparatus than Greene’s citizen-
orators, these bare rhetorical subjects are, as we might say, a quite different animal. This chapter will provide a historical overview of neighborhood-watch policing—
that is, of policing that involves the energies and responsibilities of local citizens rather than a sovereign professional police force. Then I describe the evolution from
bounty justice—in which citizens were empowered to return suspects “dead or alive”—to the emergence of an exceptional sovereign power that demands for itself the
sole right to violence in law enforcement. At this stage the responsibilities of the citizen-officer shift: while still encouraged to participate in the policing apparatus,
the citizen-officer is provided with a mandate to carry out surveillance on one’s peers , and then to
communicate suspicions to police officials. What we see, then, is the rise of a special modality of rhetorical citizenship

— the speaking subject who, deprived by the sovereign of his or her traditional means of community-based justice and law enforcement, now
fulfills his or her citizenship through rituals of surveillance and circumscribed communication . Once
oriented toward ideals of community protection and justice—however flawed these ideals and their expressions might have been—this citizen-officer now finds him
or herself articulated to a governing apparatus that produces very circumscribed acts of surveillance and discourse production.
 Jaguar Debate 122

Preemption DA
Framework is a pre-emptive attempt to constrain and deter different modes of
rhetorical being
Reeves ’13 [Joshua – Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of Memphis, “If You See
Something, Say Something: Surveillance, Communication and Citizenship in American Life,” A dissertation
submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2013, p. 207-210,
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8762/1/etd.pdf]

Yet as
Massumi observes, in the age of terror enemy epistemology has acquired a new animating
principle, as this logic of deterrence has been challenged and complemented by a logic of
“preemption.” For Massumi, this preemptive logic has a number of things in common with deterrence: most importantly, they are both fueled by the unknown
futurity of an imminent threat. Their primary difference, however, is that the enemy epistemology of preemption “is unabashedly one of uncertainty, and not due to a
simple lack of knowledge. There is uncertainty because the threat has not only not yet fully formed but . . . it has not yet even emerged. In other words, the threat is
still indeterminately in potential. This is an ontological premise: the nature of threat cannot be specified. It might in some circumstances involve weapons of mass
destruction, but in others it will not” (13). The enemy, moreover, has become “unspecifiable”: It might come from without, or rise up unexpectedly from within. You
might expect the enemy to be a member of a certain ethnic or religious group, an Arab or a Moslem, but you can never be sure. It might turn out be a white Briton
wearing sneakers, or a Puerto Rican from the heartland of America . . . . The situation is objectively one in which the only certainty is that threat will emerge where it
is least expected. This is because what is ever-present is not a particular threat or set of threats, but the potential for still more threats to emerge without warning . . . .
We are in a world that has passed from . . . the "known unknown" (uncertainty that can be analyzed and identified) to the "unknown unknown" (objective uncertainty).
(2007 13) As the enemy shifts from the known-unknown—i.e., an enemy that can be addressed by traditional methods of risk
assessment—to the unknown unknown—i.e., an enemy that can be anyone and anywhere, and which can never be expunged because it exists only as
a deferred, looming spontaneity—this epistemological shift becomes palpable in evolving forms of governmental
praxis. This strategy is especially visible in the “See Something, Say Something” campaign and other domestic
antiterrorism initiatives. The primary public service announcement released by the “See Something, Say Something” campaign provides an excellent example of how
these discourses of “categorical suspicion” (see Marx 1988, 227) circulate in federal outreach materials (see also Docobo 2006). The pedagogical voice that narrates
this tenminute video—which was released in a nationwide outreach campaign in 2011—begins by encouraging citizens to report activities that exceed their faculties
of interpretation: “It’s not easy to put all the pieces [of an unfolding terrorist threat] together, and we don’t expect you to. That’s the job of law enforcement and
intelligence analysts. But homeland security is a shared effort and responsibility for each of us. When you see things that just don’t seem right, that seem somehow out
of the ordinary, reporting what you’ve observed can be invaluable to the work of law enforcement and intelligence analysts in this shared effort. Acts of terrorism
against the United States can be large or small” (USHomelandSecurity 2011a). Citizens
are thus encouraged to report “unusual”
activities—large and small—that defy their expectations of the ordinary. Illustrating a number of these ostensibly
unusual, terroristsignifying activities, the video presents a European-American man who appears to be in his late teens recording video under an overpass. The video
informs citizens that, “before they strike, many terrorists watch and study their targets.” The video then lists a number of supposedly suspicious situations that warrant
contacting authorities: warning that terrorists “gather information,” the scene shifts to an outdoors café, where a young, blonde EuropeanAmerican woman is speaking
to a cop. According to the video, potential terrorists also “test security” (a middle-aged African-American man in a red sweatshirt leaves something in his pocket as he
goes through airport security); “acquire funds and supplies, often through criminal activities” (two white vans are parked next to each other, as two men transfer barely
visible items between the vans); and “rehearse their plans” (a middle-aged EuropeanAmerican woman leaves her purse under a bench in a bus station). After this
lesson in the semiotics of terror, the narrator instructs the viewer, “Any of what we call these ‘precursor activities’ might be observable and reportable by a vigilant
member of the public. You are in the best position to spot these precursor activities as you go about your everyday activities in your community.” Operating
on a logic of preemption, virtually anything can be a “precursor” to terrorist acts—as the video shows, taking
photographs and speaking with cops can be precursor activities; and now, since the Boston Marathon attacks, walking across a college apartment complex with a
pressure cooker has become a precursor activity that warrants the scrutiny of “vigilant members of the public.” The
video’s narrator then
reminds us of the preemptive logic that governs antiterrorist outreach strategy : after fostering ambiguity under
the guise of a boilerplate anti-discrimination statement, the video instructs the viewer how to respond to suspicious
activities: “it’s important to carefully consider what you observe. Reporting suspicious activity should not be based on a
person’s race, religion, or gender, but rather on behaviors that seem suspicious . . . . So if you see something that
just isn’t right, report your observations to your state or local authorities” (2011a). While this assertion is standard politically correct fare, it should be identified within
the larger trend toward governing through ambiguity. While the logic of deterrence spawned knowledge-building enterprises aimed at understanding, containing, and
outsmarting the enemy, the logic of preemption is rooted in a more ambivalent epistemology: it is faced with the relative futility of establishing the truth of the
terrorist enemy. Thus while risk assessment practices remain an essential practice of preemption, they are
complemented by specialized forms of citizen mobilization whose primary utility is not the generation
of practicable knowledge. As the video reminds us, “Homeland security starts with hometown security, and we all have a role to play. Working
together, we can all help secure our country. If you see something, say something” (2011a). By cultivating this sense of civic duty, and by
mobilizing citizens to operate within its appropriate realms of communicative-surveillant practice ,
 Jaguar Debate 123

DHS and allied authorities provide citizens with meaningful ways to “go kinetic” in the War on
Terror.
 Jaguar Debate 124

AT Significance
 Jaguar Debate 125

Refugees
The U.S. will still take in refugees, despite what state governors may say. State
governments have no power over immigration decisions.
Carrol and Qui 11/19 [Lauren Carroll is a PolitiFact staff writer based in Washington, Linda Qiu is a
PolitiFact staff writer based in Washington. She has previously written for PunditFact, National Geographic, and the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting., “PolitiFact Sheet: 5 questions about Syrian refugees”, 11/19/15, POLITIFACT]

Experts say governors don’t have the authority to ban refugees from their states outright. The
federal government has sole power over immigration decisions, and the refugee system is included
under that umbrella. This has been affirmed by Supreme Court decisions as recently as 2012. The
Refugee Act of 1980 says the federal government is expected "to the maximum extent possible" take states’ concerns into account when resettling refugees. But
there are no consequences if the federal government ignores the states, said Steve Vladeck, a professor of national
security law at American University, writing at the Lawfare blog. States also can’t bar people from moving between states.
The 14th Amendment, as well as equal protection laws in individual states, prevents states from
barring entry to people based on their nationality. In the 1915 Supreme Court case Truax v. Raich, the justices concluded that
state governments cannot impose onerous conditions on admitted immigrants, such as denying
them access to a state. "No state can tell legal immigrants where they can live," said Andrew Schoenholtz,
director of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center. "They’re entitled to live anywhere." A number of
the governors who have said they will not accept refugees have acknowledged that they do not have
a legal avenue to make such a demand. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, for example, wrote in a letter to Congress, "It is our understanding that the
state does not have the authority to prevent the federal government from funding the relocation of these Syrian refugees to Florida even without state support."

There are millions of refugees living in the U.S. and tens of thousands are admitted
each year.
Gilmore ’09 [Claudia Gilmore, Bridging Refugee and Youth Children Services, 2009, “Refugees 101”]
Congress
When did U.S. Refugee Resettlement Begin? The U.S. admitted more than 250,000 displaced Europeans following World War II, after which the U.S.
enacted the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowing an additional 400,000 European refugees to resettle in
the U.S. This legislation was followed by later laws admitting refugees from Communist countries
such as China, Cuba, Hungary, Korea, Poland and Yugoslavia. The modern refugee resettlement program traces its roots to
the 1975 admission of over 100,000 Southeast Asian refugees under an ad hoc resettlement program called the Refugee Task Force. In 1980, Congress
formalized the refugee resettlement program in the Refugee Act of 1980, which included the UN
criteria for refugee status and set the legal basis for the Refugee Admissions Program. Today this program is
operated by the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) of the U.S. Department of State in conjunction with the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and offices in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For more about the U.S. Refugee
Resettlement Program, see the Refugee Council USA Web site. How Many Refugees Live in the United States? Since
1980, when formal U.S.
refugee resettlement began, 1.8 million refugees have been invited to live in the United States , with
recent annual refugee arrivals typically falling between 40,000 to 75,000. The number of individuals
granted asylum in the U.S. over the past decade has ranged from a high of 39,000 in 2001 to just
below 23,000 in 2008. About 35 to 40 percent of refugees resettled in the U.S. are children. The vast
majority of refugee children—about 95%—resettle in the U.S. with their parents. About five percent of refugee children are resettled with relatives or other adults who
have agreed to care for the children, while about 100 to 200 children per year are placed into specialized foster care through the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor
Program.
 Jaguar Debate 126

AT Politics DA
 Jaguar Debate 127

2AC
A. Straight Turn
Obama has no political capital now. He spent it all trying to win TPA,
Obamacare, and gay marriage.
Young 7/21 [J.T. Young served in the Department of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget
from 2001 to 2004 and as a Congressional staff member from 1987 to 2000., July 21, 2015, “BELOW THE
HEADLINES, THE REAL OBAMA STORY”, The American Spectator]

Despite having his best week this year a few weeks back, Obama remains decidedly out of favor. The contrast between
his current successes and his long-term political erosion could not be starker. The real question is: How
can Obama be winning so big and still doing so badly? As June closed, Obama arguably had one of his
presidency's best weeks with big Congressional and Court successes. In Congress he won trade promotion authority (TPA), which gives
trade agreements he negotiates an expedited and protected path through Congress. In the Supreme Court, Obamacare received a crucial
verdict allowing continuation of its subsidies, another ruling upholding the administration's
targeting of unintended bias in housing, and a third upholding the constitutionality of gay-
marriage. For an administration less than two years from ending and facing a strong opposition Congress, any positives are welcome. To get them in
areas so central to its legacy and its agenda, they are even more so. However, there are good reasons to delay reappraising
Obama too quickly. First, Obama's “victories” are less than they appear. In winning trade
promotion authority, Obama spent virtually all his political capital and still only got the barest
number of Democrats to support him. In return, all he received was fast track authority — something other presidents have routinely
held — for a trade agreement he may conclude, not passage of an actual deal. So, he spent heavily to obtain a process, not an outcome. As for
Obama’s other big “win” on Obamacare, the court’s ruling said it was constitutional. Let that sink in
for a moment. If ever there was damnation with faint praise, not being unconstitutional is it. And that
still does not make it popular, which it decidedly is not. At the end of the day, Obama’s big “victories”
were really avoidances of embarrassing defeats. Perhaps at this stage of his presidency that is all he
can hope for, but that is still all he got. Second, Obama himself is in no less trouble than he was before. None of Obama’s “victories” addressed the
nation’s most pressing problem: the economy. The economy remains the most pressing issue, because the economy remains… depressing, as it has for the better
part of Obama’s entire presidency. Even last year’s seeming uptick ran out of gas in 2014’s second half, the economy then reversing in 2015’s first quarter.
His presidency’s biggest accomplishment, Obamacare, has been unpopular since inception and
continues to be. It is unpopular, not because of questions over its constitutionality, but because
it was poorly conceived, badly drafted, and abysmally implemented. Further, the administration’s
biggest supporters aren’t anymore — at least not like they used to. According to Rasmussen polling released on the day (6/25) of the
Supreme Court’s rulings, Obama’s strong approval rating was just 23 percent. That’s virtually the same as 2014’s midterm election level (21 percent) — when
Obama’s party lost control of the Senate in another stinging electoral defeat. Simultaneously, Obama’s strong opponents remain
strong. Rasmussen showed Obama’s strong disapproval rating at 41 percent. That too is close to where they were last November (40 percent). Now weeks
later, Obama’s ratings are still essentially the same. According to Rasmussen’s July 20 release, Obama’s strong support is 24 percent and his strong opposition
is 42 percent. Obama’s net strong negative rating remains the same before and after his big “wins”: 18 percent. Finally,
most lame duck
presidents’ favorite retreat, international policy, has been anything but a safe haven for
Obama. If anything, it is his administration’s weakest link — as public opinion bears out. And as
details emerge on the just-negotiated Iran deal during congressional debate, foreign policy
could become an even weaker link for the administration. Despite a much needed good week for
the administration, Obama is where he was — matching an electoral low point with all his
fundamental problems still in place. It is easy to just see the headline without reading the story. Unquestionably, Obama had some very
good headlines; however, today's headlines do not change the bigger story: Obama’s remains a weak administration with

powerful liabilities. The White House is stuck with an economy it cannot resuscitate and a health plan it cannot rehabilitate. And Obama cannot
escape these domestic problems through foreign policy as most lame duck presidents do, because his failures abroad are at even more acute than they are at
home. What really would have changed the Obama story is if these “victories” had not been the averted crises they really were. Defeat could have been fatal to
 Jaguar Debate 128

a presidency as precariously balanced as Obama’s. Despite the momentary respite, Obama’s

administration remains just as
endangered. It is just a bad headline away from writing a very bad ending to the Obama story.

Biometrics are unpopular throughout the political spectrum. Democrats hate it

because of its big brother-esque tactics, and Republicans hate it because of its
potential to track gun owners and because it represents another government
intervention into everyday life. Repealing an unpopular biometric system would
bring Obama more political capital.
ACLU ’10 [American Civil Liberties Union, “BROAD COALITION URGES PRESIDENT OBAMA AND
CONGRESS TO OPPOSE BIOMETRIC NATIONAL ID”, April 13, 2010]

WASHINGTON – A broad coalition of groups today sent a letter to the White House, the House and
Senate Judiciary Committees, the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance
Committee urging them to oppose a proposal by Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that
would include a biometric national ID card in comprehensive immigration reform legislation. Signatories
are from across the political spectrum and include advocates for privacy, consumer rights, gun
owners, limited government and religious liberty. A biometric ID card, like the kind under consideration here,
is a national system for identifying individuals that is used to determine if they are eligible for
rights and benefits – a classic national ID. In order to create a biometric ID, every worker in America
would have to present a birth certificate and other identification documents, then have his or her biometric, like a
fingerprint, captured. In its letter, the coalition stated, “A National ID would not only violate
privacy by helping to consolidate data and facilitate tracking of individuals, it would bring
government into the very center of our lives by serving as a government permission slip needed
by everyone in order to work.” Below is the full text of the letter and a full list of signatories: Re: Oppose Schumer/Graham
Biometric National ID Proposal within Comprehensive Immigration Reform We write today to express our opposition to a
proposal by Senators Charles Schumer (D – NY) and Lindsey Graham (R – SC) to create a biometric Social Security card –
one that relies on personal characteristics like fingerprints to identify individuals. No one disputes that
our broken immigration system harms both immigrants and non-immigrants, but a full scale National ID system is not the solution. Both

Republicans and Democrats have opposed a National ID system. President Reagan likened a
1981 proposal to the biblical "mark of the beast," and President Clinton dismissed a similar
plan because it smacked of Big Brother. A National ID would not only violate privacy by
helping to consolidate data and facilitate tracking of individuals, it would bring government
into the very center of our lives by serving as a government permission slip needed by everyone
in order to work. As happened with Social Security cards decades ago, use of such ID cards would quickly spread
and be used for other purposes – from travel to voting to gun ownership. Contrary to the contentions of Senators
Schumer and Graham, it would be impossible to create such a system without establishing a national
database – a central electronic repository – of Americans’ personal information . Every government
identification system currently in existence requires a database. Databases are necessary in order to reissue lost or stolen cards and as a check on fraud and
abuse. Without record keeping, the same Social Security number and birth certificate could be used again and again to issue new cards to different people –
defeating the entire purpose of the system. Such
a central repository will be irresistible to identity thieves,
hackers and those who want to misuse personal information for crimes like stalking. The cost of this
system will be extraordinary, running to hundreds of billions of dollars and dwarfing the expense associated with other parts of immigration reform. As one
example, the federal government recently began to issue a limited number of biometric ID cards, called Transportation Worker Identification Credentials. It is
estimated that the Department of Homeland Security will spend approximately $1.9 billion to issue cards to approximately 1 million workers. Expanded to the
entire US workforce of 150 million people, that would translate to a proportionately greater cost of $285 billion. A biometric system would likely have to be fee
based – requiring not just government permission, but also a government fee to work.
Adding insult to injury, this unaffordable
scheme will probably never work. Even ignoring the enormous difficulties of creating a system to fingerprint everyone and distributing
readers to employers across the country, the truth is that some employers prefer the ambiguity of the current process. Unless significantly greater resources are
dedicated to enforcing the law, employers will continue to have a strong incentive to circumvent a broken system. Such enforcement could be accomplished just
 Jaguar Debate 129

as easily without a National ID .

A biometric ID system would be controversial and unpopular with constituencies
across the ideological spectrum . It would require the fingerprinting of every American worker – not just immigrants. It would also require
the creation of a bureaucracy that combines the worst elements of the Transportation Security Administration and state Motor Vehicle Departments. For all of
these reasons we believe that a National ID system should play no part in the otherwise needed reform of our immigration system.

B. Intrinsicness - The disadvantage is not intrinsic to the affirmative plan, and

not necessarily an unavoidable result of the plan.
1. Interpretation—Affirmatives may run intrinsicness arguments which it
cannot claim net-benefits from. This functions as an aff CP.

2. Do the plan and _________. This negates the link of the disad.

3. Legitimacy
A real policy maker would be able to pass the plan and to avoid the
disadvantage link.
Debate without intrinsicness is divorced from rational decision making—a
real decision maker would do the plan and the intrinsicness position
McKinney ‘91 [T.A. McKinney, Debater’s Research Guide, 91 “Rehabilitating Intrinsicness”, top
speaker at the NDT]
The functional equivalent of the intrinsicness argument is made constantly , not only in
policymaking circles but also in the every day logic of individual decision making. How many
times have fun-loving nine year olds promised to do their homework at 7 :30 if they could just watch the Simpsons at 7:00? This, friends and
countrymen, is nothing more than an intrinsicness argument (“Mom, please vote for my plan [the Simpsons], and as for your ‘fail the fourth grade’
disad, studying at 7:30 will solve that”). Debate
without intrinsicness is artificially divorced from real
decision making processes. Cases are voted against on the basis of objections that no
rational policymaker would consider because they are only incidental and not inherent
results of adopting the plan. A vigorous revival of well reasoned and evidenced intrinsicness arguments by the affirmative should go
a long way toward chopping the meatball down to size and stimulating more case specific debate, goals toward which all those concerned with quality
debates should strive.

4. Voting – The advantages gained from intrinsicness are not net benefits,
they don’t justify the resolution. However, they do justify the illegitimacy
of the disadvantage, and show that the disadvantage is not necessarily an
unavoidable result of the plan. It is a test, a type of permutation.
 Jaguar Debate 130

C. Political capital isn’t a real thing.

Political capital is a misused fairy tale. Political capital is just a debate concept-
it’s not something that can be measured or tracked, there is no way to know how
much Obama has or how much he needs or how much he allegedly spends on the
plan. Their evidence doesn’t come from Washington insiders- it comes from
random staff writers trying to sell papers by focusing on the spectacle of politics,
they throw around terms like political capital but don’t mean it in the sense of
the disad. Where do their staff writers get the information on how much capital
Obama has or is spending- from the same place Jack got his beanstalk beans?
You should assign the DA zero risk.
Hirsh ’13 [Michael Hirsh is the national editor for Politico Magazine. He is the former foreign editor and
chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, February 8, 2013, “There’s No Such Thing as Political Capital”,
The National Journal]

On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President

Obama will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes, he
will lay out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and debt
reduction. In response, the pundits will do what they always do this time of year: They will talk about how unrealistic

most of the proposals are, discussions often informed by sagacious reckonings of how much
“political capital” Obama possesses to push his program through. Most of this talk will have
no bearing on what actually happens over the next four years. Consider this: Three months ago, just
before the November election, if someone had talked seriously about Obama having enough
political capital to oversee passage of both immigration reform and gun-control legislation at
the beginning of his second term—even after winning the election by 4 percentage points and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)—
this person would have been called crazy and stripped of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought
to.) In his first term, in a starkly polarized country, the president had been so frustrated by GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last
August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to work without fear of deportation for at least two years. Obama
didn’t
dare to even bring up gun control, a Democratic “third rail” that has cost the party elections
and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s health
care law. And yet, for reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s personal prestige or
popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or “political capital”—chances are fair that
both will now happen. What changed? In the case of gun control, of course, it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the 20 first-graders who
were slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled with bullets from a high-capacity assault weapon
seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point in the national conscience. One thing changed after another. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association
marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon after the massacre. The pro-gun lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables
and crazies. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot in the head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her
husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners. Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers: “Be bold.” As a
result, momentum has appeared to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are
permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun
laws. But one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time . Whole new
possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new
spirit of compromise on immigration reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable
for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this
turnaround has very little to do with
Obama’s personal influence—his political mandate, as it were. It has almost entirely to do with just two numbers: 71
and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney, the breakdown of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his
advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29 at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8
percentage points in November. But the movement on immigration has mainly come out of the Republican Party’s recent introspection, and the realization by
its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing
It’s got nothing to
demographic death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority.

do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a
meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for “mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive
 Jaguar Debate 131

election—and just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than
he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on the country’s mood and direction.
Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful
concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But
the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your side .”
The real problem is that the idea of
political capital—or mandates, or momentum—is so poorly defined that presidents and
pundits often get it wrong. “Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University.
“The best kind of political capital—some sense of an electoral mandate to do something— is

very rare. It almost never happens . In 1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason ,
political capital is a concept that misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary. It
conveys the idea that we know more than we really do about the ever-elusive concept of
political power, and it discounts the way unforeseen events can suddenly change everything.
Instead, it suggests, erroneously, that a political figure has a concrete amount of political capital to
invest, just as someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank
his gains, and the size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history .
Naturally, any president has practical and electoral limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama
has neither at present. And unless a surge in the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is inevitable
that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will increasingly avoid any
concessions that make him (and the Democrats) stronger. But the abrupt emergence of the immigration and gun-control issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in
mood can occur and how political interests can align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the pseudo-concept of political capital
masks a larger truth about Washington that is kindergarten simple: You just don’t know what
you can do until you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “ Winning wins .” In theory, and in practice, depending
on Obama’s handling of any particular issue, even in a polarized time, he could still deliver on a lot of his second-
term goals, depending on his skill and the breaks. Unforeseen catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can dawn, such
as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to the huge disparity in the Hispanic vote. Some political scientists who
study the elusive calculus of how to pass legislation and run successful presidencies say that
political capital is, at best, an empty concept, and that almost nothing in the academic
literature successfully quantifies or even defines it. “It can refer to a very abstract thing, like a
president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard
Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the calculus is far more complex than the term suggests. Winning on
one issue often changes the calculation for the next issue; there is never any known amount of
capital. “The idea here is, if an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he wants, and he gets it, then each
time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors” Ornstein says. “If they think he’s going to win, they may change positions to get on the winning
side. It’s a bandwagon effect.”

D. Winners Win
If Obama wins this legislation, he will get more people rallying behind him,
making it easier for him to pass bills.
SMALL ’14 2/3/14 Political Science and History at Depaul [Arthur Small, Obama runs a ‘stale’
administration, http://www.thedepauw.com/opinion/obama-runs-a-stale-administration-
1.3135925#.UvPDUPk_CQA]
What happened? He did not represent me the way I thought he would. During the 2008 election, he came off as a dynamic political figure.
As a young liberal in a bastion of conservatism, Zionsville, Ind., I hoped that Obama could be a man who could rise above ‘political capital’
and the chains of the ‘Washington-Elite’ and become a transcendent political leader. But President Obama
has become stale,
and he seems to lead with little to no conviction. His premier policy achievement, The Affordable Care Act, has
sputtered to start. ‘Obamacare,’ as it is referred to by the American people, was a watered-down bill that looked almost nothing like it did
when it was first proposed. The American people, who know very little about what the policy entails, seems to be against everything that
 Jaguar Debate 132

The Affordable Care Act stands for. Most of the blame for the people’s distaste for the bill has to fall on the Obama administration for
failing to advertise the most important legislative accomplishment of his time in office. Pundits and rival political factions were able to rip
the bill apart because the administration failed to properly publicize the policy. President Obama
has yet to use his power as
the commander-in-chief to influence the legislative branch. Great presidents in the past have put
their feet down and demanded that their legislative peers hear what they have to say. President
Obama has been far too timid to use the influence granted to him by his office. In the end, President Obama has
missed an opportunity to be considered a great president for two reasons. He is unwilling to exert his power and
is willing to compromise with rivals that have little interest in seeing him succeed. Last week’s State of
the Union address was the first one I have not watched during the president’s time in office. He and his administration have become stale,
even to a bleeding heart liberal like me.
 Jaguar Debate 133

Biometrics Unpopular Extensions

Biometrics programs, like the NGI implemented by the FBI, are controversial and
unpopular.
Volz ’14 [Dustin Volz is a reporter for National Journal and Reuters covering cybersecurity and surveillance
policy, Septermber 15, 2014, “FBI’s Facial-Recognition Technology Has Achieved ‘Full Operational Capability’”,
National Journal]

The FBI’s futuristic identification powers are ready for prime time. The Next Generation
Identification System, a controversial biometric database that relies heavily on facial recognition technology, is now
fully operational, the agency announced Monday. The program is designed to help law enforcement officials identify criminal suspects, but it
has endured repeated scrutiny from civil liberties groups that say the database will endanger the
privacy of every day citizens guilty of no wrong doing. “This effort is a significant step forward for the criminal justice community
in utilizing biometrics as an investigative enabler,” the FBI said in a statement. The agency announced two new services Monday that complete the database’s
“operational capability.” The first, called Rap Back, allows officials to receive “ongoing status notifications” regarding the reported criminal history of people “in
positions of trust, such as school teachers.” The other newly deployed service is the Interstate Photo System, a facial recognition program that will allow law
enforcement agencies, including probation and parole officers, to cross reference photographic images with criminal databases. Privacy
groups have
repeatedly deplored the FBI’s facial recognition database as rife with troubling privacy
implications. In June, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and
others warned that the facial recognition program has “undergone a radical transformation” since
it was last vetted for privacy concerns six years ago. The lack of oversight, they said, “raises serious
privacy and civil liberties concerns.” “One of the risks here, without assessing the privacy
considerations, is the prospect of mission creep with the use of biometric identifiers,” Jeramie Scott, national
security counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told National Journal in June. “It’s been almost two years since the FBI
said they were going to do an updated privacy assessment, and nothing has occurred.” A 2010 report on the
FBI’s facial recognition technology found it could fail one in every five times it was used, a rate far higher than more traditional methods of identification, such as
fingerprinting or iris scans. But earlier this year, FBI Director James Comey attempted to dispel fears that the use of biometric data for identification purposes
amounted to some sort of Orwellian tracking system. Comey testified before Congress that the database would not collect or store photos of everyday people. Its use,
he said, is only intended to “find bad guys by matching pictures to mugshots.” No federal laws limit the use of facial recognition
software, either by the private sector or the government.
 Jaguar Debate 134

Winners Win Extensions

Wins would rally support and get more wins
ECONOMIST 1—30—14 [Clowns to the left, jokers to the right,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/01/barack-obama]
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH is supposed to have told his biographer that the bombastic triumphalism of the last movement of his Fifth
Symphony, which Stalin compelled him to write, was actually a parody: "It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your
business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.'" I thought of this (probably apocryphal) story Tuesday as Barack Obama strained to
project an image of pragmatic, bipartisan optimism in his state-of-the-union address. Given how frustrating the past year
has been for Mr Obama, one might have expected him to mount the podium and vow eternal vengeance on the Republican party, cursing its
leadership to the deepest circles of hell. But nobody rewards a president for pouring out his indignation upon the opposition. The American
people want sunny confidence from their leaders, and Mr Obama's calm demeanor is one of the reasons his popularity
ratings aren't lower than they are, after a year in which Republicans have deployed scorched-earth resistance to his every proposal, brought his
agenda to a grinding halt, damaged the economy by imposing needless austerity measures, and nevertheless convinced much of the country that
Mr Obama is largely to blame for Washington's paralysis The
closest Mr Obama got to denouncing the GOP's strategy
of total resistance came early on, when he noted that Washington "has been consumed by a
rancorous argument over the proper size of the federal government". He conceded that this is "an important
debate—one that dates back to our very founding", but he chided Congress (without pointing fingers) for allowing this argument to shut down the
government. This rhetorical stance encapsulates everything that makes Mr Obama a successful politician, and also what what drives both parties
crazy. Mr Obama has built his career on standing above the political fray, acknowledging that he has a partisan agenda, but calling for both sides
to compromise wherever possible for the country's sake. This is his vaunted "adult in the room" ploy. Tuesday night, for example, after plugging
the achievements of Obamacare, he cracked that he "do[es] not expect to convince my Republican friends on the merits of this law," drawing a
round of laughs. Then he scolded Republicans for continuing to stage hopeless votes to repeal the law, and said he would welcome any positive
ideas they have to improve it. It's obvious why Mr Obama's wry, pedagogical tone angers Republicans.
Increasingly, though, it also angers Democrats, who are tired of having to throw their weight behind
the president's call for reasonable compromise. Over the past three years, America's political system has
descended into all-out partisan warfare . Democrats want a general in that fight; they are
increasingly dissatisfied that their leader has to spend his rhetorical energy playing the role of the
UN envoy calling on all sides to exercise restraint. Since the day after his re-election, pundits have been calling on Mr
Obama to act more like LBJ: take strong ideological positions , propose major legislation , twist
arms off and beat people's heads in with them (in Senator Russell's immortal words), and so forth. (Our Lexington argued
that case a few months back.) Earlier this month Isaac Chotiner bemoaned the president's habit of forever presenting both sides of every
argument, accusing him of "talk[ing] to us like we're children": "It's as if the reader can't be trusted to just hear one side from the president,
because that might (heaven forbid) make him or her think Obama hasn't considered every angle."

Winners win
THE HILL 3/20/13 [Amie Parnes and Justin Sink, Obama honeymoon may be over,
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/289179-obama-honeymoon-may-be-over]

The second-term honeymoon for President Obama is beginning to look like it is over.¶ Obama, who was riding
high after his reelection win in November, has seen his poll numbers take a precipitous fall in recent weeks. ¶ A CNN poll
released Tuesday showed Obama’s favorability rating underwater, with 47 percent approving and 50 percent disapproving of Obama’s handling
of his job. ¶ Much of the president’s agenda is stuck, with climate change regulations delayed,
immigration reform mired in committee negotiations and prospects for a grand bargain budget
deal in limbo at best. ¶ On Tuesday, in a decision that underscored Obama’s depleting political capital,
the White House watched as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced only a watered-down version of Obama’s
gun control proposals would be considered on the Senate floor. ¶ Republicans, sensing the sea change, are licking
their chops. They point to the lack of movement on Obama’s signature issues, noting the contrast to the
ambitious plans outlined in the early weeks of his second term.¶ “The president set very high goals for himself during his State of the Union, but
the reality is very
little of his agenda is actually moving,” Republican strategist Ron Bonjean said. “He allowed
himself to get caught up in the legislative quicksand, [and] the cement is beginning to harden. Ҧ
 Jaguar Debate 135

History isn’t on Obama’s side. ¶ The last four presidents who won a second term all saw their poll numbers slide by mid-March with the
exception of Bill Clinton, whose numbers improved in the four months following his reelection.¶ Clinton may have only been delaying the
inevitable. His numbers dropped 5 points in April 1994. Even Ronald Reagan, buoyed by a dominant performance over Walter Mondale in the
1984 election, saw a double-digit erosion by this point in his second term.¶ Obama has yet to complete the first 100 days of his second term. But
without a signature achievement since his reelection, he faces a crossroads that could define the
remainder of his presidency . ¶ White House aides maintain that the 24-hour news cycle makes comparisons to previous presidents
difficult.¶ “I think the nature of our politics now is different than Ronald Reagan’s honeymoon,” one senior administration official said. “The ebb
and flow of politics doesn’t follow that model anymore.”¶ But observers say a drop in popularity is typical for second-termers.¶ “There may be
some typical second-term honeymoon fade happening,” said Martin Sweet, an assistant visiting professor of political science at Northwestern
University. “Honeymoon periods for incumbents are a bit more ephemeral.”¶ But like most other presidents, Sweet added, “Obama’s fate is tied
to the economy.”¶ “Continuing economic progress would ultimately strengthen the president but if we are hit with a double-dip recession, then
Obama’s numbers will crater,” he said.¶ The White House disputes any notion that Obama has lost any political capital in recent weeks.¶ “The
president set out an ambitious agenda and he’s doing big things that are not easy, from immigration to gun control,” the senior administration
official said. “Those are policies you can’t rack up easily, and no one here is naive about that.”¶ The White House is aware that
the clock is ticking to push its hefty agenda, but the official added, “The clock is not ticking because of president’s political capital. The
clock is ticking because there’s a timetable in achieving all of this. [Lawmakers] are not going to sign on because the president’s popular.” ¶ And
administration officials believe they still have the leverage.¶ “There’s a decent amount of momentum behind all of this,” the official said. “It
looks like immigration is closer [to passage] than ever before.Ӧ Republican strategist Ken Lundberg argued that current budget fights
“have cut short the president’s second-term honeymoon.” ¶ He said this could also hurt the president’s party, warning “the lower the president’s
approval rating, the bigger the consequence for vulnerable Democrats.”¶ “Voters want solutions, and if they see the president headed
down the wrong path, lockstep lawmakers will be punished in 2014,” he said.¶ Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis maintained that as long as he’s
president, Obama still has the leverage.¶ “Immigration reform doesn’t get impacted by whether Obama’s poll numbers are 55 or 45,” Kofinis
said. “Does it make certain things a little more difficult? Possibly. But while his numbers may have fallen, he’s still more likeable than the
Republicans are on their best day.Ӧ Kofinis
said the real question for Obama is what kind of emphasis he’s going
to place on his second term because the public will have less patience than they did during his first.¶ “The
challenge in a second term is the American people look at certain things and have a higher tolerance in a second term,” he said. “When they know
you’re not running for reelection again, they hold you to a higher standard.” ¶ Bonjean and other Republicans are aware that
Obama could potentially bounce back from his latest slip in the polls and regain his footing.¶ “He has
the opportunity to take minor legislative victories and blow them up into major accomplishments—
meaning if he got something on gun control, he can tout that that was part of his agenda and the work isn’t over.
If he were able to strike a grand bargain with Republicans, that’d be a legacy issue.”¶ Still, Bonjean added, “It’s not looking so good
right now.”
 Jaguar Debate 136

AT Terror DA
 Jaguar Debate 137

Uniqueness
We aren’t winning the GWOT – organizations are growing
Rothkopf 14 – David Rothkopf is CEO and Editor of the FP Group. His latest book, National Insecurity:
American Leadership in an Age of Fear was published in October., “We Are Losing the War on Terror”
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/10/we-are-losing-the-war-on-terror/

The ground truth about the spread of terrorism will be a hard one for many Americans to swallow after 13 costly years of war. Terrorism is spreading worldwide.
Our enemies have sustained our blows, adapted, and grown. Two questions loom large as a consequence: Where did we go wrong and
what do we do now? Recent headlines and new studies support the conclusion that global terror trends are heading in an ever more

dangerous direction. In early June, the Rand Corporation released a study that detailed the growing threat. It reports that in 2007, there were 28 Salafi-jihadist groups like al
Qaeda. As of last year, there were 49. In 2007, these groups conducted 100 attacks. Last year, they conducted 950. The study estimates that there were between 18,000 and 42,000 such terrorists
active seven years ago. The low-end estimate for last year, at 44,000, is higher than the top estimate for 2007, and the new high-end estimate is 105,000. The administration rightly argues that

"core al Qaeda" has sustained "huge" damage. But "core al Qaeda" no longer poses the principle
threat to the U.S. homeland. That comes, according to the Rand report, from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. As Rand summarizes the report: "Since 2010, there has
been a 58 percent increase in the number of jihadist groups, a doubling of jihadist fighters and a tripling of attacks by Al Qaeda affiliates. The most significant threat

to the United States, the report concludes, comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria,
Afghanistan and Pakistan." As legitimate as the questions that have emerged in the Bowe Bergdahl case may be, they are secondary to the deteriorating situation
associated with the war the recently released prisoner went to Afghanistan to fight. There is no denying that the contempt for Congress shown in failing to inform it of the deal — even as perhaps
100 in the administration knew of it — starkly reveals the cynicism behind last year’s faux deferral to Congress on Syria. But it would be far more cynical to continue with the Obama team’s
variation on the "mission accomplished" misrepresentations of his predecessor. The war in Iraq was not over or won when we said it was. Nor is the war on terror won or the threat it poses

resolved simply by no longer using the term or suggesting our goal was merely to inflict damage on the tiny fraction of terrorists who were associated with the 9/11 attacks. The reality
is that we are still fighting the last war on terror even as a new set of risks loom and are made worse by our minimizing
their implications for political purposes. In its recent assessment, "Country Reports on Terrorism 2013," the State Department acknowledged the

trend. It observes that last year attacks worldwide increased almost by half, from 6,700 to 9,700. Nearly
18,000 people died and nearly 33,000 were injured. While the report hails allied forces for making progress combating al Qaeda’s core in the AfPak region, it also notes that the group’s affiliates
are becoming more dangerous. The report takes particular note of the threat posed by foreign extremists in Syria, which has become a kind of petri dish in which a growing global terror threat is
being cultivated. Estimates on the number of such fighters range from 7,000 to over 20,000. The news that one recent suicide bomberin Syria was an American and that one of the attackers
behind the recent shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium spent time in Syria suggests how this threat may evolve over time. It’s not unlikely that, if left unchecked, the long-term
consequences of a cadre of fighters trained in Syria who will soon return to their home countries will be one of the darkest legacies of that war — a legacy that may well echo the long-term costs
associated with training jihadists in the battle against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, among whom, of course, was Osama bin Laden.

Losing the GWOT – bad leadership and info fails

Seidel 14 -- Jamie Seidel News Corp Australia Network “US General Daniel Bolger frankly admits the War on
Terror was lost by poor leadership” http://www.news.com.au/world/us-general-daniel-bolger-frankly-admits-the-
war-on-terror-was-lost-by-poor-leadership/story-fndir2ev-1227119231407
I AM a United States Army General, and I lost the global war on terrorism … These chilling words are those of Lieutenant General Daniel Bolger. And he doesn’t expect things to get any better.
From this opening sentence in his book, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, General Bolger paints a bleak picture of conflicts of interests, confused
agendas and a general lack of knowing what victory is anyway. “It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous,” he says. “Step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers.

And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem. To wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry.” It’s not the soldiers
They’re fighting harder than ever before, he says. “The courage, discipline, and lethality of our Americans in uniform stand with anything accomplished in
the Civil War, both world wars, Korea, or Vietnam. That all went very right. “What went wrong squandered the bravery, sweat, and blood of these fine Americans. Our primary

failing in the war involved generalship. If you prefer the war-college lexicon, we — guys like me — demonstrated poor
strategic and operational leadership.” He went on to tell National Public Radio earlier this week: “The mistakes, the errors made by guys like me
have to be accounted for and explained so we can learn and do better in the event we have to do something like this again.” In his book and in public, General Bolger is
surprisingly frank about his — and his military’s — failures: “I was present when key decisions were made, delayed, or avoided. I
made, delayed, or avoided a few myself.” “By the enemy’s hand, abetted by my ignorance, my arrogance, and the inexorable fortunes of war, I lost eighty men and women under my charge;
more than three times that number were wounded. Those sad losses are … all my fault.” Things started going wrong before the “War on Terror” even started. “We should have known this one
was going to go bad when we couldn’t even settle on a name. In the wake of the horrific al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, we tried out various labels,” General Bolger writes. “The guys
in the Pentagon basement at first offered Operation Infinite Justice, which sounded fine, both almighty and righteous. Then various hand-wringers noted that it might upset the Muslims … Well,

better incoherent than insensitive, I guess.” Aside from semantics,what was his biggest problem? Fighting the right enemy “We knew within
a day or two of the 9/11 attacks that it was al-Qaeda, a terrorist network that had a headquarters element, if you would call it that, or a chairman of the board in Osama bin Laden … But that’s not

the United States went to war against Iraq. “We ended up fighting
who we ended up fighting most of the time,” he said. Instead,

Sunni Arab insurgents … who again — although they might make common cause with al-Qaeda —
those weren’t the guys who attacked us on 9/11,” General Bolger said. “We waged a Global War on Terrorism
against enemies referred to vaguely as terrorists, cowards, evildoers, and extremists . Although those descriptions
were rather generic, somehow we always ended up going after the same old bunch of Islamists and their ilk. Our opponents had no illusions about who our targets were, even if some of us did.
 Jaguar Debate 138

His cause also had little support. “It became obvious that we were fighting an insurgent enemy mixed into a civil population that was suspicious of us anyway as outsiders -and that was true in

The next problem was information Despite the billions spent on spy networks
both Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

that reach into the mobile phones and email accounts of almost everyone on earth, little was known
about the US Army’s actual opponents. “It’s very, very difficult to take even the great troops that we have and send them into a village to try and sort out
which ... might be insurgents, who might be just people living in the area (and) who might potentially be government supporters,” he said, especially “when you don’t speak the language and you
really don’t understand what’s going on in that village very well.”

Paris attacks prove that we are losing the war on terror.

Chapman 11/14 [Russell Chapman is a freelance photographer and writer. Originally from the UK, he is now
based in Switzerland. He is well versed in Middle Eastern and Russian affairs. He is recognized for his work in
Syria, having been invited to present at international conferences, 11/14/15, “Attacks on France. Losing the war on
terror”]
How is a person supposed to live their life, when not knowing if going to a restaurant, a concert or going on holiday will end with them being yet another casualty of a
We live in
deadly terrorist attack. This has become the new reality. The deadly attacks in France hammer this home in a way that can leave no doubt.
extremely dangerous times. My original plan had been to write about the growing evidence that a Daesh (ISIS) bomb brought
down the Russian plane as holiday-makers flew home from Sharm el Sheikh. But this week too there was a deadly suicide
bombing by Daesh in Beirut with 43 dead and more than 200 wounded. Now there is Paris, drenched in blood. Where will
be next? What many don’t understand is the reasoning behind these attacks. Daesh are trying to provoke the international
community into putting boots on the ground in Syria, they believe than in so doing they will bring
about Judgement Day, this is part of their twisted theology. They believe that when the armies of the world gather together to
fight them, God will bring about the end of times. There can be no reasoning with them. Going back to the probability it was a bomb that
brought down the Russian plane highlights the point. Russia while very active in Syria has been concentrating its efforts on attacking the rebels who are against
Bashar al Assad, leaving Daesh (ISIS) pretty much unscathed. The bombing of the plane is a direct message to Moscow, ‘Come and get us if you can, we want you to
try and take us on’ The only way to try to defeat them is to put boots on the ground, air-strikes alone are not effective, they want to suck the world into war on their
terms. This is one of the reasons for their terror attacks. The
dreadful attacks in Paris highlight the fact that the ‘war on
terror’ is not being won despite the enhanced ability of governments to gather information and
intelligence from pretty much all electronic communication. Hopefully it will also help people in general understand just how
organized and capable Daesh are, yes they are blood thirsty but they know what they are doing and are a global

organization, never under-estimate them. A result of the attack in Paris will be the curtailing of yet
more civil liberties in the name of security . Travelling by plane will become even more arduous
than it already is, I would not be surprised to see travel by train also effected, security at large public gatherings will be
tightened, more of our personal communications will be monitored, the police will be viewing
everybody with suspicion, finger ready on the trigger. This is one of the goals of Daesh, besides wanting to
have all the major powers of the world put troops on the ground in Syria it also wants to permanently disrupt the lives of all who don’t follow its twisted philosophy.
With the attack in Paris and the bringing down of the Russian plane, it has succeeded in doing exactly that. The
fear of terror they are creating
is maybe more effective at interrupting our lives than the acts of terror themselves . As long as Daesh are
permitted to exist we can expect there to be a lot more innocent blood splattered on the streets. The question has to be, what will the USA, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and others do about it. Will they stop playing their geo-political games, which have included turning a blind eye to Daesh (ISIS) and work together for once?
Time will tell.

ISIL is winning.
Hoffman 9/10 [Bruce Hoffman is a political analyst known for his views on terrorism and insurgency. He is the
Director of the Center for Security Studies and Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, “ISIL is
Winning,” 9/10/15, POLITICO]
At the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it seemed like we had terrorism on the run; Osama bin Laden was dead, the Taliban was defeated and officials like CIA director Leon
it’s time to
Panetta had proclaimed al Qaeda all but finished. But as we mark on Friday the 14th anniversary of the devastating attacks on the United States,
admit that the terrorists—at least one specific branch of terrorists—are now winning. And it’s time to admit that our
response to the so-called Islamic State has been an abject failure. Last year, fighters belonging to the Islamic
State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a group once part of the same organization responsible for the 9/11 attacks stormed into Iraq, conquered half that
country, declared itself both a state and a Caliphate and set about to slaughter and enslave
 Jaguar Debate 139

thousands of Christians, Shi’a, and members of Islamic minority sects. Fifteen months later, ISIL’s influence has spread far
beyond the Levant and Mesopotamia. A thousand foreign recruits converge monthly on its operational cynosure. Hailing from some
fifty countries they exceed by a factor of ten the average monthly flow of foreign fighters to Iraq at even
the height of the war there a decade ago. Story Continued Below ISIL’s international cadre has also far exceeded the
number that gravitated to Afghanistan during and the 1980s and 1990s. That growth creates the same conditions
—but on a far vaster magnitude—that led to al Qaeda’s rise and the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on 9/11. One of
the more revealing measures of terrorism lethality is the number of incidents that kill more than
one hundred persons at one time—a surprisingly rare occurrence. Throughout the entirety of the
twentieth century, for example, a total of only fourteen terrorist attacks did so. Last year, however, twice
as many accomplished the same feat—the majority of which were perpetrated by either ISIL or one its
branches. The temptation to dismiss these developments as primarily “local” phenomena—confined to the perennially
violent, unstable Middle East—is further belied both by the growing number of ISIL branches or “provinces”
and its continued efforts to radicalize a worldwide stable of “stay-behind” amateurs, whom the
group encourages to carry out low-level, lethal attacks in their respective homelands . To date, ISIL has
established bases in at least a half-dozen countries: stretching from West and North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and from the
Sinai to South Asia and the Caucasus. And, over the past year alone, ISIL-inspired homegrown attacks have occurred in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France and
Belgium. “This is sort of the new normal,” FBI Director James Comey observed following the most recent July 4th holiday, after ten persons were
arrested and charged in connection with a variety of ISIL-inspired plots. They included three New York men, who are believed to have been planning to mount attacks
using improvised explosive devices similar to those used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three persons and wounded over 200 others. “If you
imagine a nationwide haystack,” Comey described the challenge facing U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, “we are trying to find needles in that
haystack.” Confronted by an increasingly geographically diffuse and demographically diverse threat, it
is clear that our current strategy is a failure . This was made clear by a poll taken among the attendees of last
spring’s prestigious Senior Conference at the U.S. Military Academy. These persons included America’s top military
commanders, senior government officials, distinguished scholars, prominent aid workers and
journalists. A startling 97 percent agreed that the U.S. is losing the war against ISIL . And the
geopolitical situation has only deteriorated since then. Even as ISIL has lost ground in northern Syria, it
has conquered new territory in the south and in the central desert zone east of Homs. This was demonstrated only days
ago when ISIL captured the last major Syrian government-held oilfield, the Jazal facility just outside Palmyra.
Even more alarming is the spread since March of ISIL terrorism to Yemen , where an ongoing series of bombings
targeting Shi’a mosques to date have killed or wounded more than 500 people. It’s obvious why those closest to the threat think

we’re losing : A depressing pattern has established itself over the past four years whereby we
continue to decapitate their leadership and they nonetheless continue to seize more territory; we
downsize our military, while the flow of recruits into their ranks continues unabated; our intelligence
collection capabilities are diminished, but they more effectively exploit digital and social media to ensure new sources of support and recruits. Just days ago, for
instance, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, explained how the intelligence disclosures made by Edward Snowden had impacted America’s
counterterrorism capabilities. Citing the closure of the National Security Agency’s MYSTIC program in Afghanistan, which monitored mobile-phone conversations
throughout that country, Clapper called it “the single most important source of force protection and warning for our people in Afghanistan.” FBI Director Comey,
meanwhile, has often cited the “going dark phenomenon”: whereby outdated legislation coupled with technological advances in encryption have eroded law
enforcement’s ability to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to court orders and warrants. The cumulative effect has been that we’ve stood on the
sidelines as a new, more pernicious hybrid threat has emerged—a threat that erodes any meaningful distinction between terrorism, insurgency and limited
conventional warfare. ISIL is something the world has never seen before . During the summer of 2014, for example, it launched a
battalion-sized assault and defeated 30,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers. As the defenders fled, they left behind approximately three military divisions’ worth of
equipment, including American-made Humvees and M1 Abrams tanks, totaling tens of millions of dollars. ISIL
had already seized large
stockpiles of weapons, equipment and cash while fighting in Syria and has recently employed
chemical weapons on several occasions. The size, weapons and tactics of ISIL forces —combined with their
ability to seize and hold terrain—are arguably unique in the annals of terrorism. Accordingly, ISIL, and even al Qaeda’s affiliate in
Yemen, are now as capable (if not more so) than the militaries of regional nation-states. Like their government counterparts, these hybrid forces hold territory, control
populations, conduct business and enforce laws. Faced with these formidable challenges on the fourteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we desperately need a new
strategy. It must start with the recognition that ISIL’s
appeal will not diminish nor its allure end until this movement is
militarily defeated and pushed out of Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces are patently incapable of this task. And, our de facto alliance with
Iran and domestic Shi’a militias has heightened rather than assuaged Sunni fears of encirclement and furnished ISIL’s propagandists with a powerful narrative that
more tightly binds the fate of indigenous populations to the protection the Islamic State provides. The inadequacy of the embryonic U.S. efforts to train Syrian rebels
was also laid bare last month when terrorists loyal to al Qaeda kidnapped the commander of Division 30, the American-backed indigenous force, along with six other
 Jaguar Debate 140

senior officers. The al Qaeda fighters then attacked the unit’s headquarters, killing or wounding nearly half of the remaining men—effectively negating U.S. hopes
that the unit would be a model for future training initiatives. We have to accept that Iraq has ceased to exist as a viable federal union and has now permanently
splintered into Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish enclaves. In these circumstances, our best option is to back the only reliable and militarily capable partners we have there—
the Kurds. To date, both the Kurdish Peshmerga and YPG or People’s Protection Unit, its Syrian counterparts, are the only local forces who have demonstrated any
effective ability to counter ISIL. Yet, American support of both is hamstrung by a misplaced deference to Turkey’s priorities—a NATO ally who has often proven as
unhelpful in the war on terrorism in the Levant as Pakistan has been in South Asia. Second, we have to finally ask why, after a decade and a half, we do not have even
one case of host nation counterterrorist training that is an unambiguous success story? Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali or Yemen our efforts to build partner
capacity have all foundered. In each, terrorist numbers have grown faster than we could effectively train
indigenous security forces, their control over territory expanded while governmental sovereignty
contracted, and their operational effectiveness appreciably outpaced that of their government
opponents. A complete overhaul of our training and resourcing of foreign partners is required if we are to prevent the further spread of ISIL branches. Finally,
a concerted effort is needed to undermine the logistical infrastructure that supports and sustains terrorism. ISIL could never have accumulated
the power it currently wields without a capacity to ensure the continued flow of recruits into its
ranks and money into its coffers. Many of the successful financial initiatives that have proven so successful against al Qaeda over the past
decade and a half are completely irrelevant to ISIL, given that only an estimated 5 percent of its revenue comes from charities or philanthropic donations. Unlike most
terrorist groups, ISIL actually possesses its own means of income generation and financing. ISIL controls
oil fields in the regions it governs that yield an estimated revenue of up to $2 million per day . U.S. and
coalition airstrikes have reportedly reduced ISIL’s income from oil and petroleum products significantly but not critically. Indeed, ISIL reportedly
continues to sell oil, natural gas, and electricity on the black and grey markets using a complex
network to smuggle contraband supplies to surrounding states. A new approach is thus required to address terrorist
financing patterns that have adapted and adjusted to previously effective government countermeasures. An essential prerequisite to achieving this should focus on
cutting ISIL off from the underhanded middle-men and nefarious brokers who routinely facilitate the sale and transfer of ISIL fuel products and other goods to
surrounding countries—many of whom are citizens of close U.S. regional allies. During the twentieth century, we believed that publicity was the oxygen that breathed
life into terrorism. Today, it is terrorist access to both physical and virtual sanctuaries and safe havens—and those protections are sadly increasing for ISIL rather than
contracting. Rolling back ISIL from Iraq is a critical first step in reversing this process and countering a threat that is becoming more entrenched and intractable.
 Jaguar Debate 141

Security Theatre Turn

Biometrics is useless, harmful, and ultimately just “security theatre.”
Bedenko ’15 [Alan Bedenko is a Journalist for The Daily Public, “New GOP Congress to Destroy Canadian
Border”, January 28, 2015, The Daily Public]

Congress’ latest idea is to require biometric testing — e.g., fingerprinting or iris scans — for people departing the
United States via the northern border. Every person in every vehicle would be required to exit the vehicle and provide biometric information. As you might
imagine, the impact that this would have on routine cross-border visits for business, tourism, or just
shopping, would be catastrophic. It would quite literally shut the border down, and it would deal a
devastating blow to the western New York economy, which relies heavily on Canadian shoppers
and cross-border traffic for jobs and tax revenue. The “Secure Our Borders First Act” is billed in national media as being a
Republican slap at President Obama’s recent executive action on immigration. But the affect on the Canadian border isn’t some
inadvertent accident — it was a deliberate amendment brought forward by freshman Republican congressman from
Syracuse John Katko. Add to that criticism the fact that this is a fundamentally idiotic, pointless, and
harmful piece of legislation. You picked a doozy, Syracuse. Requiring biometric testing upon departure from
the US would require the construction of inspection booths on the outbound lanes. Requiring every
occupant of every vehicle to exit and provide biometric information would be time-consuming and
accomplish absolutely nothing. Every effort to better integrate the WNY economy into that of Southern Ontario would simply vanish. Erie County
sales tax revenue from Canadian shoppers would plummet and put more pressure on WNY taxpayers. There’s no exception made for citizens
of Canada or the US, who don’t need visas to visit each other’s countries. Because a small
percentage of visitors to the US on tourist visas stay longer than they’re allowed, we will effectively
shut down the Canadian border. This is bad government, and it introduces exit controls rivalling what the Warsaw Pact
countries concocted pre-1989. It’s also a breach of contract with the Canadians, and completely unnecessary. The US and Canada share information on who is
crossing the border. When you enter Canada and the agent takes your passport, that information is transmitted to the US, and vice-versa. We
don’t need to
construct a new infrastructure and biometric testing to secure the Canadian border. When did we
abandon that careful balance between security and liberty? This proposal is completely pointless. It
adds an unduly restrictive anti-immigrant act to our grand security theater . As I argued in this article, we
should be making our border with Canada work smarter and better. Restricting the market for labor, goods, and services is silly,
and there are ways to free up cross-border traffic while addressing security issues. Requiring every occupant of every IKEA-bound and
Galleria-bound vehicle to provide fingerprints or an iris scan upon exit from the United States is pointless,

redundant, theater , expensive, and would reverse and devastate WNY’s fragile and tentative
economic recovery. I can understand how some throwback fascist southern xenophobe might decide that exit visas or fingerprinting might be a great idea
for the Canadian border, but we’re talking here about New York congressmen who should know better than to destroy their own districts. The text of the bill where
Congressional Republicans seek to ruin the western New York economy is here. To call it a disgrace is a collossal understatement, and the only one who gets it is
Congressman Brian Higgins. Your liberty and wallet are under Republican attack.

Biometrics are only useful for the illusion created by “security theatre,” which is
used to justify racist state actions.
Magnet ’11 [Shoshana Ameille Magnet, phD, Associate Professor at Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at
the University of Ottwa, “When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity”, Published in 2011
in London]

I also examined the ways that the

representation of biometrics allowed for forms of state action that would not
have been possible without these new identification technologies. It would have been impossible to
install signs at border security locations in a post-9 / 11 world requiring different security clearance entry
points for "Caucasians," "Asian Americans," and "African Americans." It was easily possible,
however, to install biometric iris scanners. Using biometric technologies to perform mechanical
objectivity, we could encode into the technologies themselves assumptions about the usefulness Of
 Jaguar Debate 142

racial categories, while obscuring that a form Of racial profiling was in fact occurring. Biometrics
became useful as a form of what the security technologist Bruce Schneier (2006) has termed " security theatre ," or what the border
theorists Peter Andreas and Thomas J. Biersteker (2003) call a "politically successful policy failure." Regardless of how
often the technologies broke down, worked differentially depending on race and gender, or cost
rather than saved the state money, biometrics were used to suggest that something was happening .
Thus even when biometric technologies failed, they also succeeded . Whether they were used to assert

that the state was get- ting tough on crime, welfare, or terrorism, biometric technologies were
offered up as proof that public-private partnerships were working for the public good, whatever
the particular good of the moment might be. Studying biometric technologies offers a window into
state-making in the age Of security, including the symbiotic relationship between private enterprise and the state, the increase in information
sharing and surveillance, the resurgence of biological racialism, the rise of the prison industrial complex, the
criminalization of poverty, and the mutually constitutive relationship between science fiction and real life.

Security theatre creates cognitive biases that makes people less likely to understand
the risks associated with reality, increasing the possibility for an actual attack.
Schneier ’11 [Bruce Schneier is a Harvard professor, an American cryptographer, computer security and
privacy specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and
cryptography, “The Security Mirage”, https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier, TED Talk from Bruce Schneier,
Transcribed by TED Talks]

Now there
are several biases in risk perception. A lot of good experiments in this. And you can see certain biases that
come up again and again. So I'll give you four. We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and
downplay common risks -- so flying versus driving. The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar.
One example would be, people fear kidnapping by strangers when the data supports kidnapping by relatives is much more common. This is for children. Third,
personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks -- so Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name. And
the fourth is people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in
situations they don't control. So once you take up skydiving or smoking, you downplay the risks. If a risk is thrust upon you --
terrorism was a good example -- you'll overplay it because you don't feel like it's in your control.
There are a bunch of other of these biases, these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions.
There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something
by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must
be a lot of tigers around. You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around. This works until you invent newspapers. Because what newspapers do is
they repeat again and again rare risks. I tell people, if it's in the news, don't worry about it. Because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.
(Laughter) When
something is so common, it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- those
are the risks you worry about. We're also a species of storytellers. We respond to stories more than data. And there's
some basic innumeracy going on. I mean, the joke "One, Two, Three, Many" is kind of right. We're really good at small numbers. One mango, two mangoes, three
mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes -- it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot. So one half, one quarter, one fifth -- we're good at that. One in a
million, one in a billion -- they're both almost never. So we
have trouble with the risks that aren't very common. And
what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality. And the result is that
feeling and reality get out of whack, they get different. Now you either have a feeling -- you feel more
secure than you are. There's a false sense of security . Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity. I write a lot about
" security theater ," which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything .
There's no real word for stuff that makes us secure, but doesn't make us feel secure. Maybe it's what the CIA's supposed to do for us. So back to economics. If
economics, if
the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security,
then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives are to make people feel secure .
And there are two ways to do this. One, you can make people actually secure and hope they notice. Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't
notice. So what makes people notice? Well a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work. But if
you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality. Enough real world examples
helps. Now we all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a
 Jaguar Debate 143

feeling about it that basically matches reality. Security theater's exposed when it's obvious that it's
not working properly . Okay, so what makes people not notice? Well, a poor understanding. If you don't understand the risks,
you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't
match reality . Not enough examples. There's an inherent problem with low probability events. If, for example, terrorism almost
never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures . This is why you keep
sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great. There aren't enough examples of failures. Also , feelings that are clouding

the issues -- the cognitive biases I talked about earlier, fears, folk beliefs, basically an inadequate
model of reality.

Security theatre makes people feel safe when they aren’t, wasting money and
leaving the public open to terrorism.
Schneier ’09 [Bruce Schneier is a Harvard professor, an American cryptographer, computer security and
privacy specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and
cryptography, “Beyond Security Theater”, New Internationalist, November 2009]

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay
between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly
make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something

doesn't make any sense . Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event: we
confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on aeroplanes. But it's not the target and
tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if
we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning. If we spend billions defending our rail
systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we
concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide
explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what
they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in
their tactics or targets. Our penchant for movie plots blinds us to the broader threats. And security theater consumes resources
that could better be spent elsewhere . Any terrorist attack is a series of events: something like planning, recruiting,
funding, practising, executing, aftermath. Our most effective defences are at the beginning and end of that process --
intelligence, investigation, and emergency response -- and least effective when they require us to
guess the plot correctly. By intelligence and investigation, I don't mean the broad data-mining or
eavesdropping systems that have been proposed and in some cases implemented -- those are also movie-plot
stories without much basis in actual effectiveness -- but instead the traditional "follow the evidence" type of
investigation that has worked for decades. Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are
largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic
translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist
attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include
expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security
measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling. The arrest of
the "liquid bombers" in London is an example: they were caught through old-fashioned intelligence and police work. Their choice of target (aeroplanes) and tactic
(liquid explosives) didn't matter; they would have been arrested regardless. But even as we do all of this we cannot neglect the feeling of security, because it's how we
collectively overcome the psychological damage that terrorism causes. It's
not security theater we need, it's direct appeals to
our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of
reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability.
 Jaguar Debate 144

Biometrics Fail
No Link - Biometric technologies are ineffective, easy to trick, and won’t stop any
terrorist attacks.
Mann ’05 [Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics. His 1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus won the National Academies Communication Award for best
book of the year, "Reliance on Technology May Make America Less Secure from Terrorism", Homeland Security,
Greenhaven Press, 2005]

The potential for subtractive failure, different and more troublesome, is raised by recent calls to deploy biometric
identification tools across the nation. Biometrics—"the only way to prevent identity fraud," according to the former senator Alan K.
Simpson, of Wyoming—identifies people by precisely measuring their physical characteristics and matching
them up against a database. The photographs on driver's licenses are an early example, but engineers have developed many
high-tech alternatives, some of them already mentioned: fingerprint readers, voiceprint recorders,
retina or iris scanners, face-recognition devices, hand-geometry assayers, even signature-geometry
analyzers, which register pen pressure and writing speed as well as the appearance of a signature.
Appealingly, biometrics lets people be their own ID cards—no more passwords to forget! Unhappily, biometric measures are often
implemented poorly. This past spring [2002] three reporters at c't, a German digital-culture magazine, tested a
face-recognition system, an iris scanner, and nine fingerprint readers. All proved easy to outsmart.
Even at the highest security setting, Cognitec's FaceVACS-Logon could be fooled by showing the sensor a short digital movie of someone known to the system—the
president of a company, say—on a laptop screen. To beat Panasonic's Authenticam iris scanner, the German journalists photographed an authorized user, took the
photo and created a detailed, life-size image of his eyes, cut out the pupils, and held the image up before their faces like a mask. The scanner read the iris, detected the
presence of a human pupil—and accepted the imposture. Many
of the fingerprint readers could be tricked simply by
breathing on them, reactivating the last user's fingerprint. Beating the more sophisticated Identix
Bio-Touch fingerprint reader required a trip to a hobby shop. The journalists used graphite powder to dust the latent
fingerprint—the kind left on glass—of a previous, authorized user; picked up the image on adhesive tape; and pressed the tape on the reader. The Identix reader, too,
was fooled. Not all biometric devices are so poorly put together, of course. But all of them fail badly. Consider the
legislation introduced in May [2002] by Congressmen Jim Moran and Tom Davis, both of Virginia, that would mandate biometric data chips in driver's licenses—a
sweeping, nationwide data-collection program, in essence....1 Although Moran and Davis tied their proposal to the need for tighter security after [the 9/11] attacks,
they also contended that the nation could combat fraud by using smart licenses with bank, credit, and Social Security cards, and for voter registration and airport
identification. Maybe so, Schneier says. "But think about screw-ups, because the system will screw up." Smart
cards that store non-biometric
data have been routinely cracked in the past, often with inexpensive oscilloscope-like devices that detect
and interpret the timing and power fluctuations as the chip operates. An even cheaper method, announced in May [2002] by two Cambridge security researchers,
requires only a bright light, a standard microscope, and duct tape. Biometric ID cards are equally vulnerable. Indeed, as a recent National
Research Council study points out, the extra security supposedly provided by biometric ID cards will raise the
economic incentive to counterfeit or steal them, with potentially disastrous consequences to the
victims. "Okay, somebody steals your thumbprint," Schneier says. "Because we've centralized all the
functions, the thief can tap your credit, open your medical records, start your car, any number of
things. Now what do you do? With a credit card, the bank can issue you a new card with a new
number. But this is your thumb—you can't get a new one." The consequences of identity fraud might be offset if biometric
licenses and visas helped to prevent terrorism. Yet smart cards would not have stopped the terrorists who attacked the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. According to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], all
the hijackers seem to have been who they said they were; their intentions, not their identities, were
the issue. Each entered the country with a valid visa, and each had a photo ID in his real name (some
obtained their IDs fraudulently, but the fakes correctly identified them). "What problem is being solved here?" Schneier asks. Good security is
built in overlapping, cross-checking layers, to slow down attacks; it reacts limberly to the unexpected. Its most important components are almost always human.
"Governments have been relying on intelligent, trained guards for centuries ," Schneier says. "They spot
people doing bad things and then use laws to arrest them. All in all, I have to say, it's not a bad
system
 Jaguar Debate 145

Refugees Link Defense

None of the terrorists were refugees or snuck in through the refugee crisis. Every
one was a radicalized European national.
Abrams 11/19 [Abigail Abrams is a breaking news reporter covering politics. She is originally from St. Louis,
Missouri and has previously reported for FiveThirtyEight and TIME, among others., “Paris Attack 2015: Named
Terrorists All European Nationals, Not Syrian Refugees”, 11/19/15, International Business Times]

In the days since the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday, many have made the claim the large
number of refugees coming from Syria has allowed terrorists to sneak into European countries such as France,
Germany and Belgium. These fears were exacerbated when a Syrian passport was found near the body of one of the suicide bombers. However, as more
information has come out about the attackers involved in Friday’s events, the perpetrators identified so
far all have been European Union nationals , EU officials said. This further complicates the international discussion around Syrian
refugees, as several countries have already taken steps to close their borders following the Paris terror attacks, and politicians in the United States are calling for a
“pause” in Syrian immigration as well. The Syrian passport found near the bomber at the Stade de France said it
belonged to Ahmad al-Mohammad, 25, and the Greek government confirmed someone by that name came to Greece in October before
crossing into Serbia. But there have been concerns it was fake, and the Independent reported French officials said it may have been

“planted” by the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, to take
advantage of the refugee crisis. The Paris prosecutor’s office announced Thursday Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the man suspected of being the
mastermind of the Paris attacks, was killed in a raid Wednesday on a building in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. Abaaoud, who is of Moroccan descent, grew up in
the Molenbeek suburb of Brussels, and is believed to have had close ties to the senior leadership of ISIS. While
several of the assailants had
been to Syria, the majority have been identified as French or Belgian nationals. The Independent
published Wednesday a list of the attackers with their nationalities. None of them was a refugee
from Syria.

The refugees fleeing countries like Syria are fleeing from the same kind of terrorists
that carried out the attack in Paris. To mix these two categories is to give in to
cognitive biases and fear.
Eleftheriou-Smith 11/16 [Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, Paris terror attacks: Jean Claude Juncker warns
European leaders 'do not mix up terrorists with refugees', The Independent, November 15, 2015, Loulla-Mae
Eleftheriou-Smith is a freelance reporter. She was nominated for business journalist of the year at the Press Gazette
British Journalist Awards 2012 and her name is so long that she has a double-decker byline in print. ]

As countries across Europe observe a minute’s silence for the 129 people killed in the brutal attack
on Paris, the president of the European Commission has issued a stark warning to member states
seeking to use the tragedy claimed by Isis as a reason to question their intake of refugees – many of
whom are fleeing the same militants operating in their home countries . Speaking at a news conference at the G20
summit in Turkey, Jean Claude Juncker said: “We should not mix the different categories of people coming to Europe.
“Those who organised these attacks and those that perpetrated them are exactly those that the
refugees are fleeing and not the opposite,” he said. Right-wing European politicians have highlighted
the discovery of a Syrian passport near the body of one of the suicide bombers and that the holder of the document, Ahmed Almuhamed, had
entered the EU in a group of 69 refugees after their boat sank off the Greek Island of Leros last month as a cause for concern. But intelligence sources
have thrown doubt on whether the passport was real or not, while French officials have stated there
is no proof that the bomber himself was Mr Almuhamed. Mr Juncker made it clear that “the one responsible for
the attacks in Paris… he is a criminal and not a refugee and not an asylum seeker,” and told those
seeking to change the migration agenda that has already been adopted in Europe not to “give in” to these basic
reactions following Friday night’s attack. More than 800,000 refugees and asylum seekers are expected to have entered Germany this year alone, mostly fleeing
war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, while in September European members agreed to a plan to see 120,000 refugees resettled from Italy and Greece across
 Jaguar Debate 146

the 28-nation bloc. In Poland, the new ruling party has been quick to voice its opposition to taking in its previously agreed quota of refugees since the Paris attacks,
which stood at 4,500, and has demanded security guarantees

Refugees from Syria and countries like it are the victims of violence, not the
perpetrators.
Benson 11/15 [Thor Benson, “Why It's Disgraceful to Blame Refugees for the Attacks in Paris” November 15,
2015, ATTN, Thor Benson is a traveling writer based in Los Angeles, California. He regularly contributes to ATTN,
and his writing has also been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, Rolling Stone, Vice, The Verge, and elsewhere.]

With the news updating every moment, people around the world trying to put together the pieces of what happened
in Paris Friday. Like the Charlie Hebdo attacks before it, people are looking for an explanation while they still absorb the reports. We
still do not know exactly who is behind these deadly attacks, which at the time of publishing have left at least 127 dead,
according to Reuters. Yet some on Twitter are already looking for someone or something to blame: "It's Islam!" "It's
the refugees!" The last one will certainly have an impact in the days and weeks to come. Thousands of refugees have died trying
to get to Europe from Syria. Bodies wash up on the Mediterranean shores. These people are trying
to escape poverty, radical terrorism and repressive regimes, but we too often close the door on them
or call them by disparaging names. The refugees are victims of extreme ideologies , and they are
trying to get to a safer place. It is not right to blame the victims of violence for the existence of
violence, and doing so creates the sort of cultural divisions that often breeds violence. Any claim
that the refugee situation allows bad people to fly in under the radar assumes they couldn't find an
alternate way there in the first place, when history shows they can.
 Jaguar Debate 147

AT Big Data DA
 Jaguar Debate 148

Solvency Defense
Big Data does not solve any impacts.
Tom Siegfried, managing editor of Science News, “Why Big Data is bad for science”, November
2013, https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/why-big-data-bad-science
“Big Data,” after all, is
If Star Trek: The Next Generation were to return to TV in the 21st century, Lt. Commander Data’s nickname would be “Big.”
the biggest buzzword of the new millennium. It’s everywhere, from genomics, biomics and a bunch
of other –omics to the NSA’s database on writers who mention NSA in their blogs. Social networks, financial
networks, ecological networks all contain vast amounts of data that no longer overwhelm computer hard drive storage capabilities. Scientists are now swimming in a
superocean of endless information, fulfilling their wildest dreams of data nirvana. What a nightmare. You see, scientists usually celebrate the availability of a lot of
data. Most of them have been extolling all the research opportunities that massive databases offer.
But perhaps that’s because everybody isn’t seeing the big data picture. Here and there you can find
warnings from some experts that Big Data has its downsides. “Scientific advances are becoming
more and more data-driven,” write statistician Jianqing Fan of Princeton University and
colleagues. “The massive amounts of … data bring both opportunities and new challenges to data analysis.” For one thing, huge datasets
are seductive. They invite aggressive analyses with the hope of extracting prizewinning scientific findings. But sometimes Big Data In means Bad Data Out.
Wringing intelligent insights from Big Data poses formidable challenges for computer science,
statistical inference methods and even the scientific method itself. Computer scientists, of course,
have made the accumulation of all this big data possible by developing exceptional computing
power and information storage technologies. But collecting data and storing information is not the
same as understanding it. Figuring out what Big Data means isn’t the same as interpreting little
data, just as understanding flocking behavior in birds doesn’t explain the squawks of a lone seagull.
Standard statistical tests and computing procedures for drawing scientific inferences were designed to analyze small samples taken from large populations. But Big
Data provides extremely large samples that sometimes include all or most of a population. The
magnitude of the task can pose problems for implementing computing processes to do the tests.
“Many statistical procedures either have unknown runtimes or runtimes that render the procedure
unusable on large-scale data,” writes Michael Jordan of the University of California, Berkeley. “Faced with this situation,
gatherers of large-scale data are often forced to turn to ad hoc procedures that … may have poor or
even disastrous statistical properties.” Sounds bad. But it gets worse. Not only do Big Data samples take more time to analyze, they also
typically contain lots of different information about every individual that gets sampled — which means, in statistics-speak, they are “high dimensional.” More
dimensions raises the risk of finding spurious correlations — apparently important links that are actually just flukes.

Importance of big data is hype; small data is of greater importance.

Mike Kavis, Forbes’ Expert on the Cloud Computing Industry, “Forget Big Data- Small Data is Driving
the Internet of Things”, February 25, 2015,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikekavis/2015/02/25/forget-big-data-small-data-is-driving-the-internet-of-
things/
Despite what some may think, big data is not a requirement for all IoT use cases. In many instances,
knowing the current state of a handful of attributes is all that is required to trigger a desired event.
Are the patient’s blood sugar levels too high? Are the containers in the refrigerated truck at the
optimal temperature? Does the soil have the right mixture of nutrients? Is the valve leaking?
Optimizing these business processes can save companies millions of dollars through the analysis of
relatively small datasets. Small data knows what a tracked object is doing. If you want to understand why the object is doing that, then big data is what
you seek. So, the next time someone tells you they are embarking on an IoT initiative, don’t assume that
they are also embarking on a big data project.
 Jaguar Debate 149

Uniqueness
Big data is low and in decline already.
Woodie ’15 [Alex Woodie has written about IT as a technology journalist for more than a decade. He brings
extensive experience from the IBM midrange marketplace, including topics such as servers, ERP applications,
programming, databases, security, high availability, storage, business intelligence, cloud, and mobile enablement.,
March 6, 2015, “Big Data Job Market Unexpectedly Cooled in 2014”, datami]

It was time for a reality check. After sizzling for two to three years, the big data job market hit an unexpected
dip in the second half of 2014, according to a report from Foote Partners, which found the market values for 58 big-data
related skills declined by an average of about 5 percent. The big data decline began in the second
quarter of 2014, when organizations started paying less for certain skill sets, according to Foote, which tracks the
marketability of hundreds of IT skills in its “IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends Report.” “The problem that developed in 2014 is too
many employers have not been satisfied with the return on their sizable investments in big data
initiatives,” says David Foote, chief analyst and co-founder of Foote Partners. According to Foote’s survey of more than 200,000 IT workers in the U.S. and
Canada, pay premiums for 31 noncertified big data skills (such as Hadoop, MapReduce, Hbase, Hive, NoSQL, data mining, and base SAS) fell an average of 3 percent
in over the second half of the year, but still ended up slightly for the year, thanks to healthy gains from January to June. Pay
for 37 big data
certifications (such as those from Cloudera, MongoDB, Teradata, and others) grew more than 10 percent for the year, but lost some value as the
year went on. The drop came as a surprise, Foote says, but it should be a reality check about what it
takes to succeed with big data technologies. It takes more than possessing data, analytic tools, and skilled people to succeed–you also need
the right organizations structures in place to benefit from big data. “Holding back these [big data] returns have been mostly organizational and cultural barriers related
to transparency, data governance, and sharing of data enterprise wide,” Foote notes. “The fact is that there are barriers that don’t normally exist in companies with less
hierarchical management and decision-making structures. You can’t simply hire Hadoop experts from Google and Amazon and expect to replicate the big data
capabilities found at those companies.” You
could call it a market correction. The rapid onset of demand for people
with big data technologies easily outstripped supply over the past several years, which caused their
salaries to rise. People who have Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, and HBase skills found themselves able to command six-figure salaries. Meanwhile, full-
fledged data scientists–which the Harvard Business Review in 2012 famously labeled “the sexiest job of the 21st century“–could write their own tickets, and were
often the subject of bidding wars. The big data job market may have slowed a bit, but the overall trajectory for big data skills remains positive. Companies are taking a
more measured, long-term approach to their big data investments, Foote says, including doing more with the data and the personnel they already have. “We expect big
data skills market values to recover slowly over the next 12 to 24 months,” he says. “Big data capabilities are just too critical for staying competitive.”
 Jaguar Debate 150

Internal Link Turn

Big Data collection is too dangerous and vulnerable to theft to continue being
collected- aff solves privacy
EFF 14 (Apr. 8, 2014. EFF is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It is a non profit dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital sphere.
“Big Data in Private Sector and Public Sector Surveillance” EEF https://www.eff.org/files/2014/04/08/eff-big-data-comments.pdf //HS)

The collection and analysis of big data, which was a niche field within computer science just two
decades ago, has exploded into a $100 billion industry. 4 Big data is now used in sectors as diverse as
energy, medicine, advertising, and telecommunications. Because of the explosive growth of this
field, companies ranging from startups in Silicon Valley to established multi-national corporations are adopting the
mantra of "collect it all," in the belief that running a variety of analytics on big data will increase the value of their products or the
companies themselves. In many cases companies outsource the use of big data to intermediary entities known as data
brokers , which collect , analyze, and sell consumer information that can include highly personal
details like marital status, religion, political affiliation, tax status, and others . A website may have
an agreement with a data broker to better identify who their customers are so they can place more
effective ads — often in exchange for their customers' brows ing habits and demographic information.
Data brokers receive and aggregate consumer data from a variety of sources: transactional data from retailers and stores, loyalty cards,
direct responses and surveys, social media and website interactions, public rec ords, and more. 5 They then aggregate this
information across sources and use it to create highly detailed profiles about individuals — one 4
“Data, data everywhere.” The Economist, Feb. 25, 2010. https://web.archiv
e.org/web/20131207192955/http://www.economist.com/node/15557443. Last accessed March 28, 2014. 5 See Dixon, Pam. "What Information
Do Data Brokers Have on Consumers?" World Privacy Forum, December 18, 2013. Last accessed March 30, 2014. particular data broker
is said to have 1,500 data points on over 700 million individuals. 6 It's been revealed that these
highly detailed profiles include names like "Ethnic Second - City Strugglers," "Rural and Barely
Making It," and "Credit Crunched: City Families ," as well as sensitive lists such as police officers
and their home addresses; lists of rape victims; genetic disease sufferers; and Hispanic payday loan
responders. 7 The vast majority of information data brokers use to create these lists is data which consumers unintentionally expose in large
part because they simply do not know how or when they are being tracked , or what information is being collected. As a result the
information is almost perfectly asymmetric: brokers know a great deal about consumers, but most
consumers have no idea these parties actually even exist. This asymmetry is related to the first harm
consumers are exposed to as a result of private - sector big data usage, namely the significant power
imbalance between consumers and the companies wielding the data and analysis tools. For example, if a
company uses big data analysis to inform its hiring decisions (say by analyzing a database on the web browsing habits of potential employees
acquired from a data broker), would a rejected prospective employee learn why she was not offered a job, be able to see the data that led to the
decision or the algorithm that processed the data, or dispute the correctness of either? 8 In
general, the fact that people may be
treated differently based on data and algorithms that they know little about and have no recourse
for correcting creates elementary fairness and transparency problems . 9 A related problem results from the fact
that even if consumers are aware of what data they are providing about themselves and who they are providing it to, they frequently believe
wrongly that the law or a company's privacy policies block certain uses of that data or its dissemination. As explained by Chris Hoofnagle and
Jennifer King in their study of Californians' perceptions of online privacy: 6 See Brill, Julie. "Demanding transparency from data brokers." The
Washington Post, August 15, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/demanding - transparency - from - data -
brokers/2013/08/15/00609680 - 0382 - 11e3 - 9259 - e2aafe5a5f84_story.html. Last accessed March 30, 2014. 7 S ee Dixon, Pam. "What
Information Do Data Brokers Have on Consumers?" World Privacy Forum, December 18, 2013. Last accessed March 30, 2014. 8 One could
argue that it would be in a company's best interests to use data that is as accurate as possible.
However, a company's ultimate goal is to be as profitable as possible, and big data analysis is only
carried out to further that goal. No rational company would acquire better quality data when the
cost of doing so would be greater than the estimated returns. This exposes the fundamental
mismatch in incentives between companies (whose big data will only be as accurate as profitability
dictates) and individuals (who primarily care about whether the data about they themselves is
 Jaguar Debate 151

accurate). Even a competitive market might not be able to completely resolve this issue, since making
sure all the data is accurate 100% of the time will likely require human - intensive, and therefore costly, dispute/redress processes. 9 Dwork and
Mulligan, "It’s Not Privacy, and It’s Not Fair," 66 STAN. L. REV. ONLINE 35 (2013). Californians who shop online believe that privacy
policies prohibit third - party information sharing. A majority of Californians believes that privacy policies create the right to require a website to
delete personal information upon request, a general right to sue for damages, a right to be informed of security breaches, a right to assistance if id
entity theft occurs, and a right to access and correct data. 10 Additionally, users may not know to what extent data is shared with unknown third -
parties: an online project called "theDataMap" reflects this data - sharing landscape. 11 But even
a good understanding of the
legal and policy protections for data is insufficient to protect a consumer from harm, due in large
part to the next danger: loss of privacy due to individualized analysis and tracking by private -
sector use of big data. By “connecting the dots” between different, disparate datasets, or even by analyzing data
from the same dataset that on its face does not seem to have any connection, companies can infer characteristics about
people that they might not otherwise wish to be made public, or at least not wish to share with
certain third - parties (for example, the well - known Target pregnancy example). Very few consumers realize the power
of statistical analysis and other big data algorithms. Even if consumers are aware of what specific data they are sharing,
they may not understand what inferences could be made based on that data. The risk of abuse of the underlying datasets
remains. As the recent hack on Target's credit card systems demonstrates, even large, well -
financed companies can suffer from massive data breaches that put consumers' data in the hands of
a malicious third - party. 12 This danger is especially grave when companies collect and save all data
possible, regardless of its current value, with the idea that a profitable use might later emerge .
Unfortunately, the collection of data into more concentrated repositories creates a tempting target for
malicious agents. Additionally, , EFF has long been concerned that private - sector mass data accumulation strongly facilitates
government data accumulation given the many ways that companies can be induced or compelled to provide data to the government. Finally,
even if the above dangers are avoided, we emphasize that many "common sense" approaches to
preserving privacy and anonymity in big data do not actually accomplish their goals. Malicious
actors could use a variety of sophisticated statistical and information - theoretic 10 Hoofnagle, Chris Jay and
King, Jennifer, " What Californians Understand about Privacy Online." (September 3, 2008). Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1262130 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1262130 11 See h ttp://thedatamap.org/ 12 Elgin, Ben; Lawrence, Dune;
Matlack, Carol; Riley, Michael. “Missed Alarms and 40 Million Stolen Credit Card Numbers: How Target Blew It.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek ,
March 13, 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20140313132757/http://www .businessweek.com/articles/2014 - 03 - 13/target - missed - alarms -
in - epic - hack - of - credit - card - data. Last accessed March 29, 2014. algorithms
to extract identifiable data from what
appears to be an anonymized dataset. 13 This is especially true if the malicious agent has access to
individual datasets that might not pose a privacy risk on their own, but when combined tog ether
can be used to infer private information.

Researchers who claim Big Data has huge positive impacts are connecting
meaningless data- big data is a potential threat
John Phillips, Digital Editor with CNBC.com, “Why analyzing Big Data can be bad for business”,
June 4, 2014, http://www.cnbc.com/id/101644059
Big data – where every aspect of your life is being quantified in every way imaginable – may be a
term you are only just beginning to recognize. But get ready for another one: apophenia. In the movie "Silver Linings
Playbook," Robert DeNiro's character – a diehard Philadelphia Eagles fan – believes various random and unrelated factors such as the position of
the TV remote controls and whether or not his son watches the game with him could factor into whether his team wins or loses. While most
people would refer to this as superstition, others might call it apophenia – the experience of seeing
meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The phenomenon arises from a subconscious
tendency to seek out patterns – such as faces in clouds and hidden messages in music – because our brains are wired this way. And, it can
be bad for business, researchers say. "Big data tempts some researchers to believe that they can see
everything at a 30,000-foot view," Danah Boyd, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and Kate
Crawford, associate professor at the University of New South Wales wrote in a paper. "It is the kind of data that
encourages the practice of apophenia: seeing patterns where none actually exist, simply because
 Jaguar Debate 152

massive quantities of data can offer connections that radiate in all directions," the paper noted. Drawing
inaccurate conclusions from big data analysis could prove costly for companies in how it influences
decision making from advertising to management. One example of big data analysis gone awry was
Google, which developed Flu Trends in 2008 – a tool that geographically tracks searches for flu-
related words over time. The idea was that people showing flu symptoms would search specific
terms on Google to help self-diagnose and that these web searches could be used to create a real-
time map of flu outbreaks. While Google Flu Trends performed well for some time there was an
anomaly in December 2012. According to an article in Nature magazine, Google's flu-case estimates
were twice as high as those from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The cause?
Researchers suggested that widespread media coverage of the U.S. flu season may have boosted flu-
related searches, inflating the number of cases that Google's algorithm identified . A pharmacy using this
data to better decide on the appropriate inventory level of flu-related drugs could have easily overstocked on such drugs. "Brands are becoming
increasingly dependent upon data to manage their relationship with customers and to drive their businesses. Given this reliance, it's frankly pretty
scary how data-driven decisions often seem to be arrived at and acted upon in a relatively unquestioning way," Colin Strong, managing director at
GfK NOP business and technology told CNBC. "There will be very real commercial implications for companies
that don't stop and question how these decisions are being arrived at," he added. "Working with big
data is still subjective, and what it quantifies does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective
truth – particularly when considering messages from social media sites," Boyd and Crawford added in their paper.
 Jaguar Debate 153

AT Other Surveillance
 Jaguar Debate 154

Impacts outweigh
1. This only functions as a defensive argument. The gratuitous and structural
violence that we solve for by taking steps to solve anti-black and biopower
based violence is the root cause to the other contingent racism impacts in the
status quo.
2. Social death is the controlling impact of the round - Social death is gratuitous
violence, this is violence that is unwarranted, created through ontological
destruction. There is a qualitative ontological distinction between
CONTINGENT violence and GRATUITIOUS violence. We are controlling
the uniqueness of the impacts and control the FRAMING of all other impacts
Sexton ‘10 [“‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction” in Critical Sociology 36; 11. Jared Sexton,
Associate Professor of African-American studied and Critical Theory at the UC-Irvine]

To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land
and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is
unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved . More
simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the
‘social death’ under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the
‘natal alienation’ and ‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his
encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social Death:nI prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart
of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending
and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the
slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the
master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the
master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8) True even if elevated by
the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or the
political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World.4 The alienation and isolation of
the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and rendering
thereby the notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition,
canceling ties to the slave’s contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave, as Mannoni and
Fanon each note in their turn, is total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized,

whose status obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection
or dispersal of a class of things. Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’
discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal
obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever
of ‘reasoning … intent and rationality’ are [is]
recognized‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is,
‘the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis
added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of
culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori. The disqualification of black resistance
by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on
both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually existing slavery
cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their
themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation)or, later still,
the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and
renaissance).5 One of the defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black
suffering as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc
Wacquant calls its ‘functional surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently ,
‘the occult presence of racial
slavery’ continues to haunt our political imagination: ‘nowhere, but nevertheless
everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving’ (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and
 Jaguar Debate 155

Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the interminable terror of slavery, but we
are
still very much within the crisis of language – of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing –
that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery, precisely because it requires the
untenable demarcation of an historic end in Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death

knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system
are largely maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in
surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on, it
survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional life forged by the international movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment
(Davis 2003).But what if slavery does not die, as it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is
non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the psychic life of power? What if the
source of slavery’s longevity is not its
resilience in the face of opposition, but the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the
illegibility of its grammar? On this account, for those that bear the mark of slavery – the
trace of blackness – to speak is to sound off without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the
threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity to absent thepresence, or negate the will to presence, of
every claimto human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the
very fruitful notion of ‘fugitive justice’ that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue of Representations on ‘Redress’. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and
Stephen Best are posing the right question: ‘How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of
restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?’ (Hartman and Best 2005: 2)That is to say, they are thinking
about ‘the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition’, ‘the contemporary predicament of freedom’ (2005: 5, emphasis added). Yet,
the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life ‘lived in loss’ – spanning the split difference between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law
and justice, hope and resignation – relies nonetheless on an outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life.
Returning to our schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problématique of colonization and its imaginary
topography, indeed, the fact that it can imagine topographically at all.But, even if the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images
of place (and to do here does not imply that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both the fact of blackness and the lived
experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant registers, is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. ‘The language of race developed in
the modern period and in the context of the slave trade’ (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is our context and that context is the world, then this is the
principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such thing as a fugitive slave. To
be sure, Humans do
not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, modernity is, to a large
degree, marked by societies structured in dominance: [hetero]patriarchy and white
supremacy, settler colonialism and extra-territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and
genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet, for Wilderson, there is a
qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or dehumanization of
the masses of people ‘in Asia…in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of their land
and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in
part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that
structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated
and exchanged.

3. By taking a step, we provide a mechanism through which the whole system of

impacts can come crashing down. Ie: If we solve the case, we solve the alt
causes claims.
 Jaguar Debate 156

Other surveillance not harmful to refugees

1. These cards are not specific to instances of refugees, and thus are not alt
causes of the impacts.
2. Biometrics uniquely cause this violence.
U.S. fingerprints and biometrically surveys refugees stringently.
Worth 12/2 [Katie Worth is a 2015 graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Katie Worth is
FRONTLINE's inaugural FRONTLINE-Columbia Tow Journalism Fellow., 12/2/15, “Can Biometrics Solve the
Refugee Debate?”, PBS Frontline]

Of all the doors into the United States, the one that refugees must pass through is perhaps the
most closely guarded of all: The years-long application process involves long interviews, background checks and health screenings.
Refugees’ inked fingerprints are checked against databases maintained by the FBI, the
Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. New developments in
biometrics may add yet more steps to this process: An eyeball scan is likely to become protocol
within weeks, and Homeland Security is developing a quick-turnaround DNA test that can be
used in field offices. These technological advances are arriving just as the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe and last month’s deadly attack on Paris
has stirred a national debate over whether the U.S. should accept refugees from Syria. Already, more than two dozen U.S. governors have said they do not want
Syrian refugees to relocate into their states. And following the attack, a bipartisan majority in the House passed legislation that would require the Department of
Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI to each sign off on security clearances for every refugee applying for entry to the U.S.
from Iraq and Syria. But President Barack Obama has promised to veto the bill if it clears the Senate, touting as recently as last week the nation’s “intense
security checks, including biometric screening.” In all, more
than 4 million refugees have poured out of Iraq and
Syria due to the fighting in each country. Because many refugees flee their homes without
papers, or lose documentation in their shuffle through borders and camps, they can be difficult
to identify and track. Until recently, fingerprinting was the United Nations’ favored identification technique. That changed in October 2013, when
the U.N.’s refugee agency adopted iris scanners. Other than very young children, whose eyes are still evolving, and people with certain kinds of eye damage,
any individual can be identified in this way with tremendous accuracy and speed. In the last two years, the agency has scanned the eyeballs of more than 1.6
million refugees in nations across the Middle East and Europe, with the notable exception of Turkey, which still insists on fingerprints, said Larry Yungk, a
senior resettlement officer with the U.N. The U.N. now has a “fairly complete biometric database” cataloging the iris patterns and identity of the Syrians and
Iraqis who have fled their homelands, Yungk said. Using the scanners, the agency can track where and when refugees check into camps and offices. It also
deters fraud, confirming the identity of applicants for aid, services or relocation. In some countries, the U.N. has even made deals with banks to attach iris
scanners to ATMs, so that only those authorized for assistance can make withdrawals. While some
have worried about the security
and privacy implications of the massive trove of biometric data, Yungk said the system has several layers of security.
“The great benefit is the ability to confirm identity without relying on pieces of plastic or paper,” Yungk said. “The scans are quick, painless, and require less
technology and skill than you need for fingerprints.” Currently the
U.S. doesn’t use iris scanners to identify refugees — it
still uses fingerprints. But that will likely change. Before the Paris attacks, talks were already underway between the State
Department, DHS and the U.N. to share biometric data. Once the legal language is hammered out, U.S. agencies will have access to U.N. iris scans to verify the
identities and travel histories of refugee applicants. That could happen within weeks, Yungk said. Meanwhile, the
U.S. has been prepping
for another technological leap: so-called “rapid” DNA testing. DNA tests for refugees and other
immigrants are controversial because they can reveal deeply buried family secrets about
parentage — for example, if a child is the product of infidelity or rape. Critics also say they
impose a narrow, “nuclear” conception of family that is tone-deaf to the reality of refugee life,
where people often care for unrelated children whose parents may be dead or missing. The U.N.
has said DNA testing should be used as a last resort for refugees. Nonetheless, DNA testing has
been embraced by U.S. refugee and immigration agencies to determine whether people within a
family are indeed genetically related, with the aim of stymying fraud and child trafficking. Traditional DNA testing can be expensive
and take weeks or months to process at a lab. So U.S. authorities have been funding the development of rapid DNA
systems — miniature DNA labs about the size of a microwave, that can be deployed in the field and operated by people with little training, and at low cost.
Their development was largely funded by a $15 million grant from the DOD, DHS and the FBI.
Each agency has its own plans for the technology; Homeland Security has paid for the
development of software specifically tailored for use in refugee camps . The machines would test DNA off of a
 Jaguar Debate 157

buccal swab – a Q-tip rubbed on the inside of the mouth. The goal, said Christopher Miles, biometrics program manager for Homeland Security, is for the final
product to cost about $100 per DNA test, to take less than 90 minutes, and to prove kinship with a 99.5 percent accuracy. The machines are “ruggedized,” so
they do not have to be handled delicately — they can be dropped up to a foot in their case with no damage, he said. The software does not produce typical DNA
results that must be read by a technician. Instead, it simply confirms whether there is direct kinship between two individuals. The technology was supposed to
have been launched in 2014, but ran into delays. An initial pilot program is expected to deploy in refugee camps in
Thailand early in 2016; another may take place in Turkey, where the tests would be conducted on refugees from Iraq and Syria. Even if such new technologies
fail to gain widespread adoption, refugees
admitted into the U.S. are already the most stringently screened of
any visitor group in the country, according to Yungk. Yungk said he’s somewhat baffled by the
overwhelming concern about security risks associated with refugees coming to America, since
refugees are already rigorously screened. The U.N. Refugee Agency reports that as of mid-2014 there were more than 13 million
refugees around the world. That year, the U.S. allowed 70,000 of them, or around half a percent, to enter the country. The process takes about two years, he
noted, and entails detailed interviews, three levels of background checks, three fingerprint screenings, contagious disease screening, and cultural orientation.
And Iraqisand Syrians already must leap through hoops that their counterparts elsewhere do
not: Their cases are reviewed at U.S. immigration headquarters, and in some cases are referred
for additional review by DHS. “I’ve really never met a Homeland Security person who takes national security lightly — that’s not the first
description that comes to mind,” Yungk said. “We don’t fault people from worrying about security, but at the same time this is a highly secure process.”
 Jaguar Debate 158

Better than any alternative

Ultimately, we solve better, by addressing root causes to these impacts.
The status quo fails, which the neg is advocating for. Either that, or their advocacy
fails in the exact same ways as ours.
 Jaguar Debate 159

AT Corporate Surveillance
 Jaguar Debate 160

Impacts outweigh
1. This only functions as a defensive argument. The gratuitous and structural
violence that we solve for by taking steps to solve anti-black and biopower
based violence is the root cause to the other contingent racism impacts in the
status quo.
2. Social death is the controlling impact of the round - Social death is gratuitous
violence, this is violence that is unwarranted, created through ontological
destruction. There is a qualitative ontological distinction between
CONTINGENT violence and GRATUITIOUS violence. We are controlling
the uniqueness of the impacts and control the FRAMING of all other impacts
Sexton ‘10 [“‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction” in Critical Sociology 36; 11. Jared Sexton,
Associate Professor of African-American studied and Critical Theory at the UC-Irvine]

To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land
and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is
unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved . More
simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the
‘social death’ under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the
‘natal alienation’ and ‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his
encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social Death:nI prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart
of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending
and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the
slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the
master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the
master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8) True even if elevated by
the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or the
political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World.4 The alienation and isolation of
the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and rendering
thereby the notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition,
canceling ties to the slave’s contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave, as Mannoni and
Fanon each note in their turn, is total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized,

whose status obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection
or dispersal of a class of things. Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’
discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal
obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever
of ‘reasoning … intent and rationality’ are [is]
recognized‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is,
‘the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis
added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of
culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori. The disqualification of black resistance
by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on
both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually existing slavery
cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their
themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation)or, later still,
the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and
renaissance).5 One of the defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black
suffering as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc
Wacquant calls its ‘functional surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently ,
‘the occult presence of racial
slavery’ continues to haunt our political imagination: ‘nowhere, but nevertheless
everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving’ (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and
 Jaguar Debate 161

Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the interminable terror of slavery, but we
are
still very much within the crisis of language – of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing –
that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery, precisely because it requires the
untenable demarcation of an historic end in Emancipation. The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death

knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system
are largely maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in
surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on, it
survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional life forged by the international movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment
(Davis 2003).But what if slavery does not die, as it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is
non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the psychic life of power? What if the
source of slavery’s longevity is not its
resilience in the face of opposition, but the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the
illegibility of its grammar? On this account, for those that bear the mark of slavery – the
trace of blackness – to speak is to sound off without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the
threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity to absent thepresence, or negate the will to presence, of
every claimto human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the
very fruitful notion of ‘fugitive justice’ that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue of Representations on ‘Redress’. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and
Stephen Best are posing the right question: ‘How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of
restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?’ (Hartman and Best 2005: 2)That is to say, they are thinking
about ‘the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition’, ‘the contemporary predicament of freedom’ (2005: 5, emphasis added). Yet,
the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life ‘lived in loss’ – spanning the split difference between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law
and justice, hope and resignation – relies nonetheless on an outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life.
Returning to our schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problématique of colonization and its imaginary
topography, indeed, the fact that it can imagine topographically at all.But, even if the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images
of place (and to do here does not imply that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both the fact of blackness and the lived
experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant registers, is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. ‘The language of race developed in
the modern period and in the context of the slave trade’ (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is our context and that context is the world, then this is the
principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such thing as a fugitive slave. To
be sure, Humans do
not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, modernity is, to a large
degree, marked by societies structured in dominance: [hetero]patriarchy and white
supremacy, settler colonialism and extra-territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and
genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet, for Wilderson, there is a
qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or dehumanization of
the masses of people ‘in Asia…in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of their land
and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in
part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that
structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated
and exchanged.

3. By taking a step, we provide a mechanism through which the whole system of

impacts can come crashing down. Ie: If we solve the case, we solve the alt
causes claims.
 Jaguar Debate 162

Corporates don’t survey refugees

Private sector biometrics are used to make people’s live easier. They are completely
voluntary since they are dependent on the user’s choice. These are mainly used to
unlock iphones, replace passports, make social media easier, and advertise for
companies, not causing structural violence impacts.
Walker ’15 [Elizabeth M. Walker, Editor-in-Chief, Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law
Journal, Volume XXVI; J.D. Candidate, 2016, Fordham University School of Law; B.S., 2005, Boston College,
“Biometric Boom: How the Private Sector Commodifies Human Characteristics”, Fordham Intellectual Property,
Media and Entertainment Law Journal]

The government was an early adopter of biometric technology, and its predominant use of the technology is for security
purposes. The Department of Homeland Security uses fingerprint scanning and facial-recognition

technology to record the identities of visitors to the United States .38 Similarly, many states require
fingerprint scanning to confirm an individual’s identity before distributing welfare or unemployment
benefits.39 Some public schools have even begun allowing children to pay for lunch using their finger - or
handprint.40 However, the private sector has also begun implementing biometric systems. Without any restrictions on what
can be collected or how it may be used, industry is rapidly expanding the prevalence of biometric systems. Security
is the most common purpose for which the private sector uses biometrics. Examples include Apple’s
Touch ID, which allows users to unlock their phones and tablets with a fingerprint;41 amusement
parks, including Disney World, require patrons to scan their fingerprints to use passes;42 some ATMs are equipped with fingerprint
scanners;43 MasterCard announced a fingerprint-enabled credit card;44 and some hospitals are scanning patient hands in order to retrieve the correct
medical records.45 Recently, banks have begun storing and processing voice samples of customers calling
about their accounts to create a “voiceprint.”46 The bank will use the voiceprint to verify the customer’s identity
and prevent fraudsters from gaining access to an account over the telephone.47 Companies are also
beginning to explore other purposes for biometric technology. A recent trend in biometric use is to
provide a value-add service based on individuals’ characteristics. Facebook launched a feature that
“tagged” individuals in uploaded images.48 The site collected and stored biometric information from
millions of users and utilized facial recognition technology to automatically identify the
individuals.49 Another example of a value-add use of biometrics is Google Audio History.50 This opt-
in service retains recordings of voice searches or commands so the company can learn the sound of
an individual’s voice and provide better results when speech recognition products are used. Finally,
the private sector is also using biometrics for advertising. Digital billboards can use facial recognition to identify a viewer’s
gender, age, and ethnicity.52 For example, an advertising campaign in London only displayed advertisements to women who looked at the billboard.53 The
ability to use biometrics for advertising is an emerging field, with some companies exploring how they can use social media
photographs to identify an individual in the real world.54 Use of biometrics has become much more expansive in recent months, and it is likely that the private sector
will devise further uses for biometrics. Such pervasive and widespread uses reduce the effectiveness of human attributes for security purposes, exposing the data to
more system vulnerabilities. It also degrades the value of the characteristics as security identifiers. Suddenly the private sector values fingerprints, eyes, voices, and
faces more significantly than the individuals do.
 Jaguar Debate 163

Better than alt

Ultimately, we solve better, by addressing root causes to these impacts.
The status quo fails, which the neg is advocating for. Either that, or their advocacy
fails in the exact same ways as ours.
 Jaguar Debate 164

AT Biometric Development Good

 Jaguar Debate 165

Corporate not government

These cards are about corporate biometrics, not government. There is no
substantial internal link between curtailing government biometrics causing a
curtailment in corporate biometrics.
 Jaguar Debate 166

Impacts outweigh
Anti-blackness is the root cause.
1. Social death is the controlling impact of the round - Social death is gratuitous
violence, this is violence that is unwarranted, created through ontological
destruction. There is a qualitative ontological distinction between
CONTINGENT violence and GRATUITIOUS violence. We are controlling
the uniqueness of the impacts and control the FRAMING of all other impacts
Sexton ‘10 [“‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction” in Critical Sociology 36; 11. Jared Sexton,
Associate Professor of African-American studied and Critical Theory at the UC-Irvine]

To suffer the loss of political sovereignty, the exploitation of labor, the dispossession of land
and resources is deplorable; yet, we might say in this light that to suffer colonization is
unenviable unless one is enslaved. One may not be free, but one is at least not enslaved . More
simply, we might say of the colonized: you may lose your motherland, but you will not ‘lose your mother’ (Hartman 2007). The latter condition, the
‘social death’ under which kinship is denied entirely by the force of law, is reserved for the
‘natal alienation’ and ‘genealogical isolation’ characterizing slavery. Here is Orlando Patterson, from his
encyclopedic 1982 Slavery and Social Death:nI prefer the term ‘natal alienation’ because it goes directly to the heart
of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending
and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the
slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him [sic] by the
master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master. The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the
master wished. And this was true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. (Patterson 1982: 7–8) True even if elevated by
the income and formal education of the mythic American middle class, the celebrity of a Hollywood icon, or the
political position of the so-called Leader of the Free World.4 The alienation and isolation of
the slave is not only vertical, canceling ties to past and future generations and rendering
thereby the notion of ‘descendants of slaves’ as a strict oxymoron. It is also a horizontal prohibition,
canceling ties to the slave’s contemporaries as well. Reduced to a tool, the deracination of the slave, as Mannoni and
Fanon each note in their turn, is total, more fundamental even than the displacement of the colonized,

whose status obtains in a network of persecuted human relations rather than in a collection
or dispersal of a class of things. Crucially, this total deracination is strictly correlative to the ‘absolute submission mandated by [slave] law’
discussed rigorously in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: the slave estate is the most perfect example of the space of purely formal
obedience defining the jurisdictional field of sovereignty (Agamben 2000). Because the forced submission of the slave is absolute, any signs whatsoever
of ‘reasoning … intent and rationality’ are [is]
recognized‘solely in the context of criminal liability’. That is,
‘the slave’s will [is] acknowledged only as it [is] prohibited or punished’ (Hartman 1997: 82, emphasis
added). A criminal will, a criminal reasoning, a criminal intent, a criminal rationality: with these erstwhile human capacities construed as indices of
culpability before the law, even the potentiality of slave resistance is rendered illegitimate and illegible a priori. The disqualification of black resistance
by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on
both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually existing slavery
cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms. The latter must code itself as the apotheosis of the French and American revolutions (with their
themes of Judeo-Christian deliverance) or, later, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (with their themes of secular messianic transformation)or, later still,
the broad anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America of the mid-20th century (with their themes of indigenous reclamation and
renaissance).5 One of the defining features of contemporary political and intellectual culture remains this metaphoric transfer that appropriates black
suffering as the template for non-black grievances, while it misrecognizes the singularity of black struggles against racial slavery and what Loïc
Wacquant calls its ‘functional surrogates’ or what Hartman terms its ‘afterlife’. Put differently ,
‘the occult presence of racial
slavery’ continues to haunt our political imagination: ‘nowhere, but nevertheless
everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop arriving’ (Marriott 2007: xxi). Hartman’s notion of slavery’s afterlife and
Wacquant’s theorization of slavery’s functional surrogates are two productive recent attempts to name the interminable terror of slavery, but we are
still very much within the crisis of language – of thinking and feeling, seeing and hearing –
that slavery provokes. Both scholars challenge the optimistic idea of a residual ‘legacy’ of slavery, precisely because it requires the
 Jaguar Debate 167

The relations of slavery live on, Hartman might say, after the death
untenable demarcation of an historic end in Emancipation.

knell of formal abolition, mutating into ‘the burdened individuality of freedom’. The functions of the chattel system
are largely maintained, Wacquant might say, despite the efforts of Reconstruction, preserved in
surrogate institutional form under Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. Slavery lives on, it
survives, despite the grand attempts on its institutional life forged by the international movements against slavery, segregation and mass imprisonment
(Davis 2003).But what if slavery does not die, as it were, because it is immortal, but rather because it is
non-mortal, because it has never lived, at least not in the psychic life of power? What if the
source of slavery’s longevity is not its
resilience in the face of opposition, but the obscurity of its existence? Not the accumulation of its political capital, but the
illegibility of its grammar? On this account, for those that bear the mark of slavery – the
trace of blackness – to speak is to sound off without foundation, to appear as a ghost on the
threshold of the visible world, a spook retaining (only) the negative capacity to absent thepresence, or negate the will to presence, of
every claimto human being, even perhaps the fugitive movement of stolen life explored masterfully by Fred Moten (2008). We might rethink as well the
very fruitful notion of ‘fugitive justice’ that shapes the prize-winning 2005 special issue of Representations on ‘Redress’. Co-editors Saidiya Hartman and
Stephen Best are posing the right question: ‘How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of
restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken, of repairing what was broken?’ (Hartman and Best 2005: 2)That is to say, they are thinking
about ‘the question of slavery in terms of the incomplete nature of abolition’, ‘the contemporary predicament of freedom’ (2005: 5, emphasis added). Yet,
the notion subsequently developed of a fugitive life ‘lived in loss’ – spanning the split difference between grievance and grief, remedy and redress, law
and justice, hope and resignation – relies nonetheless on an outside, however improbable or impossible, as the space of possibility, of movement, of life.
Returning to our schematization of Fanon, we can say that the outside is a concept embedded in the problématique of colonization and its imaginary
topography, indeed, the fact that it can imagine topographically at all.But, even if the freedom dreams of the black radical imagination do conjure images
of place (and to do here does not imply that one can in either sense of the latter word: able or permitted); what both the fact of blackness and the lived
experience of the black name for us, in their discrepant registers, is an anti-black world for which there is no outside. ‘The language of race developed in
the modern period and in the context of the slave trade’ (Hartman 2007: 5). And if that context is our context and that context is the world, then this is the
principal insight revealed by the contemporary predicament of freedom: there is no such thing as a fugitive slave. To
be sure, Humans do
not live under conditions of equality in the modern world. In fact, modernity is, to a large
degree, marked by societies structured in dominance: [hetero]patriarchy and white
supremacy, settler colonialism and extra-territorial conquest, imperialist warfare and
genocide, class struggle and the international division of labor. Yet, for Wilderson, there is a
qualitative difference, an ontological one, between the inferiorization or dehumanization of
the masses of people ‘in Asia…in America and the islands of the sea’, including the colonization of their land
and resources, the exploitation of their labor and even their extermination in whole or in
part, and the singular commodification of human being pursued under racial slavery, that
structure of gratuitous violence in which bodies are rendered as flesh to be accumulated
and exchanged.

2. Whiteness is the root cause of ableism – technologies of violence and

surveillance used against people with disabilities originated in Eurocentric
thought.
Smith ‘4 [Phil, Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council, “Whiteness, Normal Theory, and Disability
Studies”, Disability Studies Quarterly Spring 2004, Volume 24, No. 2, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/491/668]
This point, that ableism is created by those who define themselves as able-bodied, as normal, and that
it is a master status invisible to themselves, calls
out for the need to develop what might be called normal theory and
normal studies, similar to the development of whiteness theory and whiteness studies, that can unpack more fully
the ideology of ableism and expose normality as a scopic site for the subjugation of people labeled as having disabilities. It is also
likely, given the normative universalization of whiteness in modernist Western culture, that the
construction of whiteness is at the complex, multiple roots of both racisms and ableisms. This is
especially true given that eugenic science is at the heart of current special education,
psychology, and the system of services and supports for people with disabilities (Kliewer and
Drake 1998). Clearly, whiteness is intimately tied to modernist constructions of science (Kincheloe
1999). It would seem, then, that the projects of developing multiple, postmodern, normal studies may have as their subjects, at least in
part, the complex ways in which whiteness ideology creates ableisms. Kincheloe (1999) argues cogently, when discussing the
normative landscape of whiteness, that: This norm has traditionally involved a rejection of those who
 Jaguar Debate 168

did not meet whiteness' notion of reason emerging from the European Enlightenment.
Whiteness deployed reason – narrowly defined Eurocentric reason as a form of disciplinary power
that excludes those who do not meet its criteria for inclusion into the community of the
socio-politically enfranchised. Understanding such dynamics, those interested in the reconstruction of white identity can
engage in the post formal (a theoretical effort to redefine the Eurocentric notions of intelligence and reason by examining such
concepts in light of socio-psychological insights from a variety of non-western cultures [see Kincheloe and Steinberg 1993; Kincheloe
1995]) search for diverse expressions of reason. Such a project empowers white students seeking progressive identities to produce
knowledge about the process of White identity reconstruction, the redefinition of reason, the expansion of what is counted as a
manifestation of intelligence, and the phenomenological experience of challenging the boundaries of whiteness. (Paragraph 56) This
The normative
analysis seems critical in understanding the relationship of whiteness studies and disability studies.
disciplinary power of whiteness undergirding the rationality of Eurocentric culture and
thought segregates not only those defined as not-white from the terrains of equality, equity,
and justice, but also those defined as not-Able (body or mind). A project of inclusion that reinvents whiteness by
calculating freshly an ideology of diverse reasons, intelligences, and experiences will, of necessity, involve an exploration of the
cartography of abled Normality. A broad whiteness studies approach must shake hands with a broad disability studies approach if
either whiteness or ability is to be reconceptualized.
 Jaguar Debate 169

AT Biometrics Good – Blackness

 Jaguar Debate 170

Link Turn
This card misses the point. The authorities that were detaining the woman required
biometrics for her to be considered a ‘citizen’. This is actually another link to the
biopower advantage. The biometric technologies use in establishing citizenship is
what props up the modern biopolitical state, that’s Foucault 76 and Agamben ’95.
 Jaguar Debate 171

Biometrics Bad – Blackness

Biometric ordering has an inherent white gaze that seeks to map “truth” unto
bodies. Whiteness sets the barometer within biometric regimes through dialectics of
recognition
Browne 09 (Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics Simone Browne, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA Critical
Sociology 36(1) 131-150 2009)

The notion of a body made out of place, or made ontologically insecure, is useful when thinking
through the moments of contact enacted at the ‘institutional sites’ of international border crossings
and spaces of the internal borders of the state, such as the voting booth and other sites and moments where identification, and increasingly
biometric identification, is required to speak the ‘truth’ of and for muted bodies. These sites and
moments are productive of, and often necessitate ontological insecurity, where ‘the body is
surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty’ (Fanon 1967: 111). This atmosphere of certain
uncertainty is part of what Lewis Gordon refers to as ‘the problematic of a denied subjectivity’ (2004: 3).
On this, Gordon is worth quoting at length: Fanon’s insight, shared by Du Bois, is that there is no inner subjectivity, where there is no

being, where there is no one there, and where there is no link to another subjectivity as ward, as
guardian, or owner, then all is permitted. Since in fact there is an Other human being in the denied
relationship, evidenced by, say, antiblack racism, what this means is that there is a subjectivity that
is experiencing a world in which all is permitted against him or her. (2004: 3) For Gordon, this is a structured
violence where ‘all is permitted’ and where this structured violence is productive of and produced
by a certain white normativity. Meaning that whiteness is made normative, and in so being, raceless, or what David Theo Goldberg terms ‘racially
invisible’ (1997: 83). What Gordon insightfully terms the ‘notion of white prototypicality’ (2004: 4) is the enabling condition of the structured violence of ‘the dialectics of recognition’ (2004: 3). What I am suggesting here is that

this prototypical whiteness is one facet of the cultural and technological logic that informs many
instances of the practices of biometrics and the visual economy of recognition and verification that
accompany these practices. Practices here are taken to include research and development (R&D), applications, and governmental rationalization. Digital
epidermalization is the exercise of power cast by the disembodied gaze of certain surveillance
technologies (for example, identity card and e-passport verification machines) that can be employed to do the work of alienating the
subject by producing a ‘truth’ about the body and one’s identity (or identities) despite the subject’s
claims. To understand the practices of white prototypicality, I turn to some recent statements appearing in publications in biometrics R&D, as they are telling of industry concerns and specifications. For example, Nanavati et
al. note that in comparative testing with control groups, higher failure to enrol rates (FTE) appear with

those whose fingerprints are said to be unmeasurable. They state: Elderly users often have very faint fingerprints and may have poorer circulation than younger
users. Construction workers and artisans are more likely to have highly worn fingerprints, to the point where ridges are nearly nonexistent. Users of Pacific Rim/Asian descent may have faint fingerprint ridges – especially female

facial scan technology may produce

users. (2002: 36–7, emphasis mine). Could these systems be calibrated to allow for cutaneous gender detection? Further, Nanavati et al. note that

higher FTE rates for ‘very dark-skinned users’, not due to ‘lack of distinctive features, of course,
but to the quality of images provided to the facial-scan system by video cameras optimized for
lighter- skinned users’ (2002: 37).6 In this way, the technology privileges whiteness, or at least lightness, in its use
of lighting. This same logic of prototypical whiteness is seemingly present in earlier models of iris-scan technology that were based on 8-bit grayscale image capture, allowing for 256 shades of gray but leaving very dark
irises ‘clustered at one end of the spectrum’ (Nanavati et al. 2002: 37).7 The distribution of this spectrum’s 256 shades of gray is made possible only through the unambiguous black-white binary; the contrapuntal extremes that anchor
the spectrum leaving the dark matter clustered at one end. Such epidermal thinking is present in other research on facial recognition technology where ‘the facial feature quantities (spacing between eyes, turn up of the eyes, thickness
of mouth etc.) are classified’; it is suggested that systems ‘can search for faces with a certain feature, if the degree of the feature quantity is designated’ (Lao and Kawade 2004: 346). Here, the possibilities for digital epidermalization
are revealed.
 Jaguar Debate 172

AT Circumvention
 Jaguar Debate 173

No circumvention
No circumvention – bureaucratic forces and leaks
William Saletan 13, writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate and the author
of Bearing Right, The Taming of the Spook, 6/1/2013, The Slate,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/07/
nsa_history_how_bureaucrats_leaks_and_courts_tamed_government_surveillance.html ||RS
In January 2007, the President’s Surveillance Program officially ceased. At that point, according to the report,
“delivery of email and phone-call content to NSA from the major telecom companies ended.” In 2008, Congress passed the FISA Amendments
Act. That law, as the Guardian and other critics note, facilitated NSA surveillance. But it also mandated the NSA Inspector General’s report. In
2009, Obama took over the White House and began to tighten the oversight. Briefings were extended more widely to Congress. In 2011,
bulk collection of Internet metadata stopped. That doesn’t mean phone or Internet surveillance has
ended altogether. It hasn’t. It doesn’t mean such programs won’t be abused or that they’re sufficiently supervised. But it does
suggest two things. First, contrary to libertarian dogma, government surveillance doesn’t always
expand. Bureaucratic forces—rules, politics, personal integrity, and finite resources—tend to
impose limits and layers of oversight . Second, contrary to government dogma, leaks are a crucial
part of this ecosystem of restraint . Without that December 2005 Times story, there’s no January 2006 briefing of the full FISC,
and the program’s reliance on presidential rather than court approval surely would have continued for more than a year. Without
Snowden, Congress wouldn’t be reexamining the NSA or filing bills to keep the agency in check . And
we wouldn’t be able to read the inspector general’s report in the Guardian. That’s what I learned from reading this history of the surveillance
program. For the most part, the government has tried to do the right thing. Little by little, it has made progress in cleaning
itself up. And Snowden, for all his flaws, is part of the cleansing.

Agencies comply with Section 702 and the FISA courts—not good examples of
circumvention
Chong 13 – Jane Chong is a 2014 graduate of Yale Law School. She researched national security issues at Brookings as a Ford Foundation Law School
Fellow and has previously interned in the narcotics and terrorism units at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. She graduated from Duke
University in 2009. (“The NSA Documents, Part VII: The Compliance Report,” Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/nsa-documents-part-vii-compliance-report,
August 24, 2013, Quay)

Some undisclosed portion of the tasking incidents described in the report "involved facilities where at
the time of tasking the Government knew or should have known that one of the users of the selector
was a United States person." Details of one cited example of such an incident have been redacted. In another incident, the NSA
failed to prevent a pending Section 702 tasking request "from being effectuated," although DHS had informed
the NSA that the target of the request was "an LPR" (likely stands for “lawful permanent resident”). All Section 702-acquired data was

purged in the cited incidents . The Joint Assessment concludes that these incidents are "isolated instances of
insufficient due diligence ." Most detasking incidents in the reporting period involved non-U.S. persons who had traveled to the U.S.; only one of the
detasking delays involved a U.S. person who had been erroneously assessed and targeted as a non-U.S. person. The NSA detasked several selectors used by the
individual based on the revised assessment, but did not detask one of the individual's telephone numbers for three weeks due to a "miscommunication within an NSA
targeting office.” The Joint Assessment concludes that better records and additional detasking procedures could prevent such detasking delays from occurring in the
future. An undisclosed number of NSA noncompliance incidents involved using U.S. person identifiers
to query Section 702 repositories. The Joint Assessment notes that the FISC's October 3, 2011 and November 30,2011 orders approved modifications to NSA's
modification procedures permitting the agency to use U.S. person identifiers to query telephony and non-upstream acquired electronic communications data. The
query terms must be approved according to internal NSA procedures, and must be designed to yield foreign intelligence information. In
each of the
incidents, an NSA analyst made one of two errors: either conducting a query that the NSA had
previously determined was a U.S. person identifier, or forgetting to filter out Section 702-acquired
data while conducting a federated query (“a query using the same term or terms in multiple NSA databases”) using a known
U.S. person identifier. The Joint Assessment notes that none of the analysts involved in the incidents were unaware that only approved U.S. person
identifiers may be used to query Section 702-acquired data. Although "few" compliance incidents resulted from technical issues
in the reporting period, the Joint Assessment notes that "technical issues can have larger implications" because they frequently involve multiple
 Jaguar Debate 174

all Section 702 agencies devote "substantial resources" toward preventing , identifying
selectors. Thus

and remedying such issues . Collection equipment and other systems are tested before deployment, monitoring programs are employed to detect
anomalies, joint oversight team members participate in technical briefings to better understand the impact of technical system development on information collection
and processing. Some undisclosed number of the compliance incidents during the reporting period caused the NSA systems to overcollect data in violation of what
had been authorized under the Section 702 certifications. Further details on particular incidents involving overcollection have been redacted. Two system
errors in the reporting period led to delays in detasking facilities . In one such incident, an adjustment made in the NSA's
system during transition between certifications resulted in unauthorized targeting of users in the U.S. for up to three days. The Joint Assessment begins its subsection
on the NSA's human errors with the observation that human errors are the cause of many compliance incidents . Some
human errors are isolated events; others represent a pattern that suggests the need for new training or
procedures. As in "the last several reporting periods," the report notes, one of the most common errors in this reporting period
involved selectors that were missed in the detasking process, and which were among those used by a target discovered to be in
or traveling to the U.S. Subsections on the causes of CIA and FBI noncompliance are heavily redacted. The Joint Assessment describe two
types of FBI noncompliance incidents: those concerning errors in the processing of requests and
those involving improper targeting. In one processing incident, involving an individual located in the U.S., an FBI supervisory agent intended
to reject an acquisition instead accidentally approved it, and the system fail-safe malfunctioned. Information on incidents involving FBI noncompliance with targeting
procedures has been substantially redacted. Lastly, an
undisclosed number of incidents involved data overproduction by
an electronic communication service provider with a Section 702(h) directive. The report states that all of the incidents had different
causes, but in each case agency personnel identified the overproduction through automated systems or
by properly reporting within their agencies that the acquired data did not match the authorized scope of
collection. The Joint Assessment concludes with the general observation “that the agencies have
continued to implement the procedures and to follow the guidelines in a manner that reflects a
focused and concerted effort by agency personnel to comply with the requirements of Section 702 ."
Although reiterating that no intentional violations or circumventions of the FISA were identified, and that the

number of compliance incidents is small , particularly when compared to total collection efforts, the joint oversight team emphasizes the
importance of and its own role in continued noncompliance investigation and monitoring of collection activity.

The DOJ solves circumvention

Bennett 13 – Wells C. Bennett is Managing Editor of Lawfare and a Fellow in National Security Law at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to
Brookings, he was an Associate at Arnold & Porter LLP. (“The Latest NSA Documents VI: Non-Compliance Redux, With More DOJ,” Lawfare,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/latest-nsa-documents-vi-non-compliance-redux-more-doj, September 13, 2013, Quay)

Some examples of the new marching orders for minimization and oversight: at least twice during the
September 3 Order’s authorizing period, NSA must perform a “spot check” of a sample of call detail records,

so as to ensure that the agency isn’t scooping up any content. The Justice Department also figures
prominently here . DOJ attorneys must review, again on no less than two times during the authorization
period, NSA metadata query activities, including the justifications given for queries. NSA also must
provide copies of all briefing and training materials to the Justice Department . Moreover, prior to
reporting back the FISC on compliance activities, NSA and Justice personnel must meet , a week before the
FISC authorization’s expiry, and discuss NSA’s conformity with FISC orders. The outcome of that meeting must be
reduced to writing and submitted to the court, when the NSA seeks to renew the metadata
authorization. Justice Department personnel likewise must, a week prior to any authorization’s lapse, meet with the
NSA Inspector General and review oversight and compliance matters. Finally, any proposed
automated metadata query processes must be vetted and approved by NSA, the Justice
Department, and the FISC . The outlines of a theme can be made out: DOJ oversight is on the rise .
So query subject to strict rules? Yes. But ask the FISC each time whether it is okay to query? No. Perhaps this marked a modest thaw, in that the FISC restored to the
NSA some unilateral—if quite controlled, more heavily DOJ-supervised—authority to consult its vast caches of telephony metadata.
 Jaguar Debate 175

Executive Checks
Executive checks bad practices
Soufan 14 (Ali Soufan, reporter and book reviewer for Wall Street Journal, “The Shadow Lawmakers”-
review of Michael Glennon’s book – National Security and Double Government, Wall Street Journal,
12/30/14, http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-national-security-and-double-government-by-
michael-j-glennon-1419983619)
Ultimately, though, the flaw with the book is that Mr. Glennon is too enamored of his thesis of an unchanging government. “Few who follow
world events can doubt that the Obama administration’s approach to multiple national security issues has been essentially the same as that of the
Bush administration,” he writes. Yes,both administrations were forced to contend with ground wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ongoing war on terrorism. But those aren’t examples of Trumanite control. They
were, and to a large extent continue to be, unavoidable realities. Yes, the high-risk detention facility at Guantanamo remains open
despite Mr. Obama’s campaign promises to close it. But the president has been stymied on this front not by a
shadowy national-security apparatus, but by the very public face of government that Mr. Glennon
claims is hors de combat in these matters: Congress. In fact, policies have shifted significantly under Mr.
Obama in some of the most controversial areas of national security. The current administration, for
example, had already halted the “enhanced interrogation techniques” described in the recently
released Senate report. It’s true that no one has been held accountable for these abhorrent abuses. But the president closed
secret prisons, or so-called Black Sites, and abolished waterboarding and other acts of abuse . These
were significant decisions and not mere political theater. The same is true of the Obama administration’s determination to bring accused foreign
terrorists back to face U.S. civilian courts. We can debate the merits of the action, but there’s no doubt it was a substantive change. None of this
negates Mr. Glennon’s thesis or mutes the warning bell he sounds in these pages. Bureaucrats can and do go wild: Witness the recent IRS
scandals. But in
my experience inside government and out of it, the system catches up eventually, and
the change that really matters flows from the top down, implemented by the private, second
government that Mr. Glennon depicts so effectively.
 Jaguar Debate 176

Courts Check
Federal Agencies will comply with the Supreme Court
Spriggs 97 (James F. Spriggs, II, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
California-Davis, “Explaining Federal Bureaucratic Compliance with Supreme Court Opinions,” Political
Research Quarterly, Volume 50, September 1997, Jstor Accessed]
Federal government agencies complied with 93.2 percent of the Supreme Court's opinions and
narrowly complied with 6.8 percent of opinions. Also, bureaucracies never defied nor evaded any of
the Court's decisions, meaning that agencies never failed to incorporate at least some aspect of the
Court's legal rules into their implementations. The agency responses that manifested narrow compliance did not flout the
Court's authority but they interpreted its opinions in self-interested ways. This is an interesting and important empirical
finding because it demonstrates that agencies, contrary to some speculation, are not engaging in
much noncompliance. When the Court writes legal rules adverse to agency interests, government
bureaucracies usually faithfully interpret and implement them.

Courts decisions ensure agency compliance especially in the context of privacy-

prefer studies without systemic case selection
Matthew E. K. Hall 11, an assistant professor of Political Science and Law at Saint Louis University,
earned his Ph.D. in political science, with distinction, from Yale University. His work has appeared in
American Politics Review, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and the Journal of Law and Policy,
The Nature of Supreme Court Power, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p 160-163,
https://books.google.com/books?id=bLDmbwUTm0wC&dq=%22bureaucratic+compliance%22+AND+
%22Supreme+Court%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s ||RS
The Supreme Court as a Mechanism for Social Change My assessment of the Supreme Court’s
power to initiate social change runs counter to the conclusions of most empirical studies on this topic.
My findings directly contradict assertions that “litigation is ineffectual ” (Scheingold 1974, 130), that “U.S.
courts can almost never be effective producers of significant social reform ” (Rosenberg 2008, 422), that
“the Court is quite constrained in its ability to secure social change” (Baum 2003), and that “the Court
is almost powerless to affect the course of national policy” (Dahl 1957, 293). In direct contrast to these claims, I find that
the Court possesses remarkable power to alter the behavior of state and private actors in a wide
range of policy issues . In those situations in which its rulings can be directly implemented by lower-court judges, the Court
commands impressive powers even when fac- ing “serious resistance” (Rosenberg 2008, 420) “[w]ithout the
support of real power holders” (Scheingold 1974, 130). Some scholars insist that when the Court has the support of these “real power holders ...
litigation is unnecessary” (Scheingold 1974, 130); my find- ings also contradict this claim. In those cases in
which the Court could
not implement its rulings through lower courts, it was only the combination of Court action with
public support that induced change. Although public pres- sure may have eventually initiated reform without Court action, it is
highly unlikely that this change would have occurred as quickly as it did without intervention from the Court in issue areas such as
reapportionment, public aid to religious schools, and minority set-aside programs. In some situations, the
Court is able to achieve
what even broad national majorities could not accomplish through other political institutions . Of
course, the Court is not always successful at initiating change, nor would any reasonable student of the American political system expect it to be.
Any statement about the Court’s power is relative to the expectations of the reader; those who previously understood Court rulings to be
universally implemented may be struck by the relative weakness of the Court in my study. Nonetheless, when compared to the
prevailing view of the Court’s power in the judicial poli- tics literature, my study depicts the Court
as a remarkably powerful institution, capable of enhancing or inhibiting political reform,
enshrining or dismantling social inequalities, and expanding or suppressing individual rights . More
importantly, my study highlights an important distinction between those Court rulings that can be directly implemented by lower courts and
those that cannot. This distinction, though simple and intuitive, explains vastly different behavior outcomes in different types of Court rulings. It
 Jaguar Debate 177

also suggests
why other empirical studies of judicial power may have been led astray; without
systematic case selection procedures to ensure avoiding selec- tion bias, other studies of judicial power may have
tended to place too much emphasis on unpopular lateral issues. Although some scholars have hinted at particular elements of the distinction
between vertical and lateral issues, none have fully explored the concept or suggested the significance of its many repercussions.5 Accordingly, I
must respectfully disagree with Rosenberg’s assertion that “courts act as ‘fly-paper’ for social reformers who succumb to the ‘lure of liti- gation’”
(2008, 427). Instead, I
find that social reformers have achieved great success by turning to the courts in
their quest for privacy rights, free speech rights , states’ rights, religious freedom, and the rights of
criminal defendants. Admittedly, social reformers should think carefully about the relative advan- tages and disadvantages of a litigation
strategy, compared to a legislative or electoral strategy for reform. My findings suggest that reformers should con- sider whether the institutional
situation and public opinion surrounding their cause would make it likely for any favorable court ruling to be implemented. If the reform sought
could be directly implemented by lower courts or if the reformers face no strong opposition from the public, the courts may offer a highly
effective route to social change. If, however, reformers hope for a change that cannot be implemented by lower courts and that faces strong
opposition, a litigation strategy may indeed be unwise. Finally, it should be emphasized that the Court is not especially equipped to advance a
conservative or liberal political agenda.6 The
Court’s unique power to nullify legal sanctions will sometimes aid
liberal movements, by protecting abortionists or flag burners. Other times, this power will be used to
promote conservative causes, by shielding states from federal law suits and gun owners from
federal prosecution. Nor does the Court’s tendency to enact popular rulings advance one ideology over another: Whereas the reappor-
tionment and public aid to religious schools rulings probably helped liberal causes, the affirmative action and minimum wage rulings likely
promoted a conservative agenda.
 Jaguar Debate 178

Congress Checks
Congressional action on Section 215 demonstrates that Congress has stepped up to
the plate to enforce anti-surveillance measures — prefer the most recent evidence.
This is a sea change in behavior that will lead to aggressive enforcement on other
Executive surveillance issues.
Buttar 15 — Shahid Buttar, constitutional lawyer and executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense
Committee, 2015 (“Senate Moves to Check Executive Spying Power,” The Progressive, May 27 th,
Available Online at http://progressive.org/news/2015/05/188151/senate-moves-check-executive-spying-
power, Accessed 06-07-2015)
A revolution came to Washington in the wee hours of Saturday morning, just after the stroke of midnight. After 15 years of
congressional deference to mass surveillance, Congress finally took action —ironically, by failing to take action—
and did its job to check and balance executive power . On May 23, after a hard-fought congressional debate, the Senate effectively
allowed portions of the notorious Patriot Act to expire as previously scheduled, appropriately rejecting a compromise branded as the Freedom Act. It is the

first time Congress has meaningfully checked and balanced the national security agencies since
2001. It will not be the last . Where Did This Come From? Congress approved the Patriot Act in 2001 with neither debate nor an understanding of
what it entailed. Since then, it has accepted—from both the Bush and the Obama administrations—secret legal interpretations contorting statutes into mass
surveillance programs recently held illegal by a federal appellate court, as well as lies under oath by senior officials aiming to hide domestic spying programs from
congressional and public oversight. The American people have never gone along quietly. During the Bush administration, years before the Edward Snowden
revelations amplified mass outrage in 2013, nearly 500 cities and eight states issued official declarations decrying mass surveillance. Cities from Lexington,
Massachusetts to Bisbee, Arizona (including others in between like New York City, Los Angeles and Dallas), and states as politically diverse as California and Idaho
raised their voices. Since the Snowden revelations, Americans from coast to coast have taken action to challenge domestic spying. We have taken action online, from
online petitions shaming the absent chair of a crucial congressional oversight committee, to campaigns promoting mass encryption to force constitutional compliance
on the agencies technologically, despite their disdain for legal limits. We have taken action in the streets, outside NSA headquarters, outside the White House, at
rallies on Capitol Hill and in our state legislatures. We have fought back with music, sculpture, DJ mixes, poetry and comedy. While the domestic
phone metadata program's days may be numbered, this drama is just beginning. Hawks may force another
Senate vote on Section 215 on the eve of the phone dragnet's expiration. Beyond their desperate effort to save the program, the Freedom Act's
rejection paves the way for further surveillance reform to address other legal authorities under which
unconstitutional and ineffective domestic spying will continue even after this authority finally expires.

Congress is willing to enforce —they’ve taken up the issue of surveillance. Prefer the
most recent evidence.
Yahoo News 15 — Yahoo News, Byline Scott Bomboy, 2015 (“USA Freedom Act signed, so what’s
next for NSA spying?,” Yahoo News, June 3rd, Available Online at http://news.yahoo.com/usa-freedom-
act-signed-next-nsa-spying-111450759.html, Accessed 06-08-2015)
Surveillance will certainly continue under other parts of the act and under other government programs designed to combat terrorism. But
the fight in
Congress may just be getting started. The New York Times says that Senator Mike Lee and Senator Pat Leahy are
moving on to targeting the government program that allows e-mails older than six months to be read by
investigators. Congressional reformers may also seek to limit the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And
there is debate in the House and Senate about other spying provisions. “Some of us don’t think USA
Freedom sufficiently ends bulk metadata collection. In fact, [the government] will still contend after the act passes that they can bulk
collect all of the websites and emails and all that content,” said Representative Thomas Massie. “Read it closely, it’s only about your phone calls.”

Congress is prepared to enforce surveillance legislation — debate over USA

Freedom Act proves.
Buffalo News 15 — Buffalo News Editorial Board, 2015 (“Freedom Act recognizes privacy rights
without endangering national security,” Buffalo News, June 5th, Available Online at
 Jaguar Debate 179

http://www.buffalonews.com/opinion/buffalo-news-editorials/freedom-act-recognizes-privacy-rights-
without-endangering-national-security-20150605, Accessed 06-08-2015)
The ensuing debate was appropriately loud and passionate. The main problems with the program were
determined to be its secrecy and lack of sufficient oversight to ensure that the NSA was not
overstepping its legal bounds. The collection of metadata, itself, was also troubling, even though the NSA wasn’t listening to the content of calls.
Rather the agency was analyzing the data and attempting to match it with known or suspected terrorist activities. In that, there may be value. The sifting of
data can still take place, as long as the NSA gets a court order to access records held by the phone companies. The continuing
need for aggressive government action against terrorism should, at this point, go without saying. The important point was to determine how government surveillance
should work, not whether it was needed. It was also true, though, that the Patriot Act was passed during the post-9/11 fever that gripped the country, including
government. Nearly 14 years later, it was time to consider the issue at least somewhat more dispassionately. The change seems to be a plausible one, though the test of
that is yet to come. The United States has not suffered a single foreign-born terrorist attack since 2001 and it is fair to conclude that the telephone surveillance
program may have played some role in that. The
Patriot Act escaped close scrutiny until the Snowden revelations.
That’s just one of the reasons that the USA Freedom Act needs to be closely monitored. Congress
needs to satisfy itself that the NSA and any other agencies involved are complying with the new law ,
which President Obama signed on Tuesday night, but it also needs to verify with those agencies that the law is doing the job intended and in a way that serves the
legitimate interests of national security. Still, it’s
good to see that Congress was able to evaluate the Patriot Act in a way
that was inclusive of all interested parties and
to produce what looks like a workable compromise. It’s what Congress is
supposed to do and what it hasn’t done for far too long.
 Jaguar Debate 180

Internal Link Turn

Reform will snowball – reforming one aspect of surveillance will eventually
snowball to cause reform of any type of circumvention.
Patel 6/25/2015 (Faiza [co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program];
When will surveillance reform stop being just 'cool'?; www.brennancenter.org/blog/when-will-
surveillance-reform-stop-being-just-‘cool’; kdf)
Last week, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden
declared that he was “cool” with the recently
enacted USA Freedom Act, which reined in government bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. His characterization
of that program as “little” is no doubt accurate. Information from the archive of documents released by NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden has revealed many other programs that pose equal or greater risks to Americans’ privacy. But Hayden is too quick to assume
that the phone records program will be the only reform. The
passage of the USA Freedom Act is the first curtailment
of intelligence authorities since the 9/11 attacks and should mark the beginning — not the end — of
reform. It’s no surprise that Congress chose to tackle the phone record program first. It is relatively
straightforward for people to understand, and its goal of amassing a vast database of information about Americans is patently difficult to square
with our constitutional values. Two review boards found it to be of minimal counterterrorism value, and a federal appeals court declared it illegal.
Even the intelligence community and the president were amenable to reform. But Congress is well
aware that this reform is insufficient. Many of the votes against the act in the House and Senate
came from lawmakers who believe it didn’t go far enough.
 Jaguar Debate 181

AT State Fails / Other K Stuff

 Jaguar Debate 182

Negative state action

We should reform the state to take away racist government actions. State is
inevitable, so we should actually attempt to make the state better, rather than
advocating for unrealistic actions in a debate round which does nothing to actually
solve the issue.

Civil society is not beyond repair – political liberalism can and should be reclaimed
for the purpose of breaking down anti-black racism.
Shelby 7 – Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard, 2007, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical
Foundations of Black Solidarity

For better or worse, black political solidarity has come to be associated with black nationalism. For many,
the very idea of black nationalism conjures up scary and unflattering images of the Black Power
movement and of controversial spokespersons for the Nation of Islam, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, US, and other influential black nationalist organizations
of the 1960s and early 1970s. This association leads many people, including some blacks, to be suspicious of calls for black political unity. In fact, at
least since the mid-nineteenth century, many have been hostile toward, dismissive of, or frightened by black nationalism. Conservatives who believe
that the fight for racial justice has already been won naturally reject black nationalism. They see calls for black political solidarity
as symptomatic of a pathological "victim's mentality" and generally urge African Americans to stop complaining about their situation and instead to take advantage of
the many opportunities that America offers. As they see it, the color line is not a serious problem in the twenty-first century. Indeed, some conservatives insist that the
roots of black America's problems lie in the self-defeating attitudes and dysfunctional behavior of blacks themselves. Yet
there are conservative
forms of black nationalism. These typically eschew political programs aimed at structural transformation ,
opting instead for group self-help strategies that emphasize the need for in-group racial responsibility. Conservative black nationalists do not deny the continuing
significance of racism. On the contrary, they often regard racism as a permanent feature of social life in America. They believe that it is futile to
struggle to end racial injustice in the United States and that African Americans should form self-
reliant black communities without making further demands on the state for racial reform . I reject
both forms of conservatism .2 I reject the first because I hold that racism still negatively affects the life prospects of African Americans in the
United States and therefore racial justice has not yet been achieved. I reject the second because I believe that antiblack racism is not incorrigible
and that blacks can work together to help effect meaningful social change. Thus, my argument is mainly directed
to progressives. Yet I mean "progressive" to be understood broadly: namely, any political orientation which maintains that there are basic social
injustices in our society that should, and can, be corrected by organized collective action or state
policy but which denies that these reforms are a matter of returning to some allegedly better form of social organization that existed in the past. The point
of focusing on progressive black politics rather than on its conservative counterpart is that the
former, though not the latter, typically holds that our society still faces serious problems of racial injustice and that
correcting them requires concerted action on the part of concerned citizens and their government . My
argument proceeds on the assumption, no doubt controversial, that this progressive view on race is correct . Liberals often portray black
nationalists as divisive, fanatical, dangerous, unprincipled, racist, delusional, and even mad. Liberal political philosophy is moreover often thought to be antithetical to
nationalism in all its forms—from its basic social ontology to its fundamental principles.3 Indeed, many liberals find the label nationalist, like the label Marxist,
enough to regard a thinker or ideology so labeled as politically dangerous, morally corrupt, and intellectually bankrupt. Accordingly, there has been little incisive
critical engagement with the black nationalist tradition by liberal political philosophers.4 However, there
is a strand of black nationalism that
is compatible with the core values of liberalism—values such as equal citizenship for all persons;
respect for individual autonomy; democratic constitutional government under the rule of law; the basic
right to freedom of conscience, expression, and association; tolerance for different conceptions of the good; equal
opportunity in education and employment; and a guaranteed minimum standard of living. This form of
black nationalism has a role to play in helping to realize these liberal ideals. Liberals should not dismiss or fear the black nationalist tradition, for there are
But if black nationalism is to be
indispensable insights to be gained from a sympathetic yet critical engagement with black nationalist theory.

sustained in the post-civil rights era, some of the ideas commonly associated with the tradition will have to be
rethought. In this way I conceive of a viable form of black nationalism as one that is compatible with what
John Rawls calls political liberalism (as opposed to comprehensive liberalism).5 This rethinking of black nationalism will force us to reconsider elements
 Jaguar Debate 183

of the intellectual legacy of the Black Power movement, as this radicalization of the black freedom struggle is often mistakenly viewed as making a sharp break with
liberal political philosophy.
 Jaguar Debate 184

State Good
Realism inevitable – states will always seek to survive- the only hope is a transition
to human security
Rø, Associate Professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies and head of
the Centre for Transatlantic Relations. His interests include U.S. foreign policy,
origins of war, political theory, and philosophy of science, 13
[Johannes Gullestad, 2013, “Mechanistic Realism and US Foreign Policy: A New Framework for
Analysis”, p.44-45] //RH
By marrying these five assumptions, Mearsheimer (2001: 29) concludes that every
state in the system has -considerable
reason to think and sometimes behave aggressively". Prompted by the structural conditions, states constantly
look for opportunities to take the offensive and maximize relative power as they realize that this is
the best survival strategy. In effect, Mearsheimer's extrapola¬tion from the bedrock assumptions amounts to a semi-deterministic
account of the consequences of anarchy. I say "semi-deterministic" because Mearsheimer is inconsistent on this issue. Sometimes he maintains
that the system leaves states no choice but to behave aggressively if they want to survive. This is pure
determinism. At others he maintains that anarchy creates powerful incentives for aggressive behavior . This is a
weaker version of structural determinism. In sum, my argument is that the structure of the international system, not the
particular characteristics of individual great powers, causes them to think and act offensively and to seek hegemony.
(Ibid.: 53) This war-driving logic is "tragic" because power maximizing and the resulting interstate conflicts run counter to a state's desire for
survival. States do not want the conflicts they help create as they simply prefer security. They are neither evil nor possessed by an intrinsic will to
power, but merely worried about their con¬tinued existence. The security competition and the continuous threat of war are ultimately suboptimal
to all states in the system. It is an unintended fact of inter¬national politics that "survival mandates aggressive behavior ... [and that states] have to
seek more power if they want to maximize their odds of survival" (Mearsheimer 2001: 21). [T]he structure of the international system forces
states which seek only to be secure nonetheless to act aggressively toward each other.... Great
powers that have no reason to
fight each other — that are merely concerned with their own survival — nevertheless have little
choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. (Ibid.: 3) Although tragic,
little can be done to amend the situation . The lack of a sover¬eign authority with a mandate and the capacity to check
offensive behavior pre¬scribes continued uncertainty. Had the states been assured of being rescued in case of foreign aggression, they would have
had little reason to fear for their security and future survival. But, contrary to the situation in a well-ordered state, the international system lacks
an agency that penalizes state perpetrators. States
can only rely on themselves, making the international system of
self-help" system (Mearsheimer 2001: 32). Moreover, each state knows full well that other states have the capacity and knowledge to
produce offensive military capabilities. As all states realize that "force is the ultimate ratio of international politics" (ibid.: 56), they come to
appreciate the unique utility of military capacity. First, it deters other states from aggression as the costs may outweigh the prospective benefits.
Second, it is a necessary instrument of defense if deterrence fails and an adversary attacks. Third, it is an effective means to acquire more power,
either through blackmail, coercion or warfighting. As the prospect of survival depends on military possessions no state will fail to acquire them.
Uncertainty about other states bifurcates at this point. First, states
become uncertain about how much military
capability other states have procured. To mitigate this uncertainty states pay close attention to how capabilities are distrib-uted
throughout the system. They also keep a wary eye on other states' "latent power", a term that denotes a state's wealth
and population size (Mearsheimer 2001: 55) - the two variables that best indicate potential growth of military power. When a state surveys its
environment to determine which states pose a threat to its survival, it focuses mainly on the offensive capabilities of potential LA rivals... Second,
suites become uncertain about the intentions of other states to employ the destructive means they possess. This uncertainty is more profound as it
cannot he mitigated by rational vigilance. Since intentions are unknowable, states worried about their survival therefore "make worst case
assumptions about their rival's intentions" (Mearsheimer 2001: 45). "Theabsence of central authority, the existence of
offensive military capabil-ity, uncertainty about other states' intentions, and the drive to survive
foster fear. This is a regularity of fundamental importance to Offensive Realism. Fear is the sole emotional catalyst in the international
system. Fear causes states to strive to be as powerful as possible relative to all others. "Strength ensures safety, and the greatest strength is the
greatest insurance of safety" (Mearsheimer 2001: xi). The
ultimate safety guarantee is to become the hegemon in the
system, which denotes a state "that is so powerful that it dominates all the other states in the
system" (ibid.: 40). Hegemony is therefore the ultimate goal of every state. The reasons supporting an expansionist
strategy towards hegemony are straightforward. By being relatively more powerful, other states will be deterred from attacking you. If a state is
 Jaguar Debate 185

powerful, but uncertainty neverthe-less makes it fearsome, it has no compelling reasons to cease its unremitting hid for power until absolute
security is reached. It follows there is no such thing as an appropriate amount of power, since there is no meaningful way of knowing when the
level of appropriateness is reached. On the contrary, the appetite for power is insatiable. Small increments of relative power have equal value,
independent of power already achieved, suggesting that states are insensitive to arguments about marginal gains. Even states in a position of
considerable power advantage will be revisionist and crave for more. As Snyder (2002: 155) points out, "Mearsheimer's great powers require a
surplus of power over 'appropriateness' to cover uncertainties, possible miscalcula¬tions, and future surprise".
 Jaguar Debate 186

State Best Option

Abandoning the state worse than endorsing it
Walzer, BA Brandeis, PhD Harvard, 10
(Michael, Response to: The Military State of America and the Democratic Left, Dissent Vol. 57 No 1,
Winter 2010)
He thinks that the most important thing happening in the world today is the growth of
international institutions and the erosion of state sovereignty. But, again, he never tells us how or
where this is "happening." Right now, no political leader in his right mind would entrust the safety of
his people to any international organization. Right now, what the most oppressed and impoverished
people in the world most urgently need is a decent and effective sovereign state. This is obviously
true for Tibetans, Kurds, and Palestinians, but it is also true of people across Africa and in many
parts of Asia, living in failed states, ruled by warlords, without effective police, without welfare
systems or functioning schools. In the world as it is today, only sovereign states can provide these
services. But Jim wants to get past state sovereignty. Maybe one day there will be pleasant pastures "beyond" the
state. Right now, there is only a wasteland.

The alternative to US jurisdiction is worse

Segarra, Esquire Associate Johnstone Adams Bailey Gordon & Harris LLC, ’12 (Jonathan, July,
“Above Us the Waves: Defending the Expansive Jurisdictional Reach of American Admiralty Courts in
Determining the Recovery Rights to Ancient or Historic Wrecks” Journal of Maritime Law and
Commerce, 43 J. Mar. L. & Com. 349, lexis//bueno)
The Eleventh Circuit, in
The Fourth Circuit's tacit approval of this declaration of the expansive reach of American admiralty jurisdiction is not unique, however.

Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. v. The Unidentified Shipwrecked Vessel, n136 determined the salvage rights to the Nuestra Senora de las
Mercedes, a famed Spanish Royal Navy frigate that sank 100 miles west of the Straits of Gibraltar during a naval confrontation with England in 1804. n137 There, the court
initially noted that a court must have "'exclusive custody and control'" over any given shipwreck in
order to "'adjudicate rights in it that are binding against the world'" n138 and that "'[n]o in rem suit can me maintained without
a valid arrest of the res by the marshal,'" n139 but then apparently satisfied itself with the simple observation that "[t]herefore, when a party files an in rem complaint, the court issues a warrant

incredibly, the Eleventh Circuit

for the arrest of the res and the res remains in the court's custody for the remainder of the proceedings." Somewhat

completely declined to trouble itself with the slightest discussion of the application of its
extraterritorial jurisdiction, instead strongly implying that the "symbolic arrest" effectuated by the salvage company's placement into the court of a [*372] small
bronze block recovered from the shipwreck in question indeed complied with these jurisdictional mandates and therefore providing for perhaps the broadest exercise of American jurisdiction

Although the view of the various federal courts seems fairly equivocal about
over international shipwrecks yet. n140

the exact limits of the extraterritorial jurisdiction of American admiralty courts under the
constructive in rem doctrine, it should be noted that even one of the commentators most opposed to America's
unilateral control over international wrecks cannot deny that the Fourth Circuit is "the vanguard
of progressively defining U.S. admiralty courts as emerging fora in [the] litigation of internationally
[-]significant historic wreck." n141 The "unique development[] of salvage law" by the admiralty courts
of any nation, it should here be noted, "provide an alternative to lawlessness on the frontier of
underwater cultural heritage and thereby fill a void." n142
 Jaguar Debate 187

AT You’re White/Priveleged
 Jaguar Debate 188

2AC
st
1 – We aren’t speaking about racism, our authors are. We are simply defending
their scholarship.
2nd – Divide Link – Saying we can’t defend an African-american’s scholarship
further ties them into the structures of whiteness – they are trying to make sure
black scholarship is never understood.
3rd – The question is not whether or not we’re trying to be white anti-racists – it’s
whether or not we acknowledge and understand our social location in the realm of
white civil society – you’re right in the fact that we will never be able to be anti-
racists but wrong in the fact that we should never combat anti-black violence
Applebaum 5, Barbara Applebaum, associate professor and chair of cultural foundations of education, is
trained in philosophy of education. “In the name of morality: moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice
education,” http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03057240500206089, NN

I asked my students, ‘Who comes to your mind when you

In a course on schooling and diversity, the topic for the week was different meanings∂ of racism.

think of white∂ people who are complicit in sustaining racism?’ Most of my white students gave∂
examples of overtly prejudiced people or groups – the Klu Klux Klan, the television∂ sitcom character Archie Bunker, someone they
happened to know. Significantly,∂ they mentioned anyone except themselves . One student, however, meekly∂

responded, ‘all of us’. When challenged, this student explained that whereas racism∂ in the past was all about organizations like the Klu Klux Klan, Archie Bunker types∂ and Jim Crow laws,
today racism is more subtle and often not seen by those who do∂ not have to experience it.∂ This opened up a
heated exchange in which I attempted to explain the different∂ meanings of racism, accentuating what certain understandings of social injustice∂ they make available and what they keep hidden. Rather than being willing to engage∂

in the different meanings of racism and their implications, many of these∂ predominantly white
students were obstinately focused on denying their complicity. They were more concerned with
proving how they were good antiracist whites than∂ they were in trying to understand how systemic
oppression works and the possibility∂ that they might have a role in sustaining such systems. In his journal, a
white student∂ wrote, ‘In any situation you cannot be held responsible for something that you did∂ not do. Even on the smallest scale, if you don’t think that you’ve done anything∂ wrong, then you will be reluctant to change or to try
and examine the problem’.∂ In their study of how white subjects perceive civil rights and equal opportunity,∂ Nancy Ditomaso and her colleagues (2003) attempt to demonstrate that one of the∂ ironic characteristics of white privilege

is thatwhite people do not have to think of∂ themselves as ‘racist’ for racial inequality to be reproduced
(p. 189). The intimated∂ irony underlying what these researchers found is not that blatant, overt racism can be∂ implemented without the perpetrator’s awareness, but rather that the subtle but lethal∂

types of covert racism can be maintained even when whites believe themselves to be∂ part of the
solution rather than part of the problem. Indeed, it is my contention that it is∂ especially when white people believe themselves to be good and moral antiracist citizens∂ that they
may be contributing to the perpetuation of systemic injustice.∂ Although what I will refer to as the ‘traditional conception of moral responsibility’∂ has

many enabling features that ground such values as autonomy, respect for persons∂ and equality,
such a conception of moral responsibility can also authorize denials of∂ complicity on the part of
my white students. In what follows, I first describe what I∂ mean by the ‘traditional conception of moral responsibility’. This is not to imply that∂ any particular moral philosopher or theorist holds this view,
but rather the point is to∂ emphasize that it is a view widely assumed by my students and that aspects of

this∂ view are implied and tacitly supported in the many debates around the meaning of∂ moral
responsibility taken up by moral theorists. These both enabling and∂ disenabling features of the traditional conception of moral responsibility are evident∂ in moral theorizing
about moral responsibility, not so much in debates around what∂ it means to be a moral agent but, more conspicuously, in discussions around the∂ criteria that make one morally accountable for particular actions. Then I

will turn to∂ three seemingly good, antiracist discourses that my white students engage in around∂
issues of difference and inequality – the discourse of colour-blindness, the discourse∂ of meritocracy
and the discourse of choice. I argue that the traditional conception of∂ moral responsibility
authorizes these discourses and contributes to camouflaging∂ their limitations . By giving examples of how these discourses
conceal systemic∂ oppression, hinder the development of cross-racial understanding, veil the relational∂ dimension of the social construction of race and promote a ‘race to innocence’, I∂ illustrate how such ostensibly moral
discourses work to conceal the very complicity∂ that some social justice educators endeavour to expose.
 Jaguar Debate 189

4th – Knowledge from the center is a precondition for social movements – identifying
their social position as uniquely key colludes with hegemonic surveillance
Yuval-Davis 12 – Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging at
University of East London [Nira, has written extensively on theoretical and empirical aspects of
intersected nationalisms, racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/s and gender
relations in Settler Societies, Professor in Gender and Ethnic Studies, former President of the Research
Committee 05 (on Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations) of the International Sociological
Association, founder member of the international research network of Women In Militarized Conflict
Zones, “Dialogical Epistemology—An Intersectional Resistance to the “Oppression Olympics”,” Gender
& Society, pp. 46-48, February 2012, Sage Journals, Accessed 7/20/15]//schnall
I first met Patricia Hill Collins in Vienna during a conference in the 1990s, which happened to be her first trip outside the United States.
However, I had already “met” her years earlier when I discovered her wonderful book Black Feminist Thought
(1990). Patricia Hill Collins the woman proved to be even more wonderful than her book, and we’ve continued since to interact in a
sporadic way, especially whenever we are in the same corner of the globe, with overlapping interests in racism, feminism,
citizenship, motherhood, belonging, and intersectionality. In this short piece, however, I want to focus on the
crucial importance that Collins’s writing has had on my thinking concerning standpoint theory,
situated knowledge and imagination, and transversal politics of solidarity. 1 I quote Collins from two of her writings. In
Black Feminist Thought, she says, Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial,
situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is
unfinished [my emphasis]. . . . Partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard; individuals and groups forwarding knowledge
claims without owning their position are deemed less credible than those who do. . . . Dialogue is critical to the success of this
epistemological approach. Nevertheless—resisting power inequities must be addressed . . . [and] “decentering” the dominant group is
essential. (1990, 236-37) And in her comment on Hekman’s article on standpoint theory, she comments, Although it is tempting
to claim that Black women are more oppressed than everyone else (. . .), this simply may not be the
case. (1997, 74) In these two quotes, Collins establishes the ontological basis for a dialogical standpoint
theory as well as an intersectional analytical framework that resists what Ange-Marie Hancock (2011) calls the
“oppression olympics,” both of which are a necessary, although not sufficient, basis for transversal dialogical politics of solidarity.
DIALOGICAL STANDPOINT THEORY One of the cornerstones of feminist theory, in all its varieties, has been its
challenge to positivist notions of objectivity and truth. There is a large variety of positions among feminists
concerning these issues, starting from— in Sandra Harding’s term—“feminist empiricists” (Harding 1993, 51), who do not intend to challenge or
reinvent the framework of “science” as such but rather to do a better job in the existing one, up to post-modernist theorists like Jane Flax (1990),
who rejected any notion of objectivity and “truth.” Despite their differences, they have all challenged
“the god-trick of seeing
everything from nowhere” (Haraway 1991, 189) as a cover and a legitimization of a hegemonic masculinist
positioning. Among those feminist theorists who did not reject completely any notion of truth as
such, standpoint theories were developed that claim, in somewhat different ways, that it is vital to account for
the social positioning of the social agent. This accounting of the situatedness of the knowing subject
has been used epistemologically in standpoint theories in at least two different ways. One claims that
a specific social situatedness (that in itself has been constructed in several different ways) endows the subject with a
privileged access to truth. The other, developed among others in Collins’s as well as my own work, rejects such
a position and views the process of approximating the truth as part of a dialogical relationship
among subjects who are differentially situated . In virtually all variations of standpoint theory,
however, the reduction of knowledge to a simple reflection of its social basis has been rejected.
Experiences, social practices, social values, and the ways in which perception and knowledge production are socially organized have been seen as
mediating and facilitating the transition and transformation of situatedness into knowledge. The
standpoint that is expected to
emerge from a specific positioning has sometimes, especially in earlier versions of standpoint theory, been
expected to provide a privileged access to liberating insight, while the more common position —more
modest and closer to the general academic debate on “sociology of knowledge” —seems to be that it
 Jaguar Debate 190

produces merely different insights. The “stronger” claim, as it has sometimes been made in the
context of “identity politics,” has been (polemically) summed up by Collins as saying that “the more
subordinated the group,” the “purer” its “vision” (Collins 1990, 207). Some standpoint feminists, such as
Zilla Eisenstein (1993), recommended, for example, specifically taking the positioning of women of color and their
multiple oppression as an epistemological starting point. This , however, was not intended to imply
that only those who share a certain marginal or oppressed positioning would be able to really
understand it (and therefore only women should study women, only Blacks should study Blacks,
etc.), or even enjoy thereby a privileged access to understanding society as a whole. The
“ethnocentrism” of such a position has been rejected by Harding (1993, 59): The claim by women that
women’s lives provide a better starting point for thought about gender systems is not the same as
the claim that their own lives are the best such starting point. (1993, 58; emphasis added) Harding points out that
Hegel was not a slave, 2 Marx and Engels not proletarians. She and other feminist theoreticians advocated that
people from the center use “marginalized lives” as “better places from which to start asking causal
and critical questions about the social order” (1993, 59). However, as valuable as this exercise is in imagining oneself into
what one believes is the worst conceivable social positioning, two problems remain. First, as Collins rightly comments (in the second quote
above), the one worst positioning simply does not exist. She rejects any mechanistic construction of
hierarchies of oppression and her resulting call for a dialogue of people from different positionings as the only way to “approximate
truth.” Second, even prioritizing nonhierarchically the “view from the margins” might lead to
underestimating the relevance of the knowledge of the dominant center. Although the view from the
margins produces other kinds of knowledge that are valuable (and often also more attractive to study), it is
crucial for any emancipatory movement to understand the hegemonic center and the ways people
situated there think and act. After all, it is this most powerful position from which most political
decisions affecting the largest number of people in society come. Not surprisingly, however, access to the
study of hegemonic positions of power is the most difficult to attain. Emphasis on the importance of
the lives of the most marginal elements in society can sometimes collude with the attempts of
hegemonic centers to remain opaque while at the same time maintaining the surveillance of
marginal elements in society.
 Jaguar Debate 191

Extensions
Just because we are privileged does not mean we can’t engage in this conversation –
taking personal experience as undeniable fact is precisely the problem with status
quo identity politics because it makes it impossible to make generalizations that can
guide courses of action – we should listen to particular experiences but that cannot
be an excuse to avoid argumentation
Reilly-Cooper 15 – Teaching Fellow in Political Theory at PAIS; BA in Politics from the University of
Leeds; MA and PhD in Political Theory from the University of Manchester (Rebecca,
“INTERSECTIONALITY AND IDENTITY POLITICS,” More Radical With Age, 4/15/2013,
http://moreradicalwithage.com/2013/04/15/intersectionality-and-identity-politics/) //RGP
But this desire to listen to oppressed people’s testimonies and respect their particular experiences ,
although motivated by only good intentions, often seems to lead to a wholly counterproductive and self-defeating
approach to politics that can’t offer any practical guidance, and can’t do anything to make
oppressed people’s lives any better. Listening to people’s stories is important. But if it is to have any value, besides satisfying
people’s desire to be heard, then we need to do more than listen. We need to be able to generalize from those
stories to more abstract principles, which then inform our action and guide polic y. Particular
experiences and personal testimonies are of political importance because they can help to illuminate general principles; they
cannot trump those general principles. Suppose two women disagree about whether a certain action
is sexist or not – one experiences it as discriminatory or oppressive, while the other does not feel this way about it. While it is useful to
know how they feel about it, it doesn’t get us very far in deciding how to judge that action and whether to allow it or not. If we want to do
more than satisfy people’s desire to be listened to – if we actually want to eradicate unjust practices – then we need
to determine who is right and who is wrong. The two women presumably don’t think they are merely expressing their
personal preferences about the action in question, in the way they might express a preference for tea over coffee. They both believe there is a
right answer about whether the action is sexist, and that the other is mistaken. They can’t resolve this by reference to their
personal testimonies and experiences alone. They will inevitably have to appeal to some beliefs they
share, some general principles about what makes an action sexist. And as soon as they do this, they are
having a discussion that anyone can contribute to, including men . They are appealing to abstract considerations and
invoking a general argument that is in principle available to anyone, regardless of their personal experience. Once we’re doing that,
men can contribute to a conversation about whether something is sexist, white people can
contribute to a conversation about whether something is racist, cisgendered people can contribute
to a conversation about whether something is transphobic – and they won’t necessarily be wrong,
just because they lack personal experience of these forms of oppression. Some intersectionality
advocates seem to jump from the reasonable and probably true premise that people are best placed to recognize their own oppression to
the unreasonable and clearly false premise that people can never be mistaken about their own oppression .
It may well be true that women are best placed to define and recognize sexism, and that non-white people are best placed to identify racism.
What is clearly not true is that women can never be mistaken about whether a particular phrase or
action is sexist or not, or that whenever a non-white person thinks she has been the victim of
racism, then she has. I may be accused here of erecting a strawman argument, that no intersectionalist actually thinks this. And yet in
practice, I see this assumption at work all time, when men who question whether something is sexist are dismissed as ‘mansplainers’, or when
accusations of racism are believed without evidence because it is a person of colour making the accusation. The danger with this line
of thinking is that it really does lead to an Oppression Top Trumps, where we have to preface all
our arguments with extensive details of our identities and past experiences to prove our oppression
credentials before we are entitled to an opinion, and where personal feelings and experience trump
abstract arguments and general principles. While we ought to begin with listening to people’s stories, we cannot stop there,
for on their own, people’s stories tell us nothing about what we ought to do, what policies we ought to prefer. And yet the logic of the
 Jaguar Debate 192

intersectionalist’s identity politics tells us that we must stop at listening to people’s testimonies,
because to do any more would be oppressive and unjust in itself. As soon as we start to abstract
away from those stories, and form general principles, we risk oppressing the people who would disagree with
those principles because they don’t quite fit with their own experience. But this is a totally fruitless and nihilistic approach to politics. On
this logic, we couldn’t implement laws against sexual assault, for example, as all victims of assault will
experience the harm of it differently, and indeed some victims might not experience it as harmful at all. On this logic, we
couldn’t have a rule that punished breaking someone’s leg more severely than pinching someone’s arm, because there may be some people who
find arm-pinching as distressing as a broken leg. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, in this vision of politics there
could be no room for movements like feminism at all. For feminism assumes some degree of
commonality among women, which the logic of this identity politics must deny. As soon as you call yourself a
feminist, you are identifying yourself as part of a movement that speaks for and represents others. And yet these others are all
radically and irreducibly different, from you and from each other. It’s not obvious to me why speaking for others
is inherently oppressive. Perhaps it would be better if all people could clearly and accurately express their views and experiences. But some
people are always going to be more skilled at doing that than others. For
some especially weak and vulnerable people, it
may be physically impossible for them to speak for themselves. And crucially, it’s inevitable that some people are
going to be better than others at highlighting the relevant connections between different stories, at drawing out the general features of people’s
experiences that will enable us to construct our principles and guide our action. While one person may well have the best understanding of her
own experiences, it’s possible that others will be in a better position to draw general conclusions from
those experiences about what we ought to do. Recognizing that there are multiple and interacting
forms of oppression, and wanting to work to eradicate the negative effects of this on the most
oppressed people, can and must divorce itself from this incoherent, self-defeating, nihilistic identity
politics. It we are going to do anything to make people’s lives better, we have to be able to draw general conclusions
from people’s experiences, and be allowed to represent those who cannot represent themselves . The
implication of this is that sometimes, we may have to tell an oppressed person that they are mistaken in
their judgement about particular cases of injustice. But the payoff is a vision of politics that allows us
to do more than just listen to people’s stories, but actually implement policies and engage in action
that makes people’s lives better .
 Jaguar Debate 193

AT Black Nihilism K
 Jaguar Debate 194

2AC
Struggling is not necessary to overcome anti-blackness. The affirmative is a project
of infiltration—universalist prescriptions that isolate ourselves from the institutions
that exercise power militates against revolutionary movements—becoming
acquainted with the methods of American racist Kangaroo justice is specifically key
to develop tactics and strategies for bringing about the end of the world
Williams 69 [Summer 1969, Robert F. Williams was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving as president of the Monroe,
North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton cited Williams’s Negroes with
Guns as a major inspiration, peaches,“The Deprived: Rebellion in the Streets”, The Crusader, Volume 10, Number 02,
http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Robert_F_Williams/513.Crusader.Vol.10.2.Summer.1969.pdf]

INFILTRATE THE MANS INSTITUTIONS : Black youth should not commit the catastrophic
error of seeing things simply in black and white . That is, of seeing things as all good or all bad. It is
erroneous to think that one can isolate oneself completely from the institutions of a social and
political system that exercises power over the environment in which he resides. Self-imposed and
pre- mature isolation, initiated by the oppressed against the organs of a tyrannical establishment,
militates against revolutionary move- ments dedicated to radical change . It is a grave error for
militant and just-minded youth to reject struggle-serving opportunities to join the mans
government services, police forces, armed forces, peace corps and vital organs of the power
structure. Militants should become acquainted with the methods of the oppressor. Meaningful
change can be more thoroughly effectuated by militant pressure from within as well as without. We can
obtain invaluable know-how from the oppressor . Struggle is not all violence . Effective struggle
requires tactics, plans, analysis and a highly sophisti- cated application of mental aptness . The
forces of oppression and tyranny have perfected a highly articulate system of infiltration for
undermining and frustrating the efforts of the oppressed in trying to upset the unjust status quo. To a great extent, the
power structure keeps itself informed as to the revolutionary activity of freedom fighters. With the
threat of extermination looming menacingly before Black Americans, it is pressingly imperative
that our people enter the vital organs of the establishment . FIGHT KANGAROOISM: Inasmuch as the
kangaroo court system constitutes a powerful defense arm of tyranny, extensive and vigorous
educational work must be done among our people so that when they serve on jury duty they will not
become tools of a legal system dedicated to railroading our people to concentration camps
disguised as prisons. The kangaroo court system is being widely used to rid racist America of black
militants, non-conformists and effective ghetto leadership . These so-called courts are not protecting
the human and civil rights of our people ; they are not dis- pensing even-handed justice, but are
long-standing instruments of terror and intimidation. Black Americans must be inspired to display
the same determination in safeguarding the human and civil rights of our oppressed people as white
racists are to legally lynch us. No matter how much rigmarole is dished out about black capitalism and minority enterprise, the hard cold
fact remains that it is as difficult for a Black American militant to receive justice in America's
tyrannical courts as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Black people must be brought to see their
duty as jurors as an opportunity to right legal wrongs not to perpetrate shameful obeisance to
tyranny and racism . Youth should mount a campaign relative to this social evil that will by far ex- ceed the
campaign of voter registration.
 Jaguar Debate 195

Rejection of the legal system alone can’t solve, this does nothing to actually remedy
the problem of anti-blackness. Abandoning the state worse than endorsing it
Walzer, BA Brandeis, PhD Harvard, 10
(Michael, Response to: The Military State of America and the Democratic Left, Dissent Vol. 57 No 1,
Winter 2010)
He thinks that the most important thing happening in the world today is the growth of
international institutions and the erosion of state sovereignty. But, again, he never tells us how or
where this is "happening." Right now, no political leader in his right mind would entrust the safety of
his people to any international organization. Right now, what the most oppressed and impoverished
people in the world most urgently need is a decent and effective sovereign state. This is obviously
true for Tibetans, Kurds, and Palestinians, but it is also true of people across Africa and in many
parts of Asia, living in failed states, ruled by warlords, without effective police, without welfare
systems or functioning schools. In the world as it is today, only sovereign states can provide these
services. But Jim wants to get past state sovereignty. Maybe one day there will be pleasant pastures "beyond" the
state. Right now, there is only a wasteland.

Black nihilism is not the only way to stop anti-blackness – claiming that a legalistic
grammar can never solve is part of the problem. The black body has no access to
such an ethical grammar in the first place. Totalizing rejection of the law sacrifices
the immediate needs of those suffering from violence. Using the law for its strategic
effects while recognizing its inherent limitations allows us to have short-term legal
strategies that are not mutually exclusive with the alt
Smith, UC Riverside media and cultural studies professor, 2013
(Andrea, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement”, Settler
Colonial Studies, Taylor and Francis)
At the same time, violence against Native women is at epidemic rates. The 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, American Indians and Crime, finds that sexual assault among Native Americans is 3.5 times higher than for all other
races living in the US. Unlike other racial groupings, the majority of sexual assaults committed against Native American women are inter-racial.3 In particular, the majority of people who perpetrate sexual assault against Native
women are white. Because of the complex jurisdictional issues involving tribal lands, the majority of sexual assaults against Native women are committed with impunity. Depending on the tribe, non-Native perpetrators of sexual
assault on Indian reservations may fall out of state, federal and tribal jurisdiction. And tribes themselves have not developed effective means for addressing violence in their communities. The intersections of gender violence and
colonialism in Native women’s lives force Native anti-violence advocates to operate through numerous contradictions. First, they must work within a federal justice system that is premised on the continued colonisation of Native
nations. Second, they must work with tribal governments that often engage in gender oppressive practices. In addition, as Native studies scholar Jennifer Denetdale argues, many tribal governments act as neo-colonial formations that
support tribal elites at the expense of the community.4 Third, they must also address women who need immediate services, even if those services may come from a colonising federal government or a tribal government that may
perpetuate gender oppression. Given the logics of settler colonialism, it may seem to be a hopeless contradiction to work within the US legal system at all. In fact, many social justice advocates eschew engaging in legal reform for this

we are often presented with two dichotomous choices: short-term legal reform that
reason. Consequently,

addresses immediate needs but further invests us in the current colonial system or long-term anti-
colonial organising that attempts to avoid the political contradictions of short-term strategies but
does not necessarily focus on immediate needs. This essay will explore possibilities for rethinking
this dichotomous approach by rethinking the role of legal reform in general . The essay foregrounds alternative approaches using a Native feminist analytic towards
engaging legal reform that may have a greater potential to undo the logics of settler colonialism from within. As I have argued elsewhere, Native feminism as well as Native studies is not limited in its object of analysis.5 Rather, in its interest in addressing the intersecting logics of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, it is free to engage with diverse materials. In looking then towards
alternative strategies for undoing settler colonialism through the law, I contend that it is important to engage important work that might not seem to be directly about Native peoples or settler colonialism if this work helps provide new resources for how we could strategically engage the law. Consequently, I engage the work of legal scholars and activists that address very different areas of
law as a means to challenge some of the current assumptions that undergird both reformist and revolutionary approaches to the law. DECOLONIAL REALISM Critical race theorist Derrick Bell challenged the presupposition of much racial justice legal reform strategies when he argued that racism is a permanent feature of society. While his work is generally cited as a critical race
theoretical approach, I would contend that his work implicitly suggests a settler colonial framework for understanding legal reform. That is, many of the heirs of Derrick Bell do not follow the logical consequences of his work and argue for an approach to race and the law that seeks racial representation in the law.6 However, Bell’s analysis points to the inherent contradictions to such an
approach. Rather than seeking representation, Bell calls on Black peoples to ‘acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status’.7 Espousing the framework of ‘racial realism’, Bell disavows any possibility of ‘transcendent change’.8 To the contrary, he argues that ‘[i]t is time we concede that a commitment to racial equality merely perpetuates our disempowerment’.9 The alternative
he advocates is resistance for its own sake – living ‘to harass white folks’ – or short-term pragmatic strategies that focus less on eliminating racism and more on simply ensuring that we do not ‘worsen conditions for those we are trying to help’.10 While Bell does not elaborate on what those strategies may be, he points to a different kind of reasoning that could be utilised for legal reform.
In his famous story, ‘Space Traders’, aliens come to planet Earth promising to solve the world’s problems if world leaders will simply give up Black people to the aliens. This story narratively illustrates how thin white liberal commitments to social justice are. First, the white people of course do give up Black people to the aliens without much thought. But what more dramatically
illustrates this point is that the reader knows that, almost without a doubt, if this were to happen in real life, of course Black people would be given up. Within this story, however, is a little-commented scene that speaks to perhaps a different way to approach legal reform within the context of white supremacy. Gleason Golightly, a conservative black economics professor who serves as an
informal cabinet member for the President, becomes embroiled in a fight with the civil rights legal establishment about the best means to oppose the proposed trade. Golightly had previously pleaded with the President and his cabinet to reject it. When his pleas are not heard, he begins to reflect on how his support for conservative racial policies in the interests of attaining greater political
power had been to no avail. He realises the strategy behind his appeal to the President was doomed to fail. In retrospect, though [his] arguments were based on morality […] [i]nstead of outsmarting them, Golightly had done what he so frequently criticised civil rights spokespersons for doing: he had tried to get whites to do right by black people because it was right that they do so.
‘Crazy!’ he commented when civil rights people did it. ‘Crazy!’ he mumbled to himself, at himself.11 Realising the error of his ways, Golightly interrupts this civil rights meeting in which activists plan to organise a moral crusade to convince white Americans to reject the space traders proposal. Instead, he suggests that they should tell white people that they cannot wait to go on the ship
because they have learned they are being transported to a land of milk and honey. White people, argues Golightly, so oppose policies that benefit Black people, even if they benefit white people, that they will start litigating to stop the space traders’ proposed plan.12 The civil rights establishment rejects this strategy as a moral outrage and begins a racial justice campaign, ultimately to no
avail. What this story troubles is social justice movements’ investment in the morality of the law. Despite the US legal system’s complicity in settler colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy since its inception, they advocate strategies for change that rest on the presupposition that the law can somehow be made to support the end of sexism, racism and classism.
Historically, as more radical racial and social justice organisations were either crushed or co-opted by the US governments during the 1970s, these movements shifted from a focus on a radical restructuring of the political and economic system to a focus on articulating identity based claims that did not necessarily challenge the prevailing power structure.13 If groups were not going to
directly challenge the state, they could then call on the state to recognise their claims to equality and redress from harms perpetrated by other social actors. Ironically, then, the same US government that codified slavery, segregation, anti-immigrant racism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, now becomes the body that will protect people of colour from racism. The fact that the US

it may be possible to engage in legal reform in the

itself could not exist without the past and continuing genocide of indigenous peoples in particular does not strike liberal legal reformists as a contradiction. Bell suggests that

midst of these contradictions if one foregoes the fantasy that the law is morally benevolent or even
neutral. In doing so, more possibilities for strategic engagement emerge. For instance, in the ‘Racial Preference Licensing Act’, Bell
suggests that rather than criminalise racial discrimination, the government should allow discrimination, but tax it. Taxes accrued from this discrimination would then go into an ‘equality’ fund that would support the educational and
economic interests of African-Americans.14 As I have argued elsewhere, the law enforcement approach has been similarly limited in addressing the issues of gender violence when the majority of men do, or express willingness to
engage in, it.15 As a result, criminalisation has not actually led to a decrease in violence against women.16 Anti-violence activists and scholars have widely critiqued the supposed efficacy of criminalisation.17 As I will discuss later
in this essay, Native women in particular have struggled with the contradictions of engaging the legal system to address the legacies of colonial gender violence. While there is growing critique around criminalisation as the primary
strategy for addressing gender violence, there has not been attention to what other frameworks could be utilised for addressing gender violence. In particular, what would happen if we pursued legal strategies based on their strategic
effects rather than based on the moral statements they propose to make? DISTRUSTING THE LAW Aside from Derrick Bell, because racial and gender justice legal advocates are so invested in the morality of the law, there has not
 Jaguar Debate 196

been sustained strategising on what other possible frameworks may be used. Bell provides some possibilities, but does not specifically engage alternative strategies in a sustained fashion. Thus, it may be helpful to look for new
possibilities in an unexpected place, the work of anti-trust legal scholar Christopher Leslie. Again, the work of Leslie may seem quite remote from scholars and activists organizing against the logics of settler colonialism. But it may

to disinvest in the morality of the law in a manner which is

be the fact that Leslie is not directly engaging in social justice work that allows him

often difficult for those who are directly engaged in social justice work to do. This disinvestment, I
contend is critical for those who wish to dismantle settler colonialism to rethink their legal
strategies. In ‘Trust, Distrust, and Anti-Trust’, Christopher Leslie explains that while the economic impact of cartels is incalculable, cartels are also unstable.18 Because cartel members cannot develop formal relationships with each other, they must develop partnerships based on informal trust mechanisms in order to overcome the famous ‘prisoners’
dilemma’. The prisoner’s dilemma, as described by Leslie, is one in which two prisoners are arrested and questioned separately with no opportunity for communication between them. There is enough evidence to convict both of minor crimes for a one year sentence but not enough for a more substantive sentence. The police offer both prisoners the following deal: if you confess and
implicate your partner, and your partner does not confess, you will be set free and your partner will receive a ten-year sentence. If you confess, and he does as well, then you will both receive a five-year sentence. In this scenario, it becomes the rational choice for both to confess because if the first person does not confess and the second person does, the first person will receive a ten-year
sentence. Ironically, however, while both will confess, it would have been in both of their interests not to confess. Similarly, Leslie argues, cartels face the prisoners’ dilemma. If all cartel members agree to fix a price, and abide by this price fixing, then all will benefit. However, individual cartel members are faced with the dilemma of whether or not they should join the cartel and then
cheat by lowering prices. They fear that if they do not cheat, someone else will and drive them out of business. At the same time, by cheating, they disrupt the cartel that would have enabled them to all profit with higher prices. In addition, they face a second dilemma when faced with anti-trust legislation. Should they confess in exchange for immunity or take the chance that no one else
will confess and implicate them? Cartel members can develop mechanisms to circumvent pressures. Such mechanisms include the development of personal relationships, frequent communication, goodwill gestures, etc. In the absence of trust, cartels may employ trust substitutes such as informal contracts and monitoring mechanisms. When these trust and trust substitute mechanisms
break down, the cartel members will start to cheat, thus causing the cartel to disintegrate. Thus, Leslie proposes, anti-trust legislation should focus on laws that will strategically disrupt trust mechanisms. Unlike racial or gender justice advocates who focus on making moral statements through the law, Leslie proposes using the law for strategic ends, even if the law makes a morally suspect
statement. For instance, in his article, ‘Anti-Trust Amnesty, Game Theory, and Cartel Stability’, Leslie critiques the federal Anti-Trust’s 1993 Corporate Lenience Policy that provided greater incentives for cartel partners to report on cartel activity. This policy provided ‘automatic’ amnesty for the first cartel member to confess, and decreasing leniency for subsequent confessors in the
order to which they confessed. Leslie notes that this amnesty led to an increase of amnesty applications.19 However, Leslie notes that the effectiveness of this reform is hindered by the fact that the ringleader of the cartel is not eligible for amnesty. This policy seems morally sound. Why would we want the ringleader, the person who most profited from the cartel, to be eligible for
amnesty? The problem, however, with attempting to make a moral statement through the law is that it is counter-productive if the goal is to actually break up cartels. If the ringleader is never eligible for amnesty, the ringleader becomes inherently trustworthy because he has no incentive to ever report on his partners. Through his inherent trustworthiness, the cartel can build its trust
mechanisms. Thus, argues Leslie, the most effective way to destroy cartels is to render all members untrustworthy by granting all the possibility of immunity. While Leslie’s analysis is directed towards policy, it also suggests an alternative framework for pursuing social justice through the law, to employ it for its strategic effects rather than through the moral statements it purports to
make. It is ironic that an anti-trust scholar such as Leslie displays less ‘trust’ in the law than do many anti-racist/anti-colonial activists and scholars who work through legal reform.20 It also indicates that it is possible to engage legal reform more strategically if one no longer trusts it. As Beth Richie notes, the anti-violence movement’s primary strategy for addressing gender violence was
to articulate it as a crime.21 Because it is presumed that the best way to address a social ill is to call it a ‘crime’, this strategy is then deemed the correct moral strategy. When this strategy backfires and does not end violence, and in many cases increases violence against women, it becomes difficult to argue against this strategy because it has been articulated in moral terms. If, however,
we were to focus on legal reforms chosen for their strategic effects, it would be easier to change the strategy should our calculus of its strategic effects suggest so. We would also be less complacent about the legal reforms we advocate as has happened with most of the laws that have been passed on gender violence. Advocates presume that because they helped pass a ‘moral’ law, then
their job is done. If, however, the criteria for legal reforms are their strategic effects, we would then be continually monitoring the operation of these laws to see if they were having the desired effects. For instance, since the primary reason women do not leave battering relationships is because they do not have another home to go, what if our legal strategies shifted from criminalising
domestic violence to advocating affordable housing? While the shift from criminalisation may seem immoral, women are often removed from public housing under one strike laws in which they lose access to public housing if a ‘crime’ (including domestic violence) happens in their residence, whether or not they are the perpetrator. If our goal was actually to keep women safe, we might
need to creatively rethink what legal reforms would actually increase safety. REVOLUTIONARY REFORMS As mentioned previously, there has been insufficient evaluation of the strategic effects of legal strategies opposing gender violence. However, the work of Native anti-violence scholar and activist, Sarah Deer, points to possible new directions in engaging legal reform for the
purpose of decolonisation. Deer notes that the issues of gender violence cannot be separated from the project of decolonisation. For instance, currently, tribal governments are restricted to sentencing tribal members to three years in tribal prison for even major crimes such as rape. Much of the focus of the anti-violence movement has been on increasing the number of years tribal
governments can incarcerate members. Because of this effort, the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 increased the length of sentences from one to three years. However, Deer notes that prior to colonisation, violence against women was virtually unheard of, even though tribes did not have prisons.22 Instead, tribes utilised a number of social mechanisms to ensure safety for women and
children, and none of these mechanisms are prohibited by federal legislation. Because the federal government restricts the amount of prison time allowed for sexual offenders, tribes primarily call on the federal government to expand tribes’ ability to incarcerate. However, as a variety of scholars have noted, expanded sentencing has not actually led to decreased violence.23 Thus, rather
than focusing their attention simply on incarceration, Deer suggests that tribes look to pre-colonial measures for addressing violence and begin to adapt those for contemporary circumstances.24 At the same time, Deer notes that it is not necessarily a simple process to adapt pre-colonial measures for addressing violence. Unfortunately, many of the alternatives to incarceration that are
promoted under the ‘restorative justice model’ have not developed sufficient safety mechanisms for survivors of domestic/sexual violence. ‘Restorative justice’ is an umbrella term that describes a wide range of programs that attempt to address crime from a restorative and reconciliatory rather than a punitive framework. As restorative justice frameworks involve all parties (perpetrators,
victims, and community members) in determining the appropriate response to a crime in an effort to restore the community to wholeness, restorative justice is opposed to the US criminal justice system, which focuses solely on punishing the perpetrator and removing him (or her) from society through incarceration. These models are well developed in many Native communities, especially
in Canada, where the legal status of Native nations allows an opportunity to develop community-based justice programs. In one program, for example, when a crime is reported, the working team that deals with sexual/domestic violence talks to the perpetrator and gives him the option of participating in the program. The perpetrator must first confess his guilt and then follow a healing
contract, or go to jail. The perpetrator is free to decline to participate in the program and go through the criminal justice system. In the restorative justice model, everyone (victim, perpetrator, family, friends, and the working team) is involved in developing the healing contract. Everyone is also assigned an advocate through the process. Everyone is also responsible for holding the
perpetrator accountable to his contract. One Tlingit man noted that this approach was often more difficult than going to jail: First one must deal with the shock and then the dismay on your neighbors faces. One must live with the daily humiliation, and at the same time seek forgiveness not just from victims, but from the community as a whole […]. [A prison sentence] removes the
offender from the daily accountability, and may not do anything towards rehabilitation, and for many may actually be an easier disposition than staying in the community.25 These models have greater potential for dealing with crime effectively because, if we want people who perpetuate violence to live in society peaceably, it makes sense to develop justice models in which the
community is involved in holding him/her accountable. Under the current incarceration model, perpetrators are taken away from their community and are further hindered from developing ethical relationships within a community context. However, the problem with these models is that they work only when the community unites in holding perpetrators accountable. In cases of sexual and
domestic violence, the community often sides with the perpetrator rather than the victim. As Deer argues, in many Native communities, these models are often pushed on domestic violence survivors in order to pressure them to reconcile with their families and ‘restore’ the community without sufficient concern for their personal safety.26 In addition, Native advocates have sometime
critiqued the uncritical use of ‘traditional’ forms of governance for addressing domestic violence. They argue that Native communities have been pressured to adopt circle sentencing because it is supposed to be an indigenous traditional practice. However, some advocates contend that there is no such traditional practice in their communities. Moreover, they are concerned that the process
of diverting cases outside the court system can be dangerous for survivors. In one example, Bishop Hubert O’Connor (a white man) was found guilty of multiple cases of sexual abuse but his punishment under the restorative justice model was to participate in a healing circle with his victims. Because his crimes were against Aboriginal women, he was able to opt for an ‘Aboriginal
approach’ – an approach, many argue, that did little to provide real healing for the survivors and accountability for the perpetrator. Deer complains that there is a tendency to romanticise and homogenise ‘traditional’ alternatives to incarceration. First, she notes traditional approaches might, in fact, be harsher than incarceration. Many Native people presume that traditional modes of justice
focus on conflict resolution. In fact, Deer argues, penalties for societal infractions were not lenient – they entailed banishment, shaming, reparations, physical punishment and sometimes death. Deer notes that revising tribal codes by reincorporating traditional practices is not a simple process. It is sometimes difficult to determine what these practices were or how they could be made
useful today. For example, some practices, such as banishment, would not have the same impact today. Prior to colonisation, Native communities were so close-knit and interdependent that banishment was often the equivalent of a death sentence. Today, however, banished perpetrators could simply leave home and join the dominant society. While tribes now have the opportunity to
divest from the US colonial system, many Native women remain under violent attack. They may need to use the federal system until such time that more advanced decolonisation becomes possible. Thus Deer advocates a two-fold strategy: 1) The short-term strategy of holding the federal government accountable for prosecuting rape cases; and 2) encouraging tribes to hold perpetrators
accountable directly so that they will eventually not need to rely on federal interference. This approach can be misread as a simple formula for reform. However, it is important to remember that the project of prison abolition is a positive rather than a negative project. The goal is not to tell survivors that they can never call the police or engage the criminal justice system. The question is
not, should a survivor call the police? The question is: why have we given survivors no other option but to call the police? Deer is suggesting that it is not inconsistent to reform federal justice systems while at the same time building tribal infrastructures for accountability that will eventually replace the federal system. If we focus simply on community accountability without a larger
critique of the state, we often fall back on framing community accountability as simply an add-on to the criminal justice system. Because anti-violence work has focused simply on advocacy, we have not developed strategies for ‘due process’, leaving that to the state. When our political imaginaries are captured by the state, we can then presume that the state should be left to administer
‘justice’ while communities will serve simply as a supplement to this regime. To do so, however, recapitulates the fundamental injustice of a settler state that is founded on slavery, genocide and the exploitation of immigrant labour. Further, we are unable to imagine new visions for liberatory nationhood that are not structured on hierarchical logics, violence and domination. We face a
dilemma: on the one hand, the incarceration approach for addressing sexual/domestic violence promotes the repression of communities of colour without really providing safety for survivors. On the other hand, restorative justice models often promote community silence and denial under the rhetoric of community restoration without concern for the safety of survivors. Thus, our challenge
is to develop community-based models that respond to gender violence in ways that hold perpetrators accountable. Unfortunately, in this discussion advocates often assume only two possibilities: the criminal justice system or restorative justice. When anyone finds faults with the restorative justice model, it is assumed that the traditional criminal justice approach must be the back-up
strategy. Deer’s approach, by contrast, is to work with the criminal justice system while continuing to develop effective strategies for addressing violence. These will eventually eliminate the need to rely on the criminal justice system. Of course, the trap of pursuing reforms is that they can create investment in the current US legal system and detract from building new systems of
governance that are not based on violence, domination and control. At the same time, we are not going to go from where we are now to revolution tomorrow. Thus, it becomes important to strategise around what may be called ‘revolutionary’ reforms. Other abolitionists have argued that the only reforms that should be supported are those that diminish the criminal justice apparatus. Other
abolitions have argued that this approach leaves people vulnerable to the ‘crimes of the powerful’, such as rape and domestic violence.27 It is in this context that we can understand Deer’s current projects. She has worked on building tribal infrastructure by encouraging and assisting tribes to develop tribal civil protection orders. Her strategy is not so much based on the rationale that civil
protection orders will in themselves provide protection for women. Rather, by developing these orders, tribes gain the practice of developing their own systems for addressing violence. Deer notes that this is one area that is not likely to be interfered with by the US federal government. At the same time, it is not an approach that is directly tied with investing tribes in the project of
incarceration. Thus, it becomes a reform that tribal communities may adopt now as they develop creative responses for addressing violence. The reason for this suggested reform is that many tribal governments incorrectly think that the federal government is already adequately addressing gender violence and do not take initiative to address it themselves.28 In the end, the importance of
Deer’s recommendation is not so much an investment in that particular strategy, but the manner in which it encourages us to think of short-term strategies that are not simply based on increased incarceration, strategies that will more likely fall under the federal radar screen so that tribal communities have more time to practice new ways of supporting accountability for violence. This will
encourage communities to develop better decolonial practices in the future. As Deer notes, a ‘long-term vision for radical change requires both immediate measures to address sexual violence and a forward-looking effort to dismantle the culture of rape that has infiltrated tribal nations’.29 At the same time, many other Native activists are engaging community accountability strategies that
do not work with the current system at all. These strategies are not broadly advertised because these activists do not want to gain the attention of federal authorities. Yet, many communities have developed informal strategies for addressing authorities. For instance, one man who assaulted a relative was banished from his community. As he was simply able to move to the city, tribal
members would follow him to various work places, carrying signs that described him as a rapist. Again, this may be a strategy that we may or may not support. But the point is that it is important to engage the experimental and ‘jazzy’ approaches for developing community-based accountability strategies.30 In his recent book X-Marks, Scott Lyons engages with Native activists and

Those who call for decolonisation often do not effectively engage in any short-
scholars who call for decolonisation as a central focus for organising.31

term reformist strategy, even though they may save the lives of indigenous peoples who are
currently under immediate attack. As a result, the immediate needs of people often get sacrificed in
favour of articulating seemingly politically-pure ideals. Conversely, those who do engage in short-term reform strategies often decry the goal of decolonisation as ‘unrealistic’. In doing so, they do not critique the manner in

which these strategies often retrench rather than challenge the colonial status quo. Lyons affirms the need for decolonisation, but notes that decolonization happens with pre-existing materials and institutions. He calls on Native peoples to think creatively about these institutions and about the ways in which they can be deployed not just for short-term gains but for a long-term vision of
liberation. BEYOND SHAMING THE SYSTEM Legal reformists who often focus on shaping the law to reflect their moral values and those who focus on extra-legal revolutionary strategies often share the same goal. Often the presumed ‘radical’ strategy adopted by social justice groups is to engage in civil disobedience. While these groups ostensibly break the law, they often do so in
rather ceremonial fashion; they essentially want to shame the system. People are supposed to get arrested, and those in power are supposed to be so shamed by the fact that an unjust system required people to break the law. The expectation is that they will then change the laws. Acts of civil disobedience often are not targeted toward changing a policy directly or building alternative
systems to the current one. Many Native groups in the southwest US, however, have developed an alternative framework for extra-legal social change. Rather than breaking the law to change the system, they propose to make Native communities ungovernable. For instance, during the passage of SB1070, Native groups with the Taala Hooghan Infoshop, O’odham Solidarity Across
Borders, and others occupied the Border Patrol Office.32 However, rather than engaging in the occupation with the expectation of getting arrested, they chained themselves to the building so that the office could not perform its work. This approach has continued with their efforts to stop the US government’s desecration of the San Francisco Peaks through the construction of a ski resort.
While they have not eschewed legal strategies for stopping this desecration, they have focused on preventing tourists from visiting the area so that the ski resort will no longer be economically viable. According to their promotional material on TrueSnow.org: For the last decade defenders of the peaks have used every legitimate way they could think of to try to stop the US Forest Service
from allowing treated sewage effluent to be sprayed on the Peaks to make snow. More than 20,000 people took part in the Forest Service Environmental Impact Statement process with letters and appeals asking them not to spray treated sewage effluent on the peaks to make snow. Thousands of us went to Flagstaff City Council meetings to voice our opposition to the sale of treated sewer
water for the project. Yet still they approved it – before even an environmental impact statement was done. They were the most clueless of all. Currently the Hopi tribe is seeking lawsuit against the city because of this treated sewage effluent sale. A group of tribes and environmental and social justice organizations took a lawsuit all the way to the steps of the Supreme Court. The lawsuits
have only called into question the legitimacy of what is loosely termed the ‘justice’ system. For it seems there is no justice in this system. It is just us, IN this system. There is also yet another lawsuit in play which I have termed ‘Save the Peaks Coalition vs The Snowbowl Movement’ which may have the possibility of stopping this project in the long term. But if we wait for a verdict, all
the trees will be cut and the pipeline installed. This has not stopped the politically connected ski area from going ahead with their project right now and they have already clear-cut 100,000 trees (or more) and have already buried a few miles of pipeline along Snowbowl road. If they lose in court they would be expected to repair the damages. How do you get back 400 year old trees?
Greed and hatred seems to be Snowbowl's only motivation […]. But isn't there some way to stop it? Well we could hit them where it hurts! In the pocketbook. If you live in the Fort Valley area of Flagstaff you must see by now how little Arizona Snowbowl really cares about the ‘economic benefits’ it brings our fair town. I know some of us had a good deal of trouble even going to work
when the snow was good and Snowbowl was busy. The traffic jam was incredible. Stretching more than 15 miles. They took our livelihood away and hope to make that a daily occurrence by having a ‘predictable’ ski season using sewer water to make snow. This jam up gave us an idea! Why don't we do the same thing? Arizona Snowbowl does not own the mountain, and it is perfectly
legal to drive up to the area for any permitted public lands use. This means hiking, camping, praying, skiing, sitting, loving, mushroom hunting, etc. So what do I do? It is time to stop waiting for a government entity, an environmental group, or any of the people you have come to expect to save the peaks for us. The time has come to show them how much power the people have! And
believe me, you are the most powerful people in all of the world! You! Yep you! You can do it! All summer the Arizona Snowbowl is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for scenic skyrides, food, and alcohol. They do get a pretty good business up there and it would have an impact if the mountain was just ‘too busy’ with people doing all the other things our Public Forests are for. There
is nothing illegal about it and it would send a clear message to the forest service that we don't need Snowbowl to ‘recreate on the mountain’. Heck, we don't even need a ski area up there to ski! In essence, take a vacation. Just do it up on the peaks and don't use Snowbowl. Our government officials are forgetting what ‘all power to the people’ really means. You cannot wait any longer for
someone else to save the peaks for you. It will take of all us together to do this. So what are you waiting for? Pack a lunch this Saturday morning and Converge on the Peaks!33 What these activists suggest is to divest our moral investment in the law. This will affect not only what legal reforms we may pursue, but what revolutionary strategies we might engage in. Rather than engaging in
civil disobedience to force legislators to change laws to conform to our moral principles, we might be free to engage creatively in strategies that build political and economic power directly. CONCLUSION In the debates prevalent within Native sovereignty and racial justice movements, we are often presented with two seemingly orthogonal positions – long-term revolutionary extra-legal
movements or shortterm reformist legalist strategies. Short-term legal strategies are accused of investing activists within a white supremacist and settler colonial system that is incapable of significant change . Meanwhile, revolutionaries are accused of sacrificing the immediate needs of vulnerable populations for the sake of an endlessly deferred revolution. The reality of gender violence

in Native communities highlights the untenability of these positions . Native women’s lives are at stake now – they cannot wait for the revolution to achieve
some sort of safety. At the same time, the short-term strategies often adopted to address gender violence have often increased violence in Native women’s lives by buttressing the prison industrial complex and its violent logics. While
this reformist versus revolutionary dichotomy suggests two radically different positions, in reality they share a common assumption: that the only way to pursue legal reform is to fight for laws that that reinforce the appropriate moral
statement (for instance, that the only way to address violence against Native women is through the law and to make this violence a ‘crime’). Because the US legal system is inherently immoral and colonial, however, attempts to
moralise the law generally fail. It is not surprising that the response to these failures is to simply give up on pursuing legal strategies. However, the works of Derrick Bell, Christopher Leslie, and Sarah Deer, while working in

We can challenge the assumption that the law will reflect our morals
completely different areas of the law, point to a different approach.

and instead seek to use the law for its strategic effects . In doing so, we might advocate for laws that
might in fact contradict some of our morals because we recognize that the law cannot mirror our
morals anyway. We might then be free to engage in a relationship with the law which would free us
to change our strategies as we assess its strategic effects. At the same time, by divesting from the morality of
the law, we then will also simultaneously be free to invest in building our own forms of community
accountability and justice outside the legal system. Our extra-legal strategies would go beyond ceremonial civil disobedience tactics designed to shame a system that
is not capable of shame. Rather, we might focus on actually building the political power to create an alternative system to the heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, settler colonial state.

Perm do both
Combining multiple strategies is the best approach to overcoming the contingency
of identity and political commitments which fractures coalitions to solve oppression.
Roithmayr, Illinois law professor, 2001
(Daria, “ARTICLE: Left (Over) Rights”, 5 LTC 407, lexis)
 Jaguar Debate 197

This essay has proposed that rights talk might yet be rhetorically useful for communities of color,
either as a mode of strategic action, or as transgressive performance. This contingent and instrumental use of rights talk
may help to make a broader point about an ad hoc, contingency-oriented approach to social action that elsewhere I have described a radical or
postmodern pragmatism. (Roithmayr 1998) Postmodern pragmatism looks quite different from the (neo) pragmatism of Rorty or Fish or Radin, or,
farther back, the pragmatisms of Pierce and Dewey. n29 Pragmatism in either form has defined "truth" as those practices
that collectively proved useful for a particular society or community--something that has some sort of cash value for a
community--in contrast to the more conventional definitions of truth that anchor their foundation in logic, moral imperatives or some other sort of objective sounding
meta-discourse. (Rorty 1989: 5) Critical race theory appears to adopt a slightly modified version of neo-pragmatism, one which is based on the relationship between
usefulness and identity. Like the neo-pragmatists, CRT anchors pragmatic strategies in the needs of a community, but CRT focuses on the needs of a particular
identity-based subset of the community. CRT scholar Mari Matsuda has argued that "the perspective from the bottom"--from outsider communities who are at the
bottom of the economic, social and political ladder-should drive pragmatic strategies for social change. (Matsuda 1987) But
regardless of whether
the common thread is disempowerment or cultural [*441] practices, truth for CRT scholars
appears to be that which is useful for communities of color. (Powell 1997: 789; Yamamot 1997: 821) In contrast to both neo-
pragmatism and CRT pragmatism, postmodern pragmatism explicitly abandons the CRT notion that it is possible to pinpoint some common identity to unite
communities of color, or that policymakers can derive notions of usefulness from whatever that identity may be. But radical
pragmatism also
abandons the neo-pragmatist idea that usefulness can be determinately defined apart from specific
questions about history, geography, community identity and a whole host of other factors. Instead,
postmodern pragmatism adopts a contingent, non universalist conception of both usefulness and
identity. First, many purportedly collective answers about usefulness--both at the general level and
for communities of color--contain the potential for disruption, suppressed dissent, alternative
interpretations, pockets of resistance, or deviant and unruly meanings.. (Laclau 1996: 60-61) Moreover, this potential
for disruption is structured at least partly on identity-based lines. As Richard Rorty points out, usefulness is a socially-constructed, wholly situated and inevitably
contingent concept (Rorty 1989: 48). When one says a strategy is useful, one must also ask, "useful for whom?"
Second, and by the same token, as Kennedy highlighted earlier, the idea of community identity is similarly a contested
concept that contains suppressed dissent and pockets of resistance. Not only do group members and
non-group members often disagree about what constitutes the group's defining features at any
particular point in time but communities of color also contain fractured and intersecting sub-
communities with conflicting perspectives, as Crenshaw's theory of inter-sectionality illustrates. (Crenshaw 1991: 1241) Moreover,
even if common experiences (like the experience of racialized oppression) or cultural practices
could define the identity of a particular community, those experiences and investments do not
necessarily dictate the kinds of political commitments that such [*442] a community would find
useful. Thus, the concept of community is too contingent to completely determine usefulness, and
usefulness is equally unable to serve as the foundation for definitions of community. Postmodern pragmatism
embraces this contingency and conflict, to make the following claim: Truth is that which advances contingently defined
purposes or political commitments for contingently defined communities of color at a particular
time and place (also contingently defined) and for a contingently defined period of time . In this definition,
not only are the concepts of identity contingent, but more importantly, they partly reflect and partly constitute one another at the same time. That is, a
community is defined at a particular moment in time by a whole host of factors, which includes the
set of political commitments that a group finds useful. n30 By the same token, the political
commitments that a group finds useful are constructed by a whole host of factors, one of which is
the community's pre-existing identity. Of course, in particular circumstances, community identity might itself be understood, like rights
discourse, as a rhetorical strategy designed to advance particular political commitments. Ian Haney Lopez has urged Latino/as to embrace an explicitly racialized
identity as opposed to an identity based on ethnicity, nationality or culture, because such an identity will advance shared political commitments to anti-subordination.
(Haney-Lopez 1998: 1154) In his view, an identity framed in racial terms will draw critical attention to the way in which Latino/as have been oppressed on the basis
of the same sort of racialized assumptions about intelligence, virtue and productivity that blacks and other racialized groups have suffered. (1154) Haney Lopez's
But a
vision of identity is neither naturalized nor essentialized, but explicitly political, in that it relies on shared political commitments to anti-subordination.
political commitment to anti-subordination may mean many different things to different groups of
Latino/as, depending [*443] on their nationality, their gender, their sexual orientation, the color of
their skin, their history, their age. Adopting a racialized identity for anti-subordination purposes may have far more appeal for dark-skinned
Mexican-Americans of indigenous descent than for light-skinned Cubans, who may think of themselves as white and may consider anti-subordination primarily in
terms of political resistance to Fidel Castro. Thus, although political commitments, identity and notions of usefulness
 Jaguar Debate 198

can all contribute to the pragmatic value of a particular strategy, none can serve as the foundation
because each is contingently shaped by the other, and by interaction with many other factors . (Scott
1991: 773) This essay advocates using rights discourse as a mode of strategic action or transgressive performance. Although outcomes cannot be
guaranteed in advance, because contingency often precludes closure in advance , that fact should not
foreclose engaged activity. To that end, people of color should engage, as Charles Taylor advises, in an "inspired ad hoccery," "regarding each
situation of crisis as an opportunity for improvisation." (Taylor 1989: 121) People of color should, from their unstable positions
within language and history, generate as many different species of transgressive and strategic
performances as possible, using whatever tools we might have at our disposal, to advance our vision
of social change.

Perm double bind. Either the alt is strong enough to overcome the residual link aff
or they can’t solve alt causes in the status quo.
 Jaguar Debate 199

AT Bio-power K
 Jaguar Debate 200

Link turn
We take a necessary step in reducing state power, extend the entire 1AC contention
against this.
 Jaguar Debate 201

Permutation
Permutation do both—we can work within a dominant system and still resist
Michel Foucault, biopower dude, 1980, Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, pg. 154
FOUCAULT We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible
to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a government implies neither
subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive. I even believe that the two
things go together.

Permutation – do the plan and interrogate the 1ac’s epistemological failures – those
failures are inevitable and can be interrogated endlessly – but if implementing the
aff can still be a good idea some failures, voting for the perm enables transformative
potential
Nunes 12 [Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies, João Nunes,
Security Dialogue 2012 43: 345, Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK, p. sage
publications]

In the works of these authors, one can identify a tendency to see security as inherently connected to
exclusion, totalization and even violence. The idea of a ‘logic’ of security is now widely present in the critical security studies literature.
Claudia Aradau (2008: 72), for example, writes of an ‘exclusionary logic of security’ underpinning and legitimizing ‘forms of domination’. Rens van Munster (2007:
239) assumes a ‘logic of security’, predicated upon a ‘political organization on the exclusionary basis of fear’. Laura Shepherd (2008: 70) also identifies a liberal and
highly problematic ‘organizational logic’ in security. Although there would probably be disagreement over the degree to which this
logic is inescapable, it is
symptomatic of an overwhelmingly pessimistic outlook that a great number of critical scholars are now making the case for
moving away from security. The normative preference for desecuritization has been picked up in attempts to contest, resist and ‘unmake’ security (Aradau, 2004;
Huysmans, 2006; Bigo, 2007). For these contributions, security cannot be reconstructed and political transformation can only be brought about when security and its
This tendency in the literature is problematic for the
logic are removed from the equation (Aradau, 2008; Van Munster, 2009; Peoples, 2011).

critique of security in at least three ways. First , it constitutes a blind spot in the effort of politicization . The

assumption of an exclusionary, totalizing or violent logic of security can be seen as an essentialization and a
moment of closure . To be faithful to itself, the politicization of security would need to recognize that there is nothing natural or necessary about security
– and that security as a paradigm of thought or a register of meaning is also a construction that depends upon its reproduction and performance through practice.
The exclusionary and violent meanings that have been attached to security are themselves the result of social
and historical processes, and can thus be changed . Second, the institution of this apolitical realm
runs counter to the purposes of critique by foreclosing an engagement with the different ways in
which security may be constructed . As Matt McDonald (2012) has argued, because security means different things
for different people , one must always understand it in context . Assuming from the start that
security implies the narrowing of choice and the empowerment of an elite forecloses the
acknowledgment of security claims that may seek to achieve exactly the opposite: alternative
possibilities in an already narrow debate and the contestation of elite power.5 In connection to this, the claims to
insecurity put forward by individuals and groups run the risk of being neglected if the desire to be more secure is
identified with a compulsion towards totalization, and if aspirations to a life with a degree of
predictability are identified with violence. Finally, this tendency blunts critical security studies as a
resource for practical politics . By overlooking the possibility of reconsidering security from within
– opting instead for its replacement with other ideals – the critical field weakens its capacity to confront
head-on the exceptionalist connotations that security has acquired in policymaking circles. Critical
scholars run the risk of playing into this agenda when they tie security to exclusionary and violent
 Jaguar Debate 202

practices, thereby failing to question security actors as they take those views for granted and act as
if they were inevitable. Overall, security is just too important – both as a concept and as a political instrument – to be simply abandoned by critical
scholars. As McDonald (2012: 163) has put it, If security is politically powerful, is the foundation of political legitimacy for a range of actors, and involves the
articulation of our core values and the means of their protection, we cannot afford to allow dominant discourses of security to be confused with the essence of security
itself. In sum, the trajectory that critical security studies has taken in recent years has significant limitations . The politicization of
security has made extraordinary progress in problematizing predominant security ideas and practices; however, it has paradoxically resulted in a depoliticization of the
By foreclosing the possibility of alternative notions of security, this imbalanced
meaning of security itself.

politicization weakens the analytical capacity of critical security studies , undermines its ability to
function as a political resource and runs the risk of being politically counterproductive . Seeking to address
these limitations, the next section revisits emancipatory understandings of security.

And, engaging liberalism is essential to breaking down biopower, it promotes a form

of rationality that limits state power
Lacombe 96 [Danny, Criminology Simon Fraser U, “Reforming Foucault: A Critique of the Social
Control Thesis” The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 47, No. 2 Jstor]
The nature of the relation between the individual and the political order concerned Foucault in his studies of 'bio-power' and 'bio-politics'. In this work, he
implicitly negates his earlier claims that rights in the West were unequivocally linked to the sovereign (1980b, 1988, 199 1). Foucault introduced the notion of 'bio-
power' in his work on sexuality to designate the proliferation of a technology of power-knowledge primarily concerned with life. Bio-power was a
mechanism that took charge of life by 'investing the body, health , modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions,
the whole space of existence' (Foucault 1980b: 14344, emphasis added ). The notion of bio-power is useful for our understanding of the phenomenon

of resistance because while it represents a totalizing or universal mechanism -one that interpellates the subject as a member of a population

- it also contains the seed for a counter-power or a counter-politics because that mechanism individualizes
the subject of a population. It is this aspect of bio-power, its simultaneous totalizing and individual-izing tendencies, that is of importance in understanding
the strategies by which individual subjects can claim the right to self-determination. Foucault explains that against this [bio-]power that was still new in the nineteenth
century, the forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being . Since the last century, the great
struggles that have challenged the general system of power were not guided by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old dream of a cycle of time or a
Golden Age. (. . .) [Wlhat was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs, man's concrete essence, the realization of his
potential, a plentitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle;
life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that became
the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerningrights. The 'right' tolife, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the
satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this 'right' (. . .) was the political
response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980b: 144-5) If life, understood here
we can no longer conceive law as necessarily
as 'man's concrete essence', is affirmed through rights claims, then, like Foucault

linked to the sovereign. It must be linked to a different political rationality , one I believe, in which human rights are
at the centre. While Foucault never specifically addressed the question of human rights, his lectures on 'bio-politics' (at the College de France between 1978 and 1979)
suggest that struggles for life and for self-determination are to be understood in the context of liberalism. In his lectures, he explores the relation between bio-
power -the mechanisms taking charge of life -and the emergence of bio-politics, by which he means the way in which a rationalization was attempted, dating from
the eighteenth century, for the problems posed to governmental practice by the phenomena specific to an ensemble of living beings: health, hygiene, birthrate,
we cannot dissociate the problems posed
longevity, races . . .(198 1 :353) Foucault's statement is significant because it suggests that

by the question of population (bio-power) from the political rationality within which they emerged,
liberalism . Far from conceiving it as a political theory or a representation of society, Foucault understands liberalism as an 'art of government',
that is , as a particular practice, activity and rationality used to administer, shape, and direct the conduct of people
(1981 :358). As a rationality of government - a 'governmentality' -liberalism, towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, breaks from reason of state (la raison
d'e'tat) which since the sixteenth century had sought to 'justify the growing exercise of government' (Foucault 198 1 :354). What distinguishes liberalism from
reason of state as an art of government is that for liberalism 'there is always too much government' (Foucault 1981: 354-5). In
fact, far from being organized around the principle of a strong state, liberalism upholds the principle of maximal economy with minimal government
(Foucault 1981: 354). The question of liberalism , that of 'too much governing,' regulates itself , according to Foucault, 'by means of a
continuing reflection' (1 98 1: 354). The idea of reflexivity here is significant because it refers to a mechanism of self-critique, and self-limitation, inherent in
liberalism. Foucault claims that Liberalism (. . .) constitutes - and this is the reason both for its polymorphous character and for its recurrences - an instrument for the
criticism of reality. Liberalism criticizes an earlier functioning government from which one tries to escape; it examines an actual practice of government that one
attempts to reform and to rationalize by a fundamental analysis; it criticizes a practice of government to which one is opposed and whose abuses one wishes to curb.
As a result of this, one can discover liberalism under different but simultaneous forms, both as a schema for the regulation of governmental practice and as a theme for
sometimes radical opposition to such practice. (Foucault 198 1 : 356) What allows liberalism to oppose state powe r, then, is not
 Jaguar Debate 203

the principle of sovereignty or the idea of a natural right external to the state; rather it is a rationality , a governmentality of
life that takes on 'the character of a challenge' (Foucault 1981 :353). People resist the conditions under which

they live, they make claims for or against the state, because they have been submitted to
government. In other words, the political technologies that seek to render us governable as a population (bio-power
and bio-politics) simultaneously make possible the critique of these same technologies.'
 Jaguar Debate 204

Alt Fails
Alt fails --- there is no single source that enables the sovereign control of bare life
that they criticize --- the hybrid nature of power makes change impossible
Dillon and Reid 2000 --- Professors of Politics and International Relations (Michael, Julian, Jan-March,
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, Issue 1, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”)//trepka

To conclude: This confluence of sovereign and governmental power has no center that might be captured.
It has no single source that might be located and cut off. Neither does it have a defensive curtain wall that might be fatally breached. It is subject to no
historical law that will guarantee its success or bring about its end. It operates according to no historical teleology that will

result in a just and equitable order for all. It is a viral, self-reproducing , hybrid strategic operation of
power that poses new challenges to political and democratic thought because of the ways in which it threatens to exhaust
what politics and democracy might be about. "If you want to help people in the disaster zone," John Ryle advises in the epigraph to this article, "you have to think
politically." The problem is, How does one think politically now in respect of this novel hybrid terrain of power that is radically productive of bodies-in-formation
rather than comprised of a fixed universe of preformed bodies transacting mechanical exchanges of intersubjectivity? Where states,
too, are nodes in
networks of power operating as the switching mechanisms that command the zone of indistinction
between inside/outside , nomos/physis, so that the changing fitness criteria of the politics and economics of our current liberal peace may
effect the rugged landscapes that populations, as complex adaptive life-forms, must negotiate? Here an order that newly poses the question of the political and all its
cognate issues--power, freedom, equity, justice, and the "good society"--operates. Bidding to resolve or replace these with the imperatives of performativity
demanding disposability on behalf of territorialized political sovereignty, intimately if often also conflictually allied with a more generically utile adaptability, such
abiding human questions are in fact all powerfully reinvigorated once more.

This is what ultimately makes the plan, an actual policy step towards reducing
biopower superior.
 Jaguar Debate 205

Alt Bad
There is no alternative to the law/legal system---neg alternative brings more
inequality and abuse
Auerbach 83 [Jerold S., Professor of History at Wellesley, “Justice Without Law?”, 1983, p. 144-
146]

As cynicism about the legal system increases, so does enthusiasm for alternative dispute-settlement
institutions . The search for alternatives accelerates, as Richard Abel has suggested, "when some fairly powerful interest is threatened by an increase in the number or magnitude of
legal rights.*'6 Alternatives are designed to provide a safety valve, to siphon discontent from courts. With the danger of political confrontation reduced, the ruling power of legal institutions is

alternatives prevent the use of courts for redistributive

preserved, and the stability of the social system reinforced. Not incidentally,

purposes in the interest of equality, by consigning the rights of disadvantaged citizens to institutions
with minimal power to enforce or protect them . It is, therefore, necessary to beware of the seductive
appeal of alternative institutions . They may deflect energy from political organization by groups
of people with common grievances; or discourage effective litigation strategies that could provide
substantial benefits. They may, in the end, create a two-track justice system that dispenses informal "justice" to poor people with "small" claims and "minor" disputes, who cannot afford
legal services, and who are denied access to courts. (Bar associations do not recommend that corporate law firms divert their clients to mediation, or that business deductions for legal expenses—

a gigantic government subsidy for litigation—be eliminated.) Justice according to law will be reserved for the affluen t, hardly a novel
development in American history but one that needs little encouragement from the spread of alternative dispute-settlement institutions. It is social context and political choice that determine
whether courts, or alternative institutions, can render justice more or less accessible—and to whom. Both can be discretionary, arbitrary, domineering—and unjust. Law can symbolize justice, or
conceal repression. It can reduce exploitation, or facilitate it. It can prohibit the abuse of power, or disguise abuse in procedural forms. It can promote equality, or sustain inequality.

Despite the resiliency and power of law, it seems unable to eradicate the tension between legality
and justice: even in a society of (legal) equals, some still remain more equal than others. But diversion from the legal system is likely to
accentuate that inequality. Without legal power the imbalance between aggrieved individuals and
corporations, or government agencies, cannot be redressed . In American society, as Laura Nader has observed,
"disputing without the force of law ... [is| doomed to fail ."7 Instructive examples document the

deleterious effect of coerced informality (even if others demonstrate the creative possibilities of indigenous experimentation). Freed slaves
after the Civil War and factory workers at the turn of the century, like inner-city poor people now,
have all been assigned places in informal proceedings that offer substantially weaker safeguards
than law can provide . Legal institutions may not provide equal justice under law, but in a society ruled by law it is their responsibility. It is chimerical to
believe that mediation or arbitration can now accomplish what law seems powerless to achieve . The
American deification of individual rights requires an accessible legal system for their protection . Understandably,
diminished faith in its capacities will encourage the yearning for alternatives. But the rhetoric of "community" and "justice" should not be permitted to conceal the deterioration of community life
and the unraveling of substantive notions of justice that has accompanied its demise. There is every reason why the values that historically are associated with informal justice should remain

compelling: especially the preference for trust, harmony, and reciprocity within a communal setting. These are not, however, the values that American society encourages or sustains; in
their absence there is no effective alternative to legal institutions . The quest for community may indeed be "timeless and universal."8
In this century, however, the communitarian search for justice without law has deteriorated beyond recognition into a stunted off-shoot of the legal system. The historical progression is clear:

But injustice without law is an even worse

from community justice without formal legal institutions to the rule of law, all too often without justice.

possibility, which misguided enthusiasm for alternative dispute settlement now seems likely to encourage. Our
legal culture too accurately expresses the individualistic and materialistic values that most Americans deeply cherish to inspire optimism about the imminent restoration of communitarian

For law to be less conspicuous Americans would have to moderate their expansive freedom to
purpose.

compete, to acquire, and to possess, while simultaneously elevating shared responsibilities above
individual rights. That is an unlikely prospect unless Americans become, in effect, un-American .
Until then, the pursuit of justice without law does incalculable harm to the prospect of equal justice.
 Jaguar Debate 206

2AC Alt Fails

The alt fails because it kills all political resistance and is wrong about being able to reform
legal institutions
Huysmans 8 (Jef, Chair in Security Studies, director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities,
Governance (CCIG) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, “The Jargon of Exception – On Schmitt, Agamben
and the Absence of Political Society”, International Political Sociology (2008) 2, p. 179)

Deploying the jargon of exception and especially Agamben’s conception of the exception-being-the-
rule for reconfiguring conceptions of politics in a biopolitical age comes at a serious cost , though. It inserts
both a diagnosis of our time and a conceptual apparatus for rethinking politics that has no place
for the category that has been central to the modern democratic tradition: the political significance
of people as a multiplicity of social relations that condition politics and that are constituted by the
mediations of various objectified forms and processes ( for example , scientific knowledge, technologies, property relations, legal
institutions …). Even if one would argue that Agamben’s framing of the current political conditions are valuable
for understanding important changes that have taken place in the twentieth century and that are continuing in the twenty first,
they also are to a considerable extent depoliticizing . Agamben’s work tends to guide the analysis to unmediated, factual life. For
example, some draw on Agamben to highlight the importance of bodily strategies of resistance . One of

the key example s is individual refugees protesting against their detention by sewing up lips and eyes . They
exemplify how individualized naked life resists by deploying their bodily, biological condition against sovereign biopolitical powers (for example, Edkins and Pin-Fat
such a conception of bodily, naked life is not political. It ignores
2004:15–17). I follow Adorno and others, however, that

how this life only exists and takes on political form through various socioeconomic, technological,
scientific, legal, and other mediations . For example, the images of the sewed-up eyelids and lips of the
individualized and biologized refugees have no political significance without being mediated by public media,

intense mobilizations on refugee and asylum questions, contestations of human rights in the courts,
etc . It is these mediations that are the object and structuring devices of political struggle . Reading
the politics of exception as the central lens onto modern conceptions of politics , as both Agamben and Schmitt do,
erases from the concept of politics a rich and constitutive history of sociopolitical struggles, traditions of
thought linked to this history, and key sites and temporalities of politics as well as the central processes
through which individualized bodily resistances gain their sociopolitical significance .

Alt fails – abstract movements won’t produce political results besides violence
– embrace the hard work of pragmatic reform
Condit 15 [Celeste, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication Studies at the University of
Georgia, “Multi-Layered Trajectories for Academic Contributions to Social Change,” Feb 4, 2015,
Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 101, Issue 1, 2015]

Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative ,
on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain, we can call his appeal both a failure of

imagination and a failure of reality . As for reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the
historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what
I call “AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states

and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using
 Jaguar Debate 207

animals to exist in a symbolic void. All

symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a
potentially realizable alternative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is
biological predispositions —the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is
what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is
merely against an Evil . The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth
pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the
symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That
The hard work
rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9).

to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is
piecemeal, intellectually difficult , requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires
more creativity than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable
alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of
the kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does
not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a
better offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of
history, other than as constant local scale violent actions , perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This
analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language, and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that
the focal project for progressive Left Academics should now include the hard labor to produce
alternative visions that appear materially feasible.

The rejection of all liberalism strips political judgments that are necessary for
progressive reform
Smith 8 [Nick, University of New Hampshire Department of Philosophy, Questions for a Reluctant
Jurisprudence of Alterity, http://pubpages.unh.edu/~nicks/pdf/Levinas%20and%20Law%20Questions
%20for%20a%20Reluctant%20Jurisprudence.pdf]
These are sobering questions for me. I find the challenges that Levinas and Adorno pose to modernity and the history of philosophy quite powerful, yet their resistance
to practical philosophy is deeply frustrating. Surely not all philosophers must satisfy our desire to put philosophy to use, but Levinas and Adorno seem to have
relinquished their ability to judge legal and political activity. This seems far from an apolitical, pre-political, or meta-political position. I cannot help but think that
no politics is bad politics—politics stripped of evaluative thought. This worries Fraser as well
because such a position is tantamount to surrendering any possibility of distinguishing
emancipatory and oppressive identity claims , benign and pernicious differences. Thus,
deconstructive antiessentialists evade political questions of the day: Which identity claims are rooted in the defense of
social relations of inequality and domination? And which are rooted in a challenge to such relations? Which identity claims carry the potential to expand actually
existing democracy? And which, in contrast, work against democratization? Which differences, finally, should a democratic society seek to foster, and which, on the
Fraser encourages us to
contrary, should it aim to abolish?48 Although “we are not now in a position to envision a full-scale successor to socialism,”

“try nevertheless to conceive provisional alternatives to the present order that could supply a basis
for a progressive politics .”49 There may be no leftist utopia, and all campaigns claiming otherwise should be treated with deep suspicion. We
will not overcome identity thinking in grand political reformations , but we can fight it in the
minutiae of each conflict, policy, and practice. Laws do identify and categorize, but they do not all
do so with equal violence and disregard for particularity. Levinas and Adorno, however, deny us any means of drawing
comfortable distinctions between the justifiable and unjustifiable. Given the current state of law and politics, the prospects of achieving reform through non-identity
Even if we could —against Levinas and Adorno’s spirit— activate a coherent program of reform
thinking seem quite grim.

around theories of alterity , I doubt they could match the powers promoting their antithesis. Prevailing
instrumental institutions gain momentum and crush or integrate theories of alterity , and the strategy of
abstaining from political life in order to preserve the protest against instrumentality seems more desperate than ever. Our objective should not merely be to use thought
 Jaguar Debate 208

to remember the nonidentical, but rather to safeguard the thought of the non-identical while acting to release it from blind domination. Without
both a
practical orientation toward transforming material conditions and a tolerance for the
organizational categories necessary to implement such reform, deconstruction and critical theory
seem severed from their radical traditions. Pretending that these critiques provide a form of
resistance when they live harmlessly in their academic niche only reinforces the status quo . As Adorno
and Marx recognized, reason struggles to navigate a course that gives it effect in the concrete world without sacrificing it to the instrumentalities of that world. I like
to think that law is an ally in this project, but I now wonder if there is any practical upshot for a jurisprudence of alterity. Any
attempt to discover
legal praxis in Levinas and Adorno will traverse such heights that the reformer, if not forced to
turn back, will ultimately find herself in air so theoretically rarified that one might doubt if any
community could survive at its altitude. From this perspective, a jurisprudence of alterity seems most relevant as a regulative ideal for all
legal activity. Yet for those of us inclined to seek guidance for law in Levinas or Adorno because we are moved by the threats of authoritarianism and consumerism,
we find ourselves on strangely familiar ground as we stand on this summit. Though
separated by miles of conceptual elevation, we
arrive at the familiar practical values recognized by the traditions we seek to overcome: dignity,
respect, difference, non-violence, dialogue, participation, etc. Did we find these practical principles at the height of Levinas and Adorno’s
works, or did we bring them with us interpretive biases? It seems odd, for instance, to rely on a radical critique of Western
metaphysics to support rather pedestrian arguments against racial profiling, capital punishment,
violations of human rights, or the recent wars in Iraq. We can make such arguments with much less
controversial premises, and hence I am suspicious of myself. Am I, as Adorno accused Lukács, “guilty of smuggl[ing] back the most pitiful clichés of
the conformism to which the critique had once been directed?”50 Can law ever be more than such a cliché?
 Jaguar Debate 209

1AR Alt Fails

The alt results in endless factionalism and policing within movements
Karlberg 3 [Michael, Assistant Professor of Communication at Western Washington University,
PEACE & CHANGE, v28, n3, July, p. 339-41]

Granted, social activists do "win" occasional “battles” in these adversarial arenas, but the root causes
of their concerns largely remain unaddressed and the larger "wars" arguably are not going well.
Consider the case of environmental activism. Countless environmental protests, lobbies, and lawsuits mounted in recent generations throughout the Western world.
Many small victories have been won. Yet environmental degradation continues to accelerate at a rate that
far outpaces the highly circumscribed advances made in these limited battles the most committed environmentalists acknowledge things are not going well. In
adversarial strategies of social change embody assumptions that have internal c onsequences
addition,

for social movements, such as internal factionalization . For instance, virtually all of the social projects of the "left” throughout
the 20th century have suffered from recurrent internal factionalization. The opening decades of the century were marked by political infighting among vanguard
communist revolutionaries. The middle decades of the century were marked by theoretical disputes among leftist intellectuals. The century's closing decades have
been marked by the fracturing of the a new left** under the centrifugal pressures of identity politics. Underlying this pattern of infighting and
factionalization is
the tendency to interpret differences—of class, race, gender, perspective, or strategy—as sources of
antagonism and conflict. In this regard, the political "left" and "right" both define themselves in terms
at a common adversary—the "other"—defined by political differences . Not surprisingly, advocates
of both the left and right frequently invoke the need for internal unity in order to prevail over their
adversaries on the other side of the alleged political spectrum. However, because the terms left and right axe both
artificial and reified categories that do not reflect the complexity of actual social relations, values, or beliefs, there is no way to achieve
lasting unity within either camp because there are no actual boundaries between them. In reality, social relations, values, and
beliefs are infinitely complex and variable. Yet once an adversarial posture is adopted by assuming that differences are sources at conflict,
initial distinctions between the left and the right inevitably are followed by subsequent distinctions within the left and the right. Once this centrifugal process is set in
motion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrain. For all of these reasons, adversarial
strategies have reached a point of
diminishing returns even if such strategies were necessary and viable in the past when human
populations were less socially and ecologically interdependent those conditions no longer exist . Our
reproductive and technological success as a species has led to conditions of unprecedented
interdependence , and no group on the planet is isolated any longer. Under these new conditions,
new strategies not only are possible but are essential. Humanity has become a single interdependent social body. In order to meet
the complex social and environmental challenges now facng us, we must learn to coordinate our collective actions . Yet a body cannot
coordinate its actions as long as its "left" and is "right," or its "north" and its "south," or its "east" and its "west" are locked in adversarial relationships.
 Jaguar Debate 210

AT Afro-pessimism K
 Jaguar Debate 211

Link turn
We take a necessary step in reducing state power, extend the entire 1AC contention
against this.
 Jaguar Debate 212

Perm do both
The critique is not mutually exclusive with the plan– while we do not perform the
same politics of the 1nc, we can still endorse them as productive.

Our permutation is the best combination of advocacy— The exclusionary policies of

whiteness should not be rejected, but reformed. Whiteness as a race is inevitable,
but just trying to reject whiteness would be itself a racist move, and worse, it leaves
the definition of whiteness up to white supremacists. We should use whiteness as a
means to an end that does not tolerate racism. The permutation becomes a way to
embrace our advocacy and theirs
Sullivan, 8 (Shannon Sullivan.Penn State University Charles S. Peirce Society. Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society. Buffalo: 2008. Vol. 44, Iss. 2; pg. 236, 27 pgs)
It is commonly acknowledged today, at least in academic circles, that racial essences do not exist. Racial categories, including whiteness, are
historical and political products of human activity, and for that reason the human racial landscape has changed over time and likely will continue
to change in the future. In the wake of this acknowledgement, critical race theorists and philosophers of race debate whether whiteness must be
eliminated for racial oppression to be ended. Given whiteness's history as a category of violent racial exclusion, eliminativists and "new
abolitionists" have argued that it must be abolished. If "whiteness is one pole of an unequal relationship, which can no more exist without
oppression than slavery could exist without slaves," then as long as whiteness endures, so does racial oppression.2 In contrast, critical
conservationists have claimed even though it has an oppressive past, whiteness could entail something other than racism and oppression.
since lived existential categories like whiteness cannot be merely or quickly eliminated, white people
Moreover,
should work to transform whiteness into an anti-racist category . I count myself as a critical conservationist, but I also
acknowledge the force of eliminativist arguments. If whiteness necessarily involves racist oppression, then attempting to transform whiteness into
an antiracist category would be a fool's game at best, and a covert continuance of white supremacy at worst. My goal here is not to rehearse the
disagreement between new abolitionists and critical conservationists; excellent work explaining the details of their positions already exists.3 I
instead approach that disagreement by asking the pragmatic question of whether a rehabilitated version of whiteness can be worked out
concretely. What would a non-oppressive, anti-racist whiteness look like? What difference would or could it make to the lives of white and
nonwhite people? If the question of how to transform whiteness cannot be answered in some practical detail-if it's not a difference that makes a
difference-then critical conservatism would amount to a hopeful, but ultimately harmful abstraction that makes no difference in lived experience
and that damages anti-racist movements. In that case, abolitionism would appear to be the only alternative to ongoing white supremacy and
privilege. I propose turning to Josiah Royce for help with these issues, more specifically to his essay on "Provincialism."4 This turn is not as
surprising as it might initially seem given that Royce wrote explicitly about race in "Race Questions and Prejudices."5 In that essay, Royce issued
an antiracist, anti-essentialist challenge to then-current scientific studies of race, especially anthropology and ethnology, which claim to prove the
superiority of white people, and he even briefly but explicitly names whiteness a possible threat to the future of humanity. 6 I focus here on
"Provincialism," however, because even though the essay never explicitly discusses race, it can help explain the ongoing need for the category of
whiteness and implicitly offers a wealth of useful suggestions for how to transform it. "Provincialism" is an exercise in critical conservation of
the concept of provincialism, and while not identical, provincialism and whiteness share enough in common that "wise" provincialism can serve
as a model for developing "wise" whiteness.7 Royce's essay thus can be of great help to critical philosophers of race wrestling with questions of
whether and how to transformatively conserve whiteness. Exploring similarities and differences between wise provincialism and wise whiteness,
whiteness should be rehabilitated rather than discarded and how
I use Royce's analyses of provincialism to shed light on why
white people today might begin living whiteness as an anti-racist category. Comparing Provincialism and Whiteness
Race Traitor is a contemporary journal with the motto "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity," and its editor, Noel Ignatiev, makes a
scathing case against the critical conservation of whiteness.8 Ignatiev argues that there is no valid white culture to transform. Nor is there any
biological rationale for whiteness. In his view, whiteness merely concerns status, privilege, and exclusion and thus cannot form a legitimate,
antiracist identity. To suggest that it can, as critical conservationists do, is to encourage white supremacists by giving their worldview intellectual
support. Even if critical conservationists do not intend to provide this support, the effect of arguing for the conservation of whiteness is still
extremely dangerous. In addition to unintentionally validating white supremacy movements, it tends to divert the energies of well-intentioned
white people away from political struggle for racial justice to whiteindulgent racial sensitivity and diversity workshops. According to Ignatiev,
what anti-racist movements need is not a white identity that well-intentioned white people can feel good about, but race traitors who are willing to
defect from whiteness. The only way for white people to be loyal to the human race is for them to be disloyal to their racial identity. Like critical
conservationists regarding whiteness, Royce knows that he faces an uphill battle in convincing many of his interlocutors of the value of
provincialism. Put positively, provincialism tends to connote a healthy fondness for and pride in local traditions, interests, and customs. More
negatively, it means being restricted and limited, sticking to the narrow ideas of a given region or group and being indifferent, perhaps even
violently hostile to the ways of outsiders. What connects these different meanings is their sense of being rooted in a particular cultural-
geographical place. In Royce's definition, which emphasizes conscious awareness of this rootedness (an important point to which I will return), a
 Jaguar Debate 213

province is a domain that is "sufficiently unified to have a true consciousness of its own unity, to feel a pride in its own ideals and customs, and to
possess a sense of its distinction from other[s]." And correspondingly, provincialism is, first, the tendency for a group "to possess its own customs
and ideals; secondly, the totality of these customs and ideals themselves; and thirdly the love and pride which leads the inhabitants of a province
to cherish as their own these traditions, beliefs and aspirations" (61). Emphasizing unity, love, and pride, Royce's definitions steer away from the
negative connotations of provincialism. But in Royce's day- and not much has changed in this regard-it was the negative, or "false," form of
provincialism that most often came to people's minds when they thought about the value and effects of the concept. As Royce was writing in
1902, the false provincialism, or "sectionalism," of the United States' Civil War was a recent memory for many of his readers. In the Civil War,
stubborn commitment to one portion of the nation violently opposed it to another portion and threatened to tear the nation apart. Provincialism,
which appealed to regional values to disunite, had to be condemned in the name of patriotism, which united in the name of a higher good. Royce's
rhetorical strategy is to take the challenge of defending provincialism head-on: "My main intention is to define the right form and the true office
of provincialism-to portray what, if you please, we may call the Higher Provincialism, -to portray it, and then to defend it, to extol it, and to
counsel you to further just such provincialism" (65). Royce readily acknowledges that "against the evil forms of sectionalism we shall always
have to contend" (64). But he denies that provincialism must always be evil. Going against the grain of most post-Civil War thinking about
provincialism, Royce urges that the present state of civilization, both in the world at large, and with us, in America, is such as to define a new
social mission which the province alone, but not the nation, is able to fulfil [sic] . . . .[T]he modern world has reached a point where it needs,
more than ever before, the vigorous development of a highly organized provincial life. Such a life, if wisely guided, will not mean disloyalty to
the nation. (64) Wisely developed, provincialism need not conflict with national loyalty. The two commitments can-and must, Royce insists-
flourish together. Likewise, whiteness need not conflict with membership in humanity as a whole. The two identities can-and must-flourish
together. The relationship between provincialism and nationalism, as discussed by Royce, serves as a fruitful model for the relationship of
whiteness and humanity, and critical conservationists of whiteness should follow Royce's lead by taking head-on the challenge of critically
defending whiteness. Like embracing provincialism, embracing whiteness might seem to be a step backward for the modern world-toward
limitation and insularity that breed ignorance, prejudice, and hostility toward others who are different from oneself. Like having a national rather
than provincial worldview, seeing oneself as a member of humanity rather than of the white race seems to embody an expansive, outward
orientation that is open to others. But there is a "new social mission" with respect to racial justice that whiteness, and not humanity as a whole,
humanity needs a "highly organized" anti-
can fulfill. Race relations, especially in the United States, have reached a point where
racist whiteness, that is, an anti-racist whiteness that is consciously developed and embraced . How then can we (white
people, in particular) wisely guide the development of such whiteness so that it does not result in disloyalty to other races and humanity as a
whole? Before addressing this question, let me point out two important differences between whiteness and provincialism as described by Royce.
First, while Royce calls for the development of a wise form of provincialism, he is able to appeal to existing "wholesome" forms of provincialism
in his defense of the concept. He addresses himself "in the most explicit terms, to men and women who, as I hope and presuppose, are and wish to
be, in the wholesome sense, provincial," and his demand that "the man of the future . . . love his province more than he does to-day" recognizes a
nugget of wise provincialism on which to build (65, 67). The development of wise provincialism does not have to be from scratch. In contrast, it
is more difficult to pinpoint a nugget of "wholesome" whiteness to use as a starting point for its transformation. Instances of white people who
helped slaves and resisted slavery in the United States, for example, certainly can be found-the infamous John Brown is only one such example-
but such people often are seen as white race traitors who represent the abolition, not the transformation of whiteness.9 The task of critically
conserving whiteness probably will be more difficult than that of critically conserving provincialism since there is not a straightforward or
obvious "right form and true office" of whiteness to extol. Second, true to his idealism, Royce describes both provincialism and its development
as explicitly conscious phenomena. Royce notes the elasticity of the term "province"-it can designate a small geographical area in contrast with
the nation, or it can designate a large geographical, rural area in contrast with a city (57-58)-but it always includes consciousness of the province's
unity and particular identity as this place and not another. Put another way, probably every space, regardless of its size, is distinctive in some way
or another. What gives members of a space a provincial attitude is their conscious awareness of, and resulting pride in, that space as the
distinctive place that it is. On Royce's model, someone who is provincial knows that she is, at least in some loose way. The task of developing her
provincialism, then, is to develop her rudimentary conscious awareness of her province, to become "more and not less selfconscious, well-
established, and earnest" in her provincial outlook (67). In contrast-and here lies the largest difference between provincialism and whiteness-
many white people today do not consciously think of themselves as members of this (white) race and not another, not even loosely. Excepting
members of white militant groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Creativity Movement, contemporary white people do not tend to have a
conscious sense of unity as fellow white people, nor do they consciously invoke or share special ideals, customs, or common memories as white
people. They often are perceived and perceive themselves as raceless, as members of the human species at large rather than members of a
particular racial group. This does not eliminate their whiteness or their membership in a fairly unified group. Just the opposite: such
"racelessness" is one of the marks and privileges of membership in whiteness, especially middle and upper class forms of whiteness. White
people can feel a pride in the ideals and customs of whiteness and possess a sense of distinction from people of other races without much, if any
conscious awareness of their whiteness and without consciously identifying those ideals and customs as white. To take one brief example, styles
and customs of communication in classrooms tend to be raced (as well as classed and gendered), and white styles of discussion, hand-raising, and
turn-taking tend to be treated as appropriate while black styles are seen as inappropriate.10 White students often learn to feel proud and validated
by their teachers as good students when they participate in these styles, and this almost always happens without either students or teachers
consciously identifying their style (or themselves) as white. Such students appear to belong and experience themselves as belonging merely to a
group of smart, orderly, responsible students, not to a racialized group. In the United States and Western world more broadly, unconscious habits
of whiteness and white privilege have tended to increase after the end of de jure racism.11 Unlike provincialism as described by Royce, whiteness
tends to operate more sub- and unconsciously than consciously. But I do not think that this fact spoils wise provincialism as a fruitful model for
wise whiteness. First, and reflecting a basic philosophical disagreement that I have with Royce's idealism, I doubt that provincialism always
functions as consciously as Royce suggests it does. The unity, pride, and love that are the hallmarks of provincialism could easily function in the
form of unreflective beliefs, habits, preferences, and even bodily comportment. In fact I would argue that many aspects of our provincial
loyalties-whatever type of province is at issue-operate on sub- or unconscious levels. In that case, provincialism and whiteness would not be as
dissimilar in their operation as Royce's description implies. Second, even if provincialism tends to consciously unify people while whiteness does
 Jaguar Debate 214

not, Royce's advice that people should attempt to become more, rather than less self-conscious in their provincialism still applies to white people
Given whiteness's history as a racial category of violent exclusion and oppression, one
with respect to their whiteness.
might think that white people need to focus less on their whiteness, to distance themselves from it. But just the opposite
is the case. Given that distance from racial identification tends to be the covert modus operandi for contemporary forms of white privilege, white
Rather than ignore their whiteness,
people who wish to fight racism need to become more intimately acquainted with their whiteness.
which allows unconscious habits of white privilege to proliferate unchecked, white people need to bring
their whiteness to as much conscious awareness as possible (while also realizing that complete self-transparency is never
achievable) so that they can try to change what it means . But why focus on increased awareness of whiteness simpliciter? I
mentioned briefly above that raced styles of communication also tend to be gendered and classed, and even more accurate would be to say that
race, gender, class, sexuality, and other significant axes of lived experience transactionally co-constitute one another. Race, including whiteness,
is never lived in isolation from these other axes. In the United States, the way that a white person experiences and is impacted by her whiteness
likely will vary depending on his/her ethnicity, gender and class in particular, and across the globe, national differences can give whiteness a very
different meaning.12 For these reasons, one might wonder why I do not urge white people's increased consciousness of, for example, their Irish-
American-whiteness, Southern-woman-whiteness, or lesbian-working-class-whiteness. Such forms of hyphenated whiteness might seem more
likely to be sources of consciously felt unity, shared customs, and memory than would generic whiteness. In that case, "wise whiteness" should be
read as mere shorthand for an indefinite number of forms of anti-racist whiteness. I agree that one of the functions of the term wise whiteness is
to serve as an umbrella for the infinitely rich and complicated ways that white people embody their whiteness. But I think it is important that the
term not be understood merely as a bit of convenient shorthand that could be discarded without loss. It has a more substantial function than that of
an umbrella, and treating it as mere shorthand risks letting white privilege and white supremacy off the hook too easily. Especially in the case of
white ethnicities, insisting that whiteness always be considered in connection with other axes of identity can collapse race into ethnicity and work
to deflect attention away white domination and oppression. Whiteness does mean different things for, e.g., Irish-American-whites and Italian-
American-whites, and these two groups of white people have different racial histories and therefore at least somewhat different racial presents.
But its full meaning is not contained in those different ethnicities. There is something to being white that being contemporarily Irish or Italian
alone does not capture. So while whiteness is always transactionally constituted in and through other categories of lived experience, a functional
separation of race from those other categories can be and sometimes needs to be made. In practice there is no such thing as whiteness by itself,
and yet for particular purposes and because of the tendency of its erasure, it can be useful to focus on whiteness in abstraction from other lived
categories. In that pragmatic sense, with the term "wise whiteness" I speak not only of the rehabilitation of a collection of hyphenated forms of
whiteness, but also for a rehabilitated whiteness simpliciter. Royce's eloquent pleas on the behalf of provincialism speak to my point about
bringing whiteness to as much conscious awareness as possible. As Royce appeals to his readers, he urges, "I hope and believe that you all intend
to have your community live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in
general" (67). On the same theme, he later compares the problem of wise provincialism with the problem of any individual activity, which
admittedly can become narrow and self-centered. Acknowledging this problem, Royce counters, But on the other hand, philanthropy that is not
founded upon a personal loyalty of the individual to his own family and to his own personal duties is notoriously a worthless abstraction. We love
the world better when we cherish our own friends the more faithfully. We do not grow in grace by forgetting individual duties in behalf of remote
social enterprises. Precisely so, the province will not serve the nation best by forgetting itself, but by loyally emphasizing its own duty to the
nation . . . . (98) The disappearance of the individual does not well serve larger social enterprises. Those enterprises thrive only if the personal,
passionate energies of individuals are poured into them. Large enterprises and institutions tend to become anemic abstractions if they are not
rooted in felt individual commitments. Likewise, properly understood, the nation need not be in a competitive relationship with the various
communities that it shelters. Loyalty to and love for one's more local connections can be a powerful source of meaningful loyalty to and love for
one's nation. In both cases, the same pattern can be detected: rich ties to the smaller entity-the individual or the community-are what sustain
meaningful connections to the larger entity-the philanthropic cause or the nation. The two are not necessarily in conflict, as is often thought, and
in fact the larger entity would suffer if ties to the smaller entity were cut off. It is useful to anti-racist struggle to think of a similar relationship
holding between particular races, including the white race, and humanity at large. While it might initially seem paradoxical, the larger entity of
humanity can best be served by people's ties to smaller, more local entities such as their racial groups. A person's racial group is not the only
smaller entity that provides the rich existential ties of which Royce speaks-he rightly mentions family, and we could add entities such as one's
neighborhood, one's church, mosque or synagogue, and even groups based on one's gender or sexual orientation. But race also belongs in this list
of sites of intimate connection that can and often do sustain individual lives and that can support rather than undermine the well being of
humanity. Forgetting one's duty to one's particular race in the name of working for racial justice, for example, tends to turn that goal into a remote
abstraction. "You cannot be loyal to merely an impersonal abstraction," Royce reminds us.13 Effectively serving the goal of racial justice is more
likely to occur if one concretely explores how racial justice could emerge out of loyalty to one's particular race. This claim might not seem
objectionable when considering racial groups that are not white. Loyalty to other members of their race has been an important way for African
Americans, for example, to further the larger cause of racial justice. Black slaves who helped each other escape their white masters fought against
slavery and thus helped humanity as a whole. But the history of whiteness suggests that white people's loyalty to their race not only would not
help, but in fact would undermine struggles for racial justice. How could white people serve the larger interests of the human race by being loyal
to a race that has oppressed, colonized, and brutalized other races? What possible duties or obligations to their race could white people have,
responsibilities that must be remembered if racial justice is to be a concrete, lived goal for white people to work toward? On the one hand, these
questions can seem outrageous, even dangerous. Talk of duty to the white race smacks of militarist white supremacist movements, and indeed the
first of the Creativity Movement's sixteen commandments in their "White Man's Bible" is that "it is the avowed duty and holy responsibility of
each generation to assure and secure for all time the existence of the White Race upon the face of this planet," and the sixth is that "your first
loyalty belongs to the White Race."14 Noel Ignatiev's concern about the scholarly validation of white supremacy through the critical conservation
of whiteness could not be better placed than here. Temporarily setting aside the dangerous aspect of these questions, they also can seem
nonsensical if they do not refer to the goals of white supremacist movements. What antiracist duties, we might ask with some sarcasm, do white
people have that must not be forgotten? African Americans and other non-white people might be able to combine loyalty to their racial group
 Jaguar Debate 215

with loyalty to humanity, but white people cannot. Their situations are too different to treat their relationships to their races as similar. Those
relationships are asymmetrical, which means that white people's loyalty to the human race, including racial justice for all its members, conflicts
with loyalty to whiteness. Loyalty to humanity would seem to require white people to be race traitors. On the other hand, these questions present
a needed challenge to white people who care about racial justice. Rather than rhetorically or sarcastically, the questions can be asked in the spirit
of Royce's call for each "community [to] live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called
humanity in general" (67). For white people to fight white supremacy and white privilege does not mean for them
to attempt to shed their whiteness and become members of the human species at large . Attempting to become raceless by
living the life of an abstraction called humanity merely cultivates a white person's ignorance of how race , including whiteness,
and racism inform her habits, beliefs, desires, antipathies, and other aspects of her life. It does not magically
eliminate her white privilege for even if she succeeds in thinking of herself as a raceless member of humanity, she likely will continue to
be identified and treated as white, even if unreflectively or unconsciously, by others. By allowing her white privilege to go
unchecked in this way, a white person's living the life of abstract humanity actually tends to increase, not
reduce her racial privilege. To increase the chances of reducing her racial privilege, she must resist the
temptation to see herself as raceless and instead figure out what it could mean for her to live her own life
as a racialized person. Living as a racialized, rather than abstract person does not mean attempting to take on a different race. Attempting
to take on a different race implicitly acknowledges that whiteness is problematic, and it can seem to be an expression of respect for non-white
people. But it often is no better a response to white privilege than attempting to shed one's whiteness. This is because a white person's taking on
the habits, culture, and other aspects of another race often is an expression of ontological expansiveness, which is a habit of white privileged
people to treat all spaces-whether geographical, existential, linguistic, cultural, or other-as available for them to inhabit at their choosing.15
Appropriating another race in this way thus is closer to imperialist colonialism than a gesture of respect. For this reason, white people need to
stop trying to flee the responsibilities and duties that come with being white and figure out how to live their own racialized li fe, not the life of
Once they no longer ignore or attempt to flee their whiteness, they can then ask how work for
another race.
racial justice fits with their duties and responsibilities as a white person and how they might live their own
anti-racist white life. Three "Evils" Eliminated by Wise Whiteness Royce lists three specific problems in modern American life that
cannot be solved without wise provincialism. His discussion of these "evils," as Royce calls them, also illuminates "evils" that a wise form of
whiteness could help meliorate. The first evil is the neglect of and disruption to a community when people are only loosely associated with it and
do not invest in, care about, or have a significant history with it. Royce argues that this problem is growing in frequency and significance as
people are increasingly mobile, changing their residency multiple times over their lifetime and often moving great distances from where they
were born and raised. This means that communities are increasingly dealing with a large number of newcomers who do not (yet) have an
intimate, caring connection to the new place they inhabit. This is "a source of social danger, because the community needs well-knit organization"
(73). Provincialism helps these newcomers care for their new home, and a wise provincialism does so without generating any hostility toward
either other provincial communities or larger social bodies such as the nation. In a similar fashion, when white people who care about racial
justice have virtually no conscious or deliberate affiliation with their whiteness, the meaning and effect of whiteness is left to happenstance or,
more likely, is determined by white supremacist groups. Royce's primary concern is the dissolution of communities through neglect, and if well
intentioned white people do not care about, invest in, or acknowledge a significant history with their whiteness, then whiteness will be neglected.
But unlike provincial communities, whiteness does not necessarily unravel or wither away because of simple neglect by anti-racist white people.
whiteness can easily
Its neglect by anti-racists whites instead leaves it wide open for racist white groups to develop. Like a garden,
grow tough weeds of white supremacy if it is not wisely cultivated. The evil of abandoning whiteness,
allowing white supremacists to make of it whatever they will, can be mitigated by a wise form of
whiteness. In practice, this means that white people who care about racial justice need to educate newcomers
to whiteness-namely, white children-to be loyal to and care about their race. While Royce's comments about the problem of newcomers due
to increased geographical mobility do not apply directly to whiteness,16 white children can be thought of as newcomers to the community of
whiteness who do not (yet) have an intimate connection to their race or know how to cultivate and care for it. Here again is an instance in which
white supremacists have been allowed to corner the market on whiteness : almost all explicit reflection and
writing on how to raise white children as white has been undertaken by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan,
World Church of the Creator, and Stormfront.17 The association is so tight that the mere suggestion of educating white children in their
white children about their whiteness need and should not mean
whiteness is alarming to many people. But educating
educating them to be white supremacists. A wise form of whiteness would help train the developing racial
habits of white children in anti-racist ways. 18 Royce calls the second problem addressed by provincialism that of "the leveling
tendency of recent civilization" (74), but more accurate, I think, would be to characterize the problem as one of monotonous sameness. Royce is
concerned that the increase of mass communication means that people all over the nation, indeed the globe, are reading the same news stories,
sharing the same ideas, fashions, and trends, and more and more imitating one another. The rich diversity of humankind, the independence of the
small manufacturer, and distinctiveness of the individual are being absorbed into a vast, impersonal social order. A wise provincialism is not
wholly opposed to these tendencies. There is great value in large groups of people coming to understand each other across their differences. But,
Royce argues, there often also is great value to be found in their differences, and those differences ought to be allowed to thrive. A wise
provincialism helps protect the variety of different places and communities so that they are not forced to be identical with each other. In a similar
 Jaguar Debate 216

way,wise whiteness helps preserve racial differences without treating people of various races as wholly
alien to each other and thus incapable of understanding each other across their differences . As Lucius Outlaw
asks, "Why is it, after thousands of years, that human beings are not all 'light khaki' instead of exhibiting the variety of skin tones (and other
features) more or less characteristic of various populations called races?"19 The answer, according to Outlaw, is not merely that racism and
invidious ethnocentrism have worked to establish inviolable boundaries between white and non-white races. It also is that different races are "the
result of bio-cultural group attachments and practices that are conducive to human survival and well-being."20With W.E.B. Du Bois, Outlaw
argues that racial differences can enrich everyone and that even if racism disappeared tomorrow, we should want discernibly distinct races to
continue to exist.21 The baby need not be thrown out with the bathwater. The rich variety of human racial and ethnic cultures need not be
eliminated to eliminate racism and invidious ethnocentrism. A wise whiteness also would caution, however, that white people's appreciation for
racial diversity and variety also can be an insidious form of whiteness in disguise. Too often, celebrations of multiculturalism and racial diversity
function as a smorgasbord of racial difference offered up for (middle-to-upper class) white people's consumption and enjoyment. They do this by
acknowledging some differences while simultaneously concealing others. It is very easy for white people to recognize and even celebrate racial
difference in the form of different food, dress, and cultural customs. It tends to be much more difficult for them to recognize racial difference in
the form of economic, educational, and political inequalities. Royce's criticism of the leveling tendencies of modern culture does not explicitly
depoliticize the issue, and he does mention that variety is needed particularly to counter "the purely mechanical carrying-power of certain ruling
social influences," an example of which is the hegemony of white culture (76 ).
But given the tendency of white (middle-to-
upper class, in particular) people to see whiteness as cultureless and boring and thus want to spice it up by
dabbling in other, "exotic" cultures, care must be taken that appreciation of diversity is not sanitized
through an avoidance of the history and present of white privilege. When that happens, appreciation of
plurality and diversity tend to become a covert vehicle for white ontological expansiveness. In contrast, a
wise whiteness values and thus transactionally conserves different races, as Outlaw does, without
depoliticizing the meaning of those differences . The third evil discussed by Royce, the mob spirit, occurs when all individual
judgment has been given up and a person becomes totally absorbed in a large social mass. Without discriminating individuals, the crowd or mob
is psychologically vulnerable to a strong leader, idea, or even a song that enflames emotions and leads people to act in ways they ordinarily would
not act. This danger is closely related to the one of sameness for behind the two dangers lay the same phenomenon: that of wide, inclusive human
sympathy (92-93). Openness to and sharing in the lives and the feelings of others is not always a positive event, Royce cautions us.
Undiscriminating sympathy can lend support to base absurdities as easily as to noble kindness, and as such sympathy is more of a neutral base for
psychological development than an automatic good to be ubiquitously cultivated. Under certain conditions-conditions that Royce thinks are
increasingly present in the modern world-wide, inclusive sympathy for others can become not only monotonous, but also dangerous (95). Loss of
the small-the particular, the local, the individual-as it is absorbed into the large is something to resist, and a wise provincialism helps prevent that
loss Royce's concern about the mob spirit does not directly speak to problems faced by a wise whiteness.22 But in this concern we can see the
streak of organic individualism that runs through Royce's work, which can tell us something important about the relationships of white
individuals to their race. Royce's legendary concern for community does not sacrifice or dissolve the individual into the larger whole. Just as false
forms of provincialism set up a false opposition between provincialism and nationalism, false forms of individualism set up a false opposition
between individualism and community or social causes. That kind of individualism fails because of its "failure to comprehend what it is that the
ethical individual needs," which is a cause greater than the individual that she can passionately serve (38). Here is where Royce's individualism is
distinctive: it insists that real individuality is found through personal choice of a larger cause that one loyally serves, not through endless
insistence that one is a single individual with personal initiative. This insistence is empty if never acted upon, leaving the so-called autonomous
individual lost and floundering. "Be an individual," Royce urges exasperatedly, "[b]ut for Heaven's sake, set about the task."23 To be a real
individual, a person needs something larger than herself to be a part of. And as communities of meaning, racial groups historically have
developed as one of those things. In Lucius Outlaw's words, racial and ethnic identification in part "develop[ed] as responses to the need for life-
sustaining and meaningful acceptable order of various kinds (conceptual, social, political)." 24
Human beings need to create
conceptual, social, political and other structures, including individual and social identities, to give their
lives meaning and purpose. While Outlaw talks about this need in terms of order and Royce speaks of it
in terms of a cause to devote one's self to, both point to an existential need that racial identity, including
whiteness, can serve and historically has served. And they both suggest that a theory of racial justice
that ignores this need will not be effective in practice.
 Jaguar Debate 217

State Reform Good

Civil society is not beyond repair – political liberalism can and should be reclaimed
for the purpose of breaking down anti-black racism.
Shelby 7 – Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard, 2007, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical
Foundations of Black Solidarity

For better or worse, black political solidarity has come to be associated with black nationalism. For many,
the very idea of black nationalism conjures up scary and unflattering images of the Black Power
movement and of controversial spokespersons for the Nation of Islam, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, US, and other influential black nationalist organizations
of the 1960s and early 1970s. This association leads many people, including some blacks, to be suspicious of calls for black political unity. In fact, at
least since the mid-nineteenth century, many have been hostile toward, dismissive of, or frightened by black nationalism. Conservatives who believe
that the fight for racial justice has already been won naturally reject black nationalism. They see calls for black political solidarity
as symptomatic of a pathological "victim's mentality" and generally urge African Americans to stop complaining about their situation and instead to take advantage of
the many opportunities that America offers. As they see it, the color line is not a serious problem in the twenty-first century. Indeed, some conservatives insist that the
roots of black America's problems lie in the self-defeating attitudes and dysfunctional behavior of blacks themselves. Yet
there are conservative
forms of black nationalism. These typically eschew political programs aimed at structural transformation ,
opting instead for group self-help strategies that emphasize the need for in-group racial responsibility. Conservative black nationalists do not deny the continuing
significance of racism. On the contrary, they often regard racism as a permanent feature of social life in America. They believe that it is futile to
struggle to end racial injustice in the United States and that African Americans should form self-
reliant black communities without making further demands on the state for racial reform . I reject
both forms of conservatism .2 I reject the first because I hold that racism still negatively affects the life prospects of African Americans in the
United States and therefore racial justice has not yet been achieved. I reject the second because I believe that antiblack racism is not incorrigible
and that blacks can work together to help effect meaningful social change. Thus, my argument is mainly directed
to progressives. Yet I mean "progressive" to be understood broadly: namely, any political orientation which maintains that there are basic social
injustices in our society that should, and can, be corrected by organized collective action or state
policy but which denies that these reforms are a matter of returning to some allegedly better form of social organization that existed in the past. The point
of focusing on progressive black politics rather than on its conservative counterpart is that the
former, though not the latter, typically holds that our society still faces serious problems of racial injustice and that
correcting them requires concerted action on the part of concerned citizens and their government . My
argument proceeds on the assumption, no doubt controversial, that this progressive view on race is correct . Liberals often portray black
nationalists as divisive, fanatical, dangerous, unprincipled, racist, delusional, and even mad. Liberal political philosophy is moreover often thought to be antithetical to
nationalism in all its forms—from its basic social ontology to its fundamental principles.3 Indeed, many liberals find the label nationalist, like the label Marxist,
enough to regard a thinker or ideology so labeled as politically dangerous, morally corrupt, and intellectually bankrupt. Accordingly, there has been little incisive
critical engagement with the black nationalist tradition by liberal political philosophers.4 However, there
is a strand of black nationalism that
is compatible with the core values of liberalism—values such as equal citizenship for all persons;
respect for individual autonomy; democratic constitutional government under the rule of law; the basic
right to freedom of conscience, expression, and association; tolerance for different conceptions of the good; equal
opportunity in education and employment; and a guaranteed minimum standard of living. This form of
black nationalism has a role to play in helping to realize these liberal ideals. Liberals should not dismiss or fear the black nationalist tradition, for there are
But if black nationalism is to be
indispensable insights to be gained from a sympathetic yet critical engagement with black nationalist theory.

sustained in the post-civil rights era, some of the ideas commonly associated with the tradition will have to be
rethought. In this way I conceive of a viable form of black nationalism as one that is compatible with what
John Rawls calls political liberalism (as opposed to comprehensive liberalism).5 This rethinking of black nationalism will force us to reconsider elements
of the intellectual legacy of the Black Power movement, as this radicalization of the black freedom struggle is often mistakenly viewed as making a sharp break with
liberal political philosophy.
 Jaguar Debate 218

Analyzing the ontic at the ontological level reifies the closure of colonialism and
makes pessimism a self-fulfilling prophecy
Hudson 13 (Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand , Johannesburg)
(Peter, Social Dynamics (2013): The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of
African studies, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2013.802867)
[BEGIN FOOTNOTE]
My foil here is the ontological fatalism of Frank Wilderson’s argument. See Wilderson (2008), according
to which “the only way Humanity can maintain both its corporeal and libidinal integrity is through the
various strategies through which Blackness is the abyss into which humanness can never fall” (105). And
“were there to be a place and time for blacks cartography and temporality would be impossible” (111).
Here then, the closure of colonialism is absolute. [END FOOTNOTE] “Whiteness” as whiteness – the
meaning of whiteness and that of “blackness” – is carried via “a constellation of postulates, a series of
propositions that slowly and subtly work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of
the group to which one belongs” – “a thousand details, anecdote stories” which are “woven” into
“prejudices, myths, the collective attitudes of a given group” (Fanon 1968, 78, 133). This is how the
“subject positions” of both whites and blacks are constituted. We can call this constellation the Colonial
Big Other (symbolic) in and through which the colonial relation is constituted and reproduced. This Big
Other is white, in that whiteness is its master signifier and therefore all identities are “white” under
colonialism. Everyone is white in the colonial symbolic – including blacks; it is just that they are “less
white” than “whites” to the point of not being at all – Fanon says again and again that “the black man
desires to be white” – but, when he looks at himself through the eyes he has adopted, the “eyes” that are
“his” – what he (qua white eyes) sees is something that doesn’t exist – “inequality, no non-existence”
(Fanon 1968, 98, original emphasis). He “subsists at the level of non-being” (131) – just as the white,
when it sees the black, sees an other that is, as Fanon says “absolutely not self,” so does the black see
himself – “as absolutely not self” (114). This is the depth of the fissure in the black colonial subject
position, caught between two impossibles: “whiteness,” which he desires but which is barred to him, and
“black- ness,” which is “non-existence.” Colonialism, anxiety and emancipation3 Thus the
self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There always has to exist an
outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility
of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which
isn’t excluded insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal
(may be considered “ontological”), its content (what fills it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its
reproduction – are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined
once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very
framework for deciding the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in
ontological stone but is political and never terminally settled. Put differ- ently, the “curvature of
intersubjective space” (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the “othering” of “otherness”
are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008).
The social does not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of these signifiers is never
necessary – because they are signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that
whites exist in a way barred to blacks – who are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of
the ontic – that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than the ontology of the social which
refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man
doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic
 Jaguar Debate 219

itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the
colonial division. “Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the
“ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as
ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the
separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the “void”
of “black being” functions as the ultimate substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible
forms of sociality are said to rest. What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its
constitutive axis, its “ontological” differential.
 Jaguar Debate 220

AT Security K
 Jaguar Debate 221

Link turn
Literature and psychological bias runs towards threat deflation- we are the opposite
of paranoid
Schweller, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University,
4
[Randall L., “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical RealistTheory of Underbalancing,” International Security 29.2 (2004) 159-201, Muse]

Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject . Indeed,
Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on
the causes of peace" could have been made with equal veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library
shelves are filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating threats, ranging from studies of
domestic politics to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there have been few
studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain why states have with
some, if not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their survival. There may be some cognitive or
normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a commonly used word, paranoia, for the
unwarranted fear that people are, in some way, "out to get you" or are planning to do oneharm. I suspect that just as
many people are afflicted with the opposite psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact,
they do not even like you. Yet, we do not have a familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word
that describes this pathology (hubris and overconfidence come close, but they plainly define something other than what I have described). That
noted, international relations theory does
have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of states'
underestimation of threats to their survival, the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a
disparaging way by theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naïveté associated with Munich and the outbreak of
World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the
analogy either mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is deliberately used by leaders to
justify such policies and mislead the public. Amore compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on
underreactions to threats, however, is the tendency of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as
the desire of theorists and journals to provide society with policy- relevant theories that may help
resolve or manage urgent security problems. Thus, born in the atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold
War, the field of security studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national
security that have had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings of—the
dangers of underreacting to or underestimating threats. After all, the nuclear revolution was not about overkill but, as
Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation ,
accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were more concerned about overreacting to
threats than underresponding to them. At a time when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than twenty-five minutes,
theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous
actions overly benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially
military nature that overwhelm the political process and bring on a war thatnobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear
war, and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94 Now that the Cold War is over, we can begin to
redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in
a prudent and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with recent realist studies on imperial
under- and overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the
United States had the national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power (i.e., the state was
weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the United States did [End Page 199] not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to
expand because it lacked the institutional state strength to harness resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar
argument with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent, fragmented states are unwilling and unable to balance against potentially
dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are unable to mobilize the required resources from a divided
society. The arguments presented here also suggest that elite
fragmentation and disagreement within a competitive
political process, which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for overexpansionist policies, are more likely to produce
underbalancing than overbalancing behavior among threatened incoherent states.96 This is because a balancing strategy
carries certain political costs and risks with few, if any, compensating short-term political gains,
and because the strategic environment is always somewhat uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among
 Jaguar Debate 222

fragmented elites within threatened states is more likely to generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to them. This dynamic
captures the underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I
have suggested some basic domestic-level variables that regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.

Realism inevitable – states will always seek to survive- the only hope is a transition
to human security
Rø, Associate Professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies and head of
the Centre for Transatlantic Relations. His interests include U.S. foreign policy,
origins of war, political theory, and philosophy of science, 13
[Johannes Gullestad, 2013, “Mechanistic Realism and US Foreign Policy: A New Framework for
Analysis”, p.44-45] //RH
By marrying these five assumptions, Mearsheimer (2001: 29) concludes that every
state in the system has -considerable
reason to think and sometimes behave aggressively". Prompted by the structural conditions, states constantly
look for opportunities to take the offensive and maximize relative power as they realize that this is
the best survival strategy. In effect, Mearsheimer's extrapola¬tion from the bedrock assumptions amounts to a semi-deterministic
account of the consequences of anarchy. I say "semi-deterministic" because Mearsheimer is inconsistent on this issue. Sometimes he maintains
that the system leaves states no choice but to behave aggressively if they want to survive. This is pure
determinism. At others he maintains that anarchy creates powerful incentives for aggressive behavior . This is a
weaker version of structural determinism. In sum, my argument is that the structure of the international system, not the
particular characteristics of individual great powers, causes them to think and act offensively and to seek hegemony.
(Ibid.: 53) This war-driving logic is "tragic" because power maximizing and the resulting interstate conflicts run counter to a state's desire for
survival. States do not want the conflicts they help create as they simply prefer security. They are neither evil nor possessed by an intrinsic will to
power, but merely worried about their con¬tinued existence. The security competition and the continuous threat of war are ultimately suboptimal
to all states in the system. It is an unintended fact of inter¬national politics that "survival mandates aggressive behavior ... [and that states] have to
seek more power if they want to maximize their odds of survival" (Mearsheimer 2001: 21). [T]he structure of the international system forces
states which seek only to be secure nonetheless to act aggressively toward each other.... Great
powers that have no reason to
fight each other — that are merely concerned with their own survival — nevertheless have little
choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. (Ibid.: 3) Although tragic,
little can be done to amend the situation . The lack of a sover¬eign authority with a mandate and the capacity to check
offensive behavior pre¬scribes continued uncertainty. Had the states been assured of being rescued in case of foreign aggression, they would have
had little reason to fear for their security and future survival. But, contrary to the situation in a well-ordered state, the international system lacks
an agency that penalizes state perpetrators. States
can only rely on themselves, making the international system of
self-help" system (Mearsheimer 2001: 32). Moreover, each state knows full well that other states have the capacity and knowledge to
produce offensive military capabilities. As all states realize that "force is the ultimate ratio of international politics" (ibid.: 56), they come to
appreciate the unique utility of military capacity. First, it deters other states from aggression as the costs may outweigh the prospective benefits.
Second, it is a necessary instrument of defense if deterrence fails and an adversary attacks. Third, it is an effective means to acquire more power,
either through blackmail, coercion or warfighting. As the prospect of survival depends on military possessions no state will fail to acquire them.
Uncertainty about other states bifurcates at this point. First, states become uncertain about how much military
capability other states have procured. To mitigate this uncertainty states pay close attention to how capabilities are distrib-uted
throughout the system. They also keep a wary eye on other states' "latent power", a term that denotes a state's wealth
and population size (Mearsheimer 2001: 55) - the two variables that best indicate potential growth of military power. When a state surveys its
environment to determine which states pose a threat to its survival, it focuses mainly on the offensive capabilities of potential LA rivals... Second,
suites become uncertain about the intentions of other states to employ the destructive means they possess. This uncertainty is more profound as it
cannot he mitigated by rational vigilance. Since intentions are unknowable, states worried about their survival therefore "make worst case
assumptions about their rival's intentions" (Mearsheimer 2001: 45). "Theabsence of central authority, the existence of
offensive military capabil-ity, uncertainty about other states' intentions, and the drive to survive
foster fear. This is a regularity of fundamental importance to Offensive Realism. Fear is the sole emotional catalyst in the international
system. Fear causes states to strive to be as powerful as possible relative to all others. "Strength ensures safety, and the greatest strength is the
greatest insurance of safety" (Mearsheimer 2001: xi). The ultimate safety guarantee is to become the hegemon in the
 Jaguar Debate 223

system, which denotes a state "that is so powerful that it dominates all the other states in the
system" (ibid.: 40). Hegemony is therefore the ultimate goal of every state. The reasons supporting an expansionist
strategy towards hegemony are straightforward. By being relatively more powerful, other states will be deterred from attacking you. If a state is
powerful, but uncertainty neverthe-less makes it fearsome, it has no compelling reasons to cease its unremitting hid for power until absolute
security is reached. It follows there is no such thing as an appropriate amount of power, since there is no meaningful way of knowing when the
level of appropriateness is reached. On the contrary, the appetite for power is insatiable. Small increments of relative power have equal value,
independent of power already achieved, suggesting that states are insensitive to arguments about marginal gains. Even states in a position of
considerable power advantage will be revisionist and crave for more. As Snyder (2002: 155) points out, "Mearsheimer's great powers require a
surplus of power over 'appropriateness' to cover uncertainties, possible miscalcula¬tions, and future surprise".
 Jaguar Debate 224

Security Good
Scenario planning is good – only way to reduce proximate causes of violence
Weaver, professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science,
University of Copenhagen, 2K
(Ole, International relations theory and the politics of European integration, p. 284-285)
The other main possibility is to stress' responsibility. Particularly in a field like security one has to make
choices a nd deal with the challenges and risks that one confronts – and not shy away into long-
range or principled trans-formations. The meta political line risks (despite the theoretical commitment to the
concrete other) implying that politics can be contained within large 'systemic questions . In line with he classical
revolutionary tradition, after the change (now no longer the revolution but the meta-physical transformation), there will be no
more problems whereas in our situation (until the change) we should not deal with the 'small questions'
of politics, only with the large one (cf. Rorty 1996). However, the ethical demand in post-structuralism (e.g.
Derrida's 'justice') is of a kind that can never be instantiated in any concrete political order – It is an
experience of the undecidable that exceeds any concrete solution and reinserts politics . Therefore,
politics can never be reduced to meta-questions there is no way to erase the small, particular, banal
conflicts and controversies. In contrast to the quasi-institutionalist formula of radical democracy which one finds in the 'opening'
oriented version of deconstruction, we could with Derrida stress the singularity of the event. To take a position, take part, and 'produce events'
(Derrida 1994: 89) means to get involved in specific struggles. Politics takes place 'in the singular event of engagement' (Derrida 1996: 83).
Derrida's politics is focused on the calls that demand response/responsi bility contained in words
like justice, Europe and emancipation. Should we treat security in this manner? No, security is not that kind
of call. 'Security' is not a way to open (or keep open) an ethical horizon. Security is a much more
situational concept oriented to the handling of specifics. It belongs to the sphere of how to handle
challenges – and avoid 'the worst' (Derrida 1991). Here enters again the possible pessimism which for the
security analyst might be occupational or structural. The infinitude of responsibility (Derrida 1996: 86) or the tragic
nature of politics (Morgenthau 1946, Chapter 7) means that one can never feel reassured that by some 'good deed', 'I have assumed my
responsibilities ' (Derrida 1996: 86). If I conduct myself particularly well with regard to someone, I know that it is to the detriment of an other; of
one nation to the detriment of my friends to the detriment of other friends or non-friends, etc. This is the infinitude that inscribes itself within
responsibility; otherwise there would he no ethical problems or decisions. (ibid.; and parallel argumentation in Morgenthau 1946; Chapters 6 and
7) Because of this there will remain conflicts and risks - and the question of how to handle them. Should
developments be securitized (and if so, in what terms)? Often, our reply will be to aim for de-securitization and then
politics meet meta-politics; but occasionally the underlying pessimism regarding the prospects for
orderliness and compatibility among human aspirations will point to scenarios sufficiently
worrisome that responsibility will entail securitization in order to block the worst. As a
security/securitization analyst, this means accepting the task of trying to manage and avoid spirals and
accelerating security concerns, to try to assist in shaping the continent in a way that creates the
least insecurity and violence - even if this occasionally means invoking/producing `structures' or
even using the dubious instrument of securitization. In the case of the current European configuration, the above analysis
suggests the use of securitization at the level of European scenarios with the aim of preempting and avoiding numerous instances of local
securitization that could lead to security dilemmas and escalations, violence and mutual vilification.
 Jaguar Debate 225

Performance contradictions
1. They have created a bad epistemological stance that has constructed a white
form of knowledge based off of the privileged idea of multiple worlds = this
should make you suspect of their ontology arguments because they are coded
in whiteness.
2. If discourse matters the performative stance to enact one type of rhetoric,
then say that rhetoric is bad makes them methodologically inconsistent and
produces and imperialist form of knowledge that seeks to coopt just causes.
3. Reject the team, not the argument. You reject the team, not the argument,
because it teaches them not to conflate these two forms of knowledge and get
away with it. They need to be punished by the ballot to teach them a lesson
that when you advance causes that try to change material consequences upon
individuals, you should have a consistent practice and advocacy.
4. Their knowledge production should be rejected and even further because it
forces us to debate against ourselves, it enacts an abusive form of negative
flex and tests it on the affirmative, and it allows for commodification of
critical arguments.
5. Conditionality is whiteness because it morphs into different forms, and that is
abusive.
6. Their performance contradictions are what allows them to speak from the ivy
tower pedestal of white privilege. The fact that they can just contradict
themselves by saying in one breath that minorities are the most important
impact of the round, and then talk about all these racist disadvantages about
terrorism and such is a position that perpetuates the state of anti-blackness.
 Jaguar Debate 226

AT Cap K
 Jaguar Debate 227

Cap Bad – Blackness

Racism is inextricably tied to the fundamentality of labor exploitation---race
informed larger systems of oppression
R.L. 2013, an informal theorist working on the problematic of racialised identities, gender and
communisation theory, internally cites Saidiya Hartman (“WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK
LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH,” http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-
and-social-death) // dobp
White supremacy is not some obscure hieroglyphic to be discerned by an attuned eye. White supremacy in itself is not a
coherent system. It does not possess a hidden essence that could be interrogated and revealed. It is instead a formal practice without coherent
content. White supremacy simply is a set of social and material practices. And its formal practice aims to generate the primary distinction
between black and white (or more precisely, non-black). Thus the racial distinction was a consequence, and not the cause, of slavery. From its
origins in slavery, the racial distinction was reproduced through historically specific institutional arrangements that enabled black subjection to
continue. The primary aim of these institutions was ‘the conjoint extraction of labour and social ostracisation of an outcast group deemed
unassimilable’.15 As
a direct relation of force, slavery was the condition of possibility for defining the
content of ‘free’ labour of the propertyless proletariat. To be ‘free’ and to be a worker was
negatively defined in relation to the slave. In this way, the structural position of the slave was
objectively positioned against work, outside and against the wage relation – ‘work is not an organic
principle for the slave’.16 After Emancipation, the Southern economy was decimated by the Civil War, the destruction of fixed capital
and land, and the collapse of the Confederate currency. It was particularly the newfound mobility of freed blacks and their refusal to immediately
Freed
enter into voluntary contractual relations with former slaveholders that prompted extraeconomic means to enforce their compliance.
blacks, situated outside the constraints of wage labour, needed to be integrated economically yet
excluded socially. In a way it was a problem of how to ‘humanise’ the sentient object. After all, if the slave was merely a sentient object
with no will, how could the freed black engage in the responsibilities of bourgeois individuality and ‘freedom’ requisite of waged labour? What
would it mean for a slave to become a free individual? Therefore the central concern after the abolition of slavery for
white civil society was managing the transition from the legalised subjection of slaves to the
informal and racialised subjection of blacks. The figure of the ‘free’ black from the outset was seen
as fundamentally outside the wage relation, purportedly unhabituated to the ethics of work and
hence in need of labour discipline. As such, various techniques of coercion were utilised against ex-slaves to ironically enforce the
construction of ‘consent’ for the free labour contract: the glaring disparities between liberal democratic ideology and
the varied forms of compulsion utilized to force free workers to sign labor contracts exceeded the
coercion immanent in capital labor relations and instead relied on older forms of extraeconomic
coercion. In short, violence remained a significant device in cultivating labor discipline.
Undeniably, inequality was the basis of the forms of economic and social relations that developed in
the aftermath of emancipation.17 During the period of American industrialisation in the 19th century, the construction of the labour
contract and a submissive working class necessitated the regulation of unemployment. As industrial capitalism developed with
the institution of slavery, there was a transmission of techniques in labour management between
industrialists and slaveowners, creating a line of continuity between the plantation system and the
factory: Not only did the crisis of industrialization – problems of pauperism, underemployment, and labor management – occur in the context
of an extensive debate about the fate of slavery, but also slavery informed the premises and principles of labor
discipline […] the forms of compulsion used against the unemployed, vagrants, beggars, and others in the postbellum North mirrored the
transition from slavery to freedom. The contradictory aspects of liberty of contract and the reliance on
coercion in stimulating free labor modeled in the aftermath of the Civil War were the lessons of
emancipation employed against the poor.18
 Jaguar Debate 228

Their capitalism critique avoids identity—this ideology allows white, middle class
males to cover it up with anti-capitalist movements.
Ross 2k – Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African studies at University of Michigan [Marlon. Pleasuring Identity, or the
Delicious Politics of Belonging. “Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging”. Published Autumn 2000.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057638. //JW]

Although in his contribution Eric Lott targets Professor Michaels's comments and his own recent feud with Timothy Brennan (who unfortunately
is not included in this volume) rather than Ken's argument, what Eric says about "left and liberal fundamentalists" who "simply and somewhat
penitently" urge us to "'go back to class'" could also be directed at Ken's conclusion. Ken writes, " Crafting
a political left that does
not merely reflect existing racial divisions starts with the relatively mundane proposition that it is
possible to make a persuasive appeal to the given interests of working and unemployed women and
men, regardless of race, in support of a program for economic justice." On this one, I side with Eric, rather than
Tim and Ken. Standing on the left depends on whose left side we're talking about. My left might be your
right and vice versa, because it depends on what direction we're facing, and what direction depends
on which identities we're assuming and affirming . Eric adds, "Even in less dismissive [than Tim's] accounts of new social
movements based not on class but on identities formed by histories of injustice, there is a striking a priori sense of voluntarism about the
investment in this cause or that movement or the other issue—as though determining the most fundamental issue were a matter of the writer's
strength of feeling rather than a studied or analytical sense of the ever-unstable balance of forces in a hegemonic bloc at a given moment." I
agree, but I'll risk mangling what Eric says by putting it more crassly. Touting class or "economic justice" as the
fundamental stance for left identity is just another way of telling everybody else to shut up so I can
be heard above the fray. Because of the force of "identity politics," a leftist white person would be
leery of claiming to lead Blacks toward the promised land, a leftist straight man leery of claiming to
lead women or queers, but, for a number of complex rationalizations, we in the middle class (where all
of us writing here currently reside) still have few qualms about volunteering to lead, at least theoretically, the working
class toward "economic justice." What Eric calls here "left fundamental ism," I'd call, at the risk of sounding
harsh, left paternalism . Of the big identity groups articulated through "identity politics," economic class remains the only
identity where a straight white middle-class man can still feel comfortable claiming himself a
leading political voice, and thus he may sometimes overcompensate by screaming that this is the
only identity that really matters? Which is the same as claiming that class is beyond identity. Partly
this is because Marxist theory and Marx himself (a bourgeois intellectual creating the theoretical practice for the workers'
revolution) stage the model for working-class identity as a sort of trans identification, a magical
identity that is transferable to those outside the group who commit themselves to it wholeheartedly
enough. If we look back, we realize even this magical quality is not special to a history of class struggle, as
whites during the New Negro movements of the early twentieth century felt that they were
vanguard race leaders because they had putatively imbibed some essential qualities of Negroness by
cross-identifying with the folk and their culture. Ironically, Ken's conclusion is full of the very identity concepts that he
hopes to transcend by an appeal to a broadly conceived "political left." As I have already suggested, " the left" is an identity
formation no less than race or gender or sexuality. Consider the other key terms of Ken's manifesto: "working and
unemployed," "men and women," "given interests." As Professor Michaels indicates, "interests" are always implicated in identity because they
concern the negotiation of subject positions. Ken's recourse to "men and women," instead of simply "people" or some other less gendered term,
indicates to what extent what he's referring to is an alliance or coalition. Rather
than ushering in a post-identity world of
pure common interests, Ken's manifesto looks back to the prehistory of "identity politics," that
Edenic moment before we fell into proliferating identities on the left. What is it that we bring
together in coalitions if not "men" and "women," with the identifiable interests that generally
bring them to a common place across their differing identity circumstances? What are the
"working" and "unemployed" if not class-based identity formations?
 Jaguar Debate 229

The alternative refuses to include black bodies by utilizing methods of numbering

and representation.
Ross 2k – Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African studies at University of Michigan [Marlon. Pleasuring Identity, or the
Delicious Politics of Belonging. “Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging”. Published Autumn 2000.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057638. //JW]

For Ken, "identity politics" is suspect because it fails not only a test of rational argumentation but also a test of effective political strategy. Ken
perceptively points out the non rational aspects of numbering and representation in "identity politics," how numbering and representation are so
easily turned against those seeking a fair hearing in the courts, assemblies, corporate offices, and factory floors where power is arbitrated. As he
demonstrates, what "counts for" blackness or some other identity is malleable not only to the
disempowered but also to the powerful, who can manipulate everything from census data to racial
profiling as a form of "community policing." Numbering and representation, however, were not
invented by "identity politics." They were the rules of the game in politics long before such a term
could have even been imagined. The question of how to count enslaved persons for the purposes of
determining the Congressional representation of the states was a Constitutional dilemma because
numbering and representation were grounding principles of liberal republicanism. As Patricia Williams
has so eloquently pointed out, we are still attempting to overturn the chain reactions put into place when the
Founding Fathers decided their compromise by fractioning each captive person into three-fifths of
a human body.8 "Identity politics" endeavors to make the rules of the game work for the
dispossessed, rather than against them. It may be the case that the Founding Fathers' rules can never dismantle the Fathers'
house, but perhaps they can be used to partition the rooms of the house fairly. More to the point, numbering and representation
are not just some set of arbitrary game rules rigged by a select group of elite men, although they
have operated as such for a very long time. They are, more fundamentally, the only rules that we currently
have for attempting to construct governance, society, and economics on democratic principles.
There can be no concept of democracy without some method of representation, and there can be no
representation without counting populations and finding ways to make representatives accountable
to them . Unless we have visions of stateless bodies dancing in our heads, the body politic, if it is to
be radically democratized, must be made radically accountable to the people currently at the
margins and bottoms of power by helping to place those very people in the halls of power. If
socialism and other Marxist-influenced agendas are forms of radical democratization, and I'd argue that
they are, they necessarily must rely on principles of numbering and representation, even if these
principles are transformed by a revolutionary practice not yet materialized. To underplay this , as
Soviet Communism certainly did, is to flirt with the very modes of tyranny —an old-fashioned word that needs to be
resuscitated? That radical democratization sets out to topple. The struggle for a radically democratized
society, governance, and economy dictates that numbering and representation, the hallmarks of
"identity politics," will always be a part of our politics because, as far as we can see any future,
numbering and representation are an intrinsic and thus necessary practice constituting
democratization itself.
 Jaguar Debate 230

A-B Root Cause

Analyzing race relations is a prerequisite to solving capitalism.
Ward’ 07 – philosopher at the University of Illinois [Robert Anthony. “NEOLIBERAL SILENCES, RACE, & THE HOPE OF CRT”.
Published April 2007. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.scribd.com%2Fdoc%2F125622438%2FNeoliberal-Silences-Race-the-Hope-of-Crt&ei=ul3DU6-
3PMivyATgk4CIBg&usg=AFQjCNHWHNOuLQdJMtA6P5QR0dXEU5CGsQ&sig2=maqnOQ-1Tr5K3foCRY_NQQ. //JW]

A critical race theory (CRT) framework places race as the central unit of analysis and attacks liberalism
and the inherent belief in the law to create an equitable and just society (2003, 149). Flying in the face
of neoliberal ideology and policy, one of the main tenets of CRT continues to hold that while
classical racism may have subsided, everyday racism has and continues to rise (2003, 149). Particularly
considering the context of New Orleans and the shifting focus from traditionally underserved
communities to viewing the individual student as a utility maximizer, it is important to engage a
critical race methodology here to expose the flaws of the color-blind view of everyday social
relations . The rhetoric of color-blindness pretends to ignore the impact on social perceptions, status, and identity of all societal members that
socialized notions of racial categories have; and is commonly used as a pretext to continue justifying those hierarchical racial divisions (2003,
150). Given the critical race-based positions that were developed in other fields, its coupling with
CRT has given the theory expanding explanatory power to address the myriad elements of race, its
role in shaping law and the nation state, personal and group identity, distribution of goods and
services, and institutional practices and policies. Since its inception, CRT has not lock itself into a singular line of criticism
against the law and society regarding race (Hayman, 1995). This notion of government at a distance through market
ideology and charter schools does not divorce us from the necessity of interrogating why, how, and
for what purposes do educational institutions reinforce racial, class, and gender inequality for
students of color (2003, 152). Regardless of the limited autonomy of charter schools, standard
approaches to educational policy are still the normative. The policy process has been typically
defined as a series of decisions regarding actions taken in terms of what to do, decisions on how to
do it, and decisions on how to assess outcomes through assessment and evaluation (Lee, 1998) (2003, 154).
CRT tells us that although these areas are seemingly distinct, the policy process remains
interconnected , and decisions made in one vector process will have an effect on the other domains
(2003, 154-5). The complex realities of policymaking in education, which would include showing how influence, pressure, dogma, expediency,
conflict, compromise, error, and pragmatism all play a role in the policy process. Furthermore, we
need to criticize the illusion of
the “neat and superficial” way that the policy process has been presented; surely, the policy
process in education is “messy” (p.9) (155). Simply put, given that CRT views racism as a central part of
how society is organized and governed, it helps explain and illustrate how and why racism is
accepted and taken for granted by White society (2003, 156). However, when one examines the impact of
these policies over the long term, their combined effect is to provide minorities with an inferior
education that the majority of Americans would neither tolerate nor accept for their own children
(2003, 157). In the case of neoliberal policies and rhetoric, race, racialism, and racism play a role in
determining policy design, implementation, and particularly outcomes by simply pretending that
they don’t exist.

Cap not root cause of slavery, empirically proven that it would have been easier to
use white underclass
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank B., “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent)
Scandal”, Soc Justice 30 no2 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
 Jaguar Debate 231

Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that is central
to neither Gramsci nor Marx. According to Barrett (2002), something about the Black body in and of
itself made it the repository of the violence that was the slave trade. It would have been far
easier and far more profitable to take the white underclass from along the riverbanks of
England and Western Europe than to travel all the way to Africa for slaves.
Because slavery is an ontological position, getting rid of capitalism cannot solve.
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two
Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s
armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and
the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG
I raise Eltis’s counterposing of the symbolic value of slavery to the economic value of slavery in order to
debunk two gross misunderstandings: One is that work—or alienation and exploitation—is a
constituent element of slavery. Slavery, writes Orlando Patterson, “is the permanent, violent domination of
natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” Patterson goes to great lengths to delink his three “constituent
elements of slavery” from the labor that one is typically forced to perform when one is enslaved. The forced labor is not
constitutive of enslavement because whereas it explains a common practice, it does not define the
structure of the power relation between those who are slaves and those who are not. In pursuit of his
“constituent elements” of slavery, a line of inquiry that helps us separate experience (events) from ontology
(the capacities of power—or lack thereof—lodged within distinct and irreconcilable subject
positions, e.g., Humans and Slaves), Patterson helps us denaturalize the link between force and labor, and
theorize the former as a phenomena that positions a body, ontologically (paradigmatically), and the
latter as a possible but not inevitable experience of someone who is socially dead. The other
misunderstanding I am attempting to correct is the notion that the profit motive is the consideration within the
slaveocracy that trumps all others. David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and
Achille Mbembe have gone to considerable lengths to show that, in point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status
for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but
accumulation and fungibility (Hartman): the condition of being owned and traded. As these Black writers have
debunked conventional wisdom pertaining to the grammar of slave suffering, so too has David Eltis provided a major corrective on the
commonsense wisdom that profit was the primary motive driving the African slave trade.

Capitalism is not the root cause of anti-blackness

Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two
Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s
armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and
the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, )GG
Both Spillers and Eltis remind us that the archive of African
slavery shows no internal recognition of the libidinal
costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh. From Marx’s reports on proposed vagabond-into-
slave legislation, it becomes clear that the libidinal economy of such European legislation is far too
unconsciously invested in “saving” the symbolic value of the very vagabonds such laws consciously
seek to enslave. In other words, the law would rather shoot itself (that is, sacrifice the economic
development of the New World) in the foot than step into a subjective void where idlers and
vagabonds might find themselves without contemporaries, with no relational status to save. In this
way, White-on-White violence is put in check (a) before it becomes gratuitous, or structural, before
it can shred the fabric of civil society beyond mending; and (b) before conscious, predictable, and
 Jaguar Debate 232

sometimes costly challenges are mounted against the legislation despite its dissembling lack of
resolve. This is accomplished by the imposition of the numerous “on condition that…” and “supposing that…” clauses bound up in the word
“if” and also by claims bound up in the language around the enslavement of European children: a White child may be enslaved on condition that
s/he is the child of a vagabond, and then, only until the age of 20 or 24.

Slavery is the ontological experience of the black body

Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two
Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s
armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and
the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,) GG
During the emergence of new ontological relations in the modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s, many different kinds of
people experienced slavery. In other words, there have been times when natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence have turned
individuals of myriad ethnicities and races into beings who are socially dead. But the
African, or more precisely Blackness, is
the moniker for an individual who is by definition always already void of relationality . Thus,
modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race of
people who, a priori, that is prior to the contingency of the “transgressive act” (such as losing at war or being
convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world. This, I will argue, is as true for those
who were herded onto the slave ships as it is for those who had no knowledge whatsoever of the coffles. In this period, chattel slavery, as
a condition of ontology and not just as an event of experience, stuck to the African like Velcro. To the extent
that we can think the essence of Whiteness and the essence of Blackness, we must think their
essences through the structure of the Master/Slave relation. It should be clear by now that I am not only drawing a
distinction between what is commonly thought of as the Master/Slave relation and the constituent elements of the Master/Slave relation
(Patterson 6), but I am also drawing a
distinction between the experience of slavery (which anyone can be subjected to)
and the ontology of slavery, which in Modernity (the years 1300 to the present) becomes the singular purview
of the Black. In this period, slavery is cathedralized. It “advances” from a word which describes a condition
that anyone can be subjected to, to a word which reconfigures the African body into Black flesh. Far
from being merely the experience of the African, slavery is now the African’s access to (or, more correctly, banishment from) ontology.

Cap/Marxism does not take into consideration white supremacy, it ignores racism
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank, Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society?”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Any serious consideration of the question of antagonistic identity formation — a formation, the
mass mobilisation of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and assumptive logic which undergird the United States of America —
must come to grips with the limitations of marxist discourse in the face of the black subject.
This is because the United States is constructed at the intersection of both a capitalist and
white supremacist matrix. And the privileged subject of marxist discourse is a subaltern who is approached by variable capital —
a wage. In other words, marxism assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white
supremacy. In this scenario, racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political
economy.This is not an adequate subalternity from which to think the elaboration of
antagonistic identity formation; not if we are truly committed to elaborating a theory of crisis — crisis at the crux of
America’s institutional and discursive strategies. The scandal with which the black subject position threatens
Gramscian discourse is manifest in the subject’s ontological disarticulation of Gramscian
categories: work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony, and historical self-
awareness. By examining the strategy and structure of the black subject’s absence in Antonio Gramsci’s
Prison Notebooks and by contemplating the black subject’s incommensurability with the
key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with three unsettling consequences.
 Jaguar Debate 233

Cap can never solve for blackness since it ignores racism and white supremacy
Wilderson, Professor UCI, 2003 (Frank, Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society?”, Social Identities, Volume 9, Number 2, 2003, Accessed 8-4-12, MR)
Firstly, the black American subject imposes a radical incoherence upon the assumptive logic
of Gramscian discourse. In other words, s/he implies a scandal. Secondly, the black subject reveals marxism’s
inability to think white supremacy as the base and, in so doing, calls into question
marxism’s claim to elaborate a comprehensive, or in the words of Antonio Gramsci, ‘decisive’ antagonism. Stated
another way: Gramscian marxism is able to imagine the subject which transforms her/himself
into a mass of antagonistic identity formations, formations which can precipitate a crisis in
wage slavery, exploitation, and/or hegemony, but it is asleep at the wheel when asked to
provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and/or terror. Finally, we begin to see how marxism
suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety: a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis
— a society which does away not with the category of worker, but with the imposition
workers suffer under the approach of variable capital: in other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its
desire to democratise work and thus help keep in place, ensure the coherence of, the Reformation and Enlightenment ‘foundational’ values of
productivity and progress. This is a crowding-out scenario for other post-revolutionary possibilities, i.e. idleness.

Slavery led to modern capitalism

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, 2-24-2014, "How Slavery Led To Modern Capitalism," Huffington
Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/24/slavery_n_4847105.html
Bloomberg View: When the New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of
which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations. Brown was among the world's most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his family’s firm, Brown Brothers &
Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and foreign exchange to the U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves

from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan. Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi

to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of
the nation's banks. Likewise, the architects of New England's industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations. The
story we tell about slavery is almost always regional, rather than national. We remember it as a cruel institution of the southern states that would later secede from the Union. Slavery, in this telling, appears limited in scope, an

slavery's centrality to the rise of American

unfortunate detour on the nation's march to modernity, and certainly not the engine of American economic prosperity. Yet to understand

capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were
potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees. Such revelations are

the nation’s economic development. America's "take-off" in the 19th century wasn't in spite of slavery;
hardly surprising in light of slavery’s role in spurring

it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the
emergence of modern capitalism itself. The U.S. won its independence from Britain just as it was becoming possible to imagine a liberal alternative to the mercantilist policies of the
colonial era. Those best situated to take advantage of these new opportunities -- those who would soon be called "capitalists" -- rarely started from scratch, but instead drew on wealth generated earlier in the robust Atlantic economy of
slaves, sugar and tobacco. Fathers who made their fortunes outfitting ships for distant voyages begat sons who built factories, chartered banks, incorporated canal and railroad enterprises, invested in government securities, and
speculated in new financial instruments. This recognizably modern capitalist economy was no less reliant on slavery than the mercantilist economy of the preceding century. Rather, it offered a wider range of opportunities to profit
from the remote labor of slaves, especially as cotton emerged as the indispensable commodity of the age of industry. In the North, where slavery had been abolished and cotton failed to grow, the enterprising might transform slave-
grown cotton into clothing; market other manufactured goods, such as hoes and hats, to plantation owners; or invest in securities tied to next year's crop prices in places such as Liverpool and Le Havre. This network linked Mississippi
planters and Massachusetts manufacturers to the era's great financial firms: the Barings, Browns and Rothschilds. A major financial crisis in 1837 revealed the interdependence of cotton planters, manufacturers and investors, and their
collective dependence on the labor of slaves. Leveraged cotton -- pledged but not yet picked -- led overseers to whip their slaves to pick more, and prodded auctioneers to liquidate slave families to cover the debts of the overextended.

The plantation didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy, it also generated
innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management . As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in
antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and

bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those
above for the labor of those below. The perverse reality of a capitalized labor force led to new accounting methods that incorporated (human) property depreciation in the bottom line as slaves aged, as well as new actuarial techniques
to indemnify slaveholders from loss or damage to the men and women they owned. Property rights in human beings also created a lengthy set of judicial opinions that would influence the broader sanctity of private property in U.S.
law. So important was slavery to the American economy that on the eve of the Civil War, many commentators predicted that the North would kill "its golden goose." That prediction didn't come to pass, and as a result, slavery's
importance to American economic development has been obscured. But as scholars delve deeper into corporate archives and think more critically about coerced labor and capitalism -- perhaps informed by the current scale of human
trafficking -- the importance of slavery to American economic history will become inescapable.
 Jaguar Debate 234

AT Neolib K
 Jaguar Debate 235

Permutation
Perm do both
The permutation solves best – neoliberal institutions can be used against
themselves – absolute refusal makes structural violence inevitable
Ferguson, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, 11 (James, The Uses of Neoliberalism,
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp 166–184)
If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded
political struggle—not only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it—then there is much to be said for
focusing , as I have here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and politics, even if doing so
inevitably puts us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the
seductive high ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires . But I would also insist that there is more at
stake in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the
chronically poor, or a technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign,
for instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of
worries that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated
valorization of the “informal”, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not
the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor,¶ in a context
where many of the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of
commanding the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far,
the technocrats’ dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit
pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and
lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming).¶ My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has
little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my
purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that they illustrate a process through which
specific governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to associating with
a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”) may be in the process of being peeled
away from that agenda, and put to very different uses . Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge
I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find

this turn of events of considerable interest.¶ As Steven Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to
question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic
“neoliberal” political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific “neoliberal”
techniques , on the other. Close attention to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price
driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case, fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship
between the technical and the political-economic “is much more polymorphous and unstable than is
assumed in much critical geographical work”, and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact “deployed in
relation to diverse political projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and
techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare states, social technologies need not have any essential or

eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed . Insurance
rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and
solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial measure) because it was
available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use. Specific ways of solving or posing governmental problems, specific
institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as with any other sort of technology, it is

not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do .¶ Foucault (2008:94) concluded his
discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet another search through our sacred texts, but
a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f
there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden
within socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of
 Jaguar Debate 236

governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of
bricolage (Le ́vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended
for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for
such tinkering, keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve. If we
can go beyond seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field
of specific governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be
repurposed, and put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word. If so, we may find that
the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first appeared, and that some
rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.
 Jaguar Debate 237

State Reform Solves

Have to transform systems from the inside out-otherwise rhetoric changes but not
policies.
McCormack, PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster, 2010
(Tara, Critique, Security and Power: The political limits to emancipatory approaches, pg 59-61)
Contemporary critical and emancipatory approaches reject the possibility of reaching an objective evaluation of
the world or social reality because they reject the possibility of differentiating between facts and values.
For the contemporary critical theorists, theory can only ever be for someone and for some purpose . As this is so then quite
logically critical theorists elevate their own values to be the most important aspect of critical theory. As a result of the rejection of the

fact/value distinction we see within the work of contemporary critical theorists a highly unreflective
certainty about the power of their moral position. Critical theorists argue that all theory is normative,
they offer in its place better norms: ones, as we have seen, that will lead to emancipation and will help the marginalised.
The claims made for the central role of the values of the theorist reveal the theoretical limits of
critical and emancipatory theory today. Yet even good or critical theory has no agency, and only political
action can lead to change. Theory does of course play an important role in political change. This must be the first step towards a critical engagement
with contemporary power structures and discourses. In this sense, we can see that it is critical theory that really has the potential to solve problems, unlike problem-
solving theory which seeks only to ensure the smooth functioning of the existing order. Through substantive analysis the critical theorist can transcend the narrow and
conservative boundaries of problem-solving theory by explaining how the problematic arises. Unlike problem-solving theory, critical theory makes claims to be able
to explain why and how the social world functions as it does, it can go beyond the ‘given framework for action’. The
critical theorist must
therefore be able to differentiate between facts (or social reality) and values , this ability is what marks the critical
theorist apart from the traditional or problem-solving theorists, who cannot, because of their values and commitment to the existing social world, go beyond the ‘given
framework for action’. If we cannot differentiate between our desires or values or norms (or our perspective, to put it in Cox’s terms)
and actually occurring social and political and historical processes and relationships, it is hard to
see how we can have a critical perspective (Jahn, 1998: 614). Rather, through abolishing this division we
can no longer draw the line between what we would like and everything else, and thereby contemporary
critical theories are as much of a dogma as problem-solving theories. Contemporary critical
theorists are like modern-day alchemists, believing that they can transform the base metal of the
unjust international order into a golden realm of equality and justice through their own words. For
contemporary critical theorists, all that seems that the crucial step towards progress to a better world order is
for the theorist to state that their theory is for the purposes of emancipation and a just world order.
 Jaguar Debate 238

Protectionism DA
The alternative leads to developmentalist protectionism – causes US isolationism –
turns the K because it blocks sustainability and social justice
Hess 12
(David Hess, David J. Hess is a professor in the Sociology Department at Vanderbilt University,
Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment, Director of Environmental
and Sustainability Studies, and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Sociology Department, “The
Green Transition, Neoliberalism, and the Technosciences.” In Luigi Pellizzoni and Marja Ylönen, eds.
Neoliberalism and Technoscience: Critical Assessments, Ashgate Press,
www.davidjhess.org/GreenTranNeolibEnv.pdf)=
The field sociology of neoliberalism also provides new ways to think about its possible future. The
fact that there was an historical
change during the 1970s and 1980s from the dominance of social liberalism to neoliberalism in many political fields across the world
raises the question of what type of ideology might emerge to replace neoliberalism . Historical change tends to
create new contradictions and countermovements (Polanyi 2010), but much of the scholarship on a post-neoliberal order is

clouded by nostalgia , such as belief that increasing within-nation inequality will lead to a swing of the
pendulum back toward the happy days of social liberalism, or by utopianism , such as belief that a crisis in

capitalism and global ecology will lead to a great transition to socialism or localism. I suggest that the historical
condition of the relative decline of an economic superpower may be leading to resurgence of a modified
form of its past of developmentalism. Developmentalist liberalism can be distinguished from neoliberalism and social
liberalism on several grounds, of which the increasingly defensive position on trade and the corresponding
invigoration of industrial policy are the most central. Developmentalism remains mainstream because it does
not challenge the premise of restricted government intervention into an economy based on large, publicly traded
corporations. In contrast with the three mainstream positions, agents in subordinate positions in the political field advance more radical visions of the global economy,
such as an economy based on locally owned, independent enterprises or one based on much higher levels of public ownership. Although
it is possible
that ideologies currently in a subordinate position in the political field may become dominant over the long
run, the likely outcome , albeit not necessarily desirable from either a sustainability or social justice
perspective, may be a growing tendency toward developmentalism . The shift within the American
political field in the twenty-first century is consistent with its nineteenth-century past and its isolationist
proclivities . During the nineteenth century the United States was a secondary economic power with respect to
European countries, and it pursued its successful policy of industrialization based on strong tariffs and
import substitution. Only after the United States had achieved clear hegemony in the global economy
did it shift to a liberalized position on trade, which at that time benefited the country by opening up foreign markets to trade on terms
favorable to the United States (Chang 2008). However, as foreign competition increased, sentiment in favor of a more
defensive approach to trade increased, first with respect to Japan during the 1980s and then today with respect to China. Thus, the
stage is set for the political field in the United States during the twenty-first century to look more like that of the
nineteenth century than the twentieth century. Because the United States has been the world’s leading supporter of neoliberal policies, a shift
toward developmentalism could have global implications for the history of neoliberalism as well as for the global
economy .
 Jaguar Debate 239

AT Consensual
 Jaguar Debate 240

Biometric surveillance is not consensual

Biometric surveillance is not something you can opt out of --- it’s involuntary.
Das ’14 [Ravi – owns a biometrics consultancy firm (Apollo Biometrics) based in Chicago, Illinois, “An
Introduction to Biometrics,” in Biometric Technology: Authentication, Biocryptography, and Cloud-Based
Architecture, p. 47]

The form of biometric technology that has been widely used with these types of surveillance activities has been and continues to be facial recognition.
Obviously, with surveillance, you want a contactless form of biometric technology to be used—which is why facial recognition is the popular choice. Another
biometric technology that can be potentially used in surveil lance applications is iris recognition. It is also non-contact, and with the recent advancements in
iris recognition technology, iris images can be captured of people on the move and at even further distances. Finally, another potential biometric technology that can
be used for surveillance activities and which is still under heavy research and devel opment is gait recognition, i.e., the actual verification and identification
of an individual is based upon how they walk or their unique stride. A key point to be made here is that these biometric technologies just mentioned

do not require a cooperative subject because the most widely used surveillance activity is that of
covert operations. However, despite the advantages that these biometric technologies offer to a particular type of surveillance application, all surveillance
activities suffer from a number of limitations, which are as follows:

Biometric identification is not a choice.

Liu ’13 [Nancy Yue – Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, Ph.D. in IT law from the University of
Oslo and an LL.M. in IT law from Stockholm University, “5. Biometrics and privacy protection in the United
States,” in Bio-Privacy: Privacy Regulations and the Challenge of Biometrics, Routledge, 2013, p. 176]
Hence, where the Fourth Amendment is concerned, the court needs to assess whether the individual had the ability to choose to refuse such invention. Put simply, the
justification of the ‘stop’ hinges on the ‘consent’ of the individual. If the individual is notified and given the possibility to accept or refuse such inquiry, there is no
Fourth Amendment violation. This idea is in accordance with most other privacy legislation, such as the European Data Protection Directive 95/46/ EC and the
Australian Privacy Act 1988.,,u The slight difference is that in US case analysis there is no clear requirement of‘notice’, which means the government is not required
to tell individuals about their right to decline; as long as the individual is not prohibited from asserting his right to terminate the search, the intervention may be
justified. The same analysis applies for biometric technology. The government could seek to justify its intervention into individual privacy by initiating a voluntary
program. However, in
most occasions when biometric identification or authentication is used, individuals
are not given any choice . This renders this justification irrelevant to most biometric applications.
 Jaguar Debate 241

Biometrics for refugees are especially not

The forced pressure is what makes biometrics not consensual. It is the effect of the
panopticon, of disciplinary power that makes this type of collection of data
unconsensual. The only choice these refugees have is either to have their biometric
information collected or to die. That is not a choice.
 Jaguar Debate 242

AT T – Surveillance
 Jaguar Debate 243

2AC – C/I
C/I – Surveillance isn’t static and can manifest itself in any relationship.
Shawki 9 (Sharif, Professor @ Illinois Western University "Surveillance and Foucault: Examining the
Validity of Foucault's Notions Concerning Surveillance through a Study of the United States and the
United Kingdom" (2009). Honors Projects. Paper 23. http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/socanth_honproj/23)
Before the application sections commence, Foucault's definition of surveillance will be given to provide a clear picture as to what the term encompasses. First of all,
the French word that Foucault utilizes is surveiller. As the translator to Discipline and Punish notes, there is no proper English equivalent The English correspondent
Foucault defines surveillance as a potentially aggressive
of surveiller, "surveillance," is too restricted and too technical.86 Thus,
action. It is clearly not neutral and can be used by one side to subjugate another. There are always motives
behind surveillance and these motives are usually self-serving. Foucault defines surveillance as a watch kept over a person
or a group. But one must realize that this simple definition contains several components. Foucault considers surveillance in both a
personal and complex manner. Surveillance can take place between two people such as neighbors.
This type of surveillance is very simple and usually involves insignificant issues . At the same time,
surveillance can involve many people as well as institutions. Thus, commanders can surveille many soldiers because these
commanders have been given the authority to do so. Therefore, surveillance is not considered as one static entity . This is a benefit
because Foucault allows himself to consider personal self-surveillance as well as institutional surveillance.

Voters – Surveillance is a form of disciplinary power, treating it as anything

different robs it of its social dimension.
Fuchs 10 (Christian, Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University, “The Internet
& Surveillance - Research Paper Series,” October 1, 2010,
http://www.sns3.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/The-Internet-Surveillance-Research-Paper-Series-1-
Christian-Fuchs-How-Surveillance-Can-Be-Defined.pdf)
For Foucault, surveillance is an instrument of disciplinary power. He has stressed that “the term ‘power’ designates
relationships” (Foucault 1994, 337), “it brings into play relations between individuals” (337). Surveillance is a social relationship
between humans that involves disciplinary power and makes use of instruments for producing knowledge about these humans in
order to coerce and dominate the. To reduce surveillance to the level of surveillance technologies not only robs it
of its social dimension, it is a form of techno-deterministic reductionism and fetishism that reifies
surveillance and thereby destroys the concept’s critical potential.

2nd voter is education – Disciplinary power is at the heart of the surveillance topic,
its discussion is a prerequisite into any in depth or breadth discussion of the topic.
Their interpretation is self-serving and arbitrary, limiting discussions of disciplinary
power as a form of surveillance massively overlimits the topic.
Standards – Reasonability – As long as we are reasonably topical, we shouldn’t be
rejected.
 Jaguar Debate 244

2AC – W/M
We meet their topicality interpretation.
1. We are curtailing the collection of data used for monitoring and
counterterrorism; this is the purpose of the collection of data on refugees.
2. Surveillance as disciplinary power is at the core of the topic – This means
they have no access to their education or fairness impacts.
3. Literature checks abuse
 Jaguar Debate 245

1AR C/I
Extend the C/I, surveillance isn’t any one static action that can be defined. It is any
type of watching involving people and institutions.
The C/I best solves for impacts of education and fairness.
1. Argument Depth
2. Reasonable Limits
3. Ground
 Jaguar Debate 246

***AFF***POLICY***
 Jaguar Debate 247

Plan
Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance of biometric data.

Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance by having the Supreme Court rule the collection of biometric
data to be unconstitutional.

Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance of biometric data conducted by the FBI.

Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance of biometric travel data conducted by the TSA.

Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance of biometric data conducted by the DHS.

Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance of biometric data collected at its borders and of immigrants.
 Jaguar Debate 248

1AC – Policy Supreme Court

Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its
domestic surveillance by having the Supreme Court rule the collection of biometric
data without a warrant by the federal government to be unconstitutional.
 Jaguar Debate 249

Contention 1: Security Theatre

Biometrics is useless, harmful, and ultimately just “security theatre.”
Bedenko ’15 [Alan Bedenko is a Journalist for The Daily Public, “New GOP Congress to Destroy Canadian
Border”, January 28, 2015, The Daily Public]

Congress’ latest idea is to require biometric testing — e.g., fingerprinting or iris scans — for people departing the
United States via the northern border. Every person in every vehicle would be required to exit the vehicle and provide biometric information. As you might
imagine, the impact that this would have on routine cross-border visits for business, tourism, or just
shopping, would be catastrophic. It would quite literally shut the border down, and it would deal a
devastating blow to the western New York economy, which relies heavily on Canadian shoppers
and cross-border traffic for jobs and tax revenue. The “Secure Our Borders First Act” is billed in national media as being a
Republican slap at President Obama’s recent executive action on immigration. But the affect on the Canadian border isn’t some
inadvertent accident — it was a deliberate amendment brought forward by freshman Republican congressman from
Syracuse John Katko. Add to that criticism the fact that this is a fundamentally idiotic, pointless, and
harmful piece of legislation. You picked a doozy, Syracuse. Requiring biometric testing upon departure from
the US would require the construction of inspection booths on the outbound lanes. Requiring every
occupant of every vehicle to exit and provide biometric information would be time-consuming and
accomplish absolutely nothing. Every effort to better integrate the WNY economy into that of Southern Ontario would simply vanish. Erie County
sales tax revenue from Canadian shoppers would plummet and put more pressure on WNY taxpayers. There’s no exception made for citizens
of Canada or the US, who don’t need visas to visit each other’s countries. Because a small
percentage of visitors to the US on tourist visas stay longer than they’re allowed, we will effectively
shut down the Canadian border. This is bad government, and it introduces exit controls rivalling what the Warsaw Pact
countries concocted pre-1989. It’s also a breach of contract with the Canadians, and completely unnecessary. The US and Canada share information on who is
crossing the border. When you enter Canada and the agent takes your passport, that information is transmitted to the US, and vice-versa. We
don’t need to
construct a new infrastructure and biometric testing to secure the Canadian border. When did we
abandon that careful balance between security and liberty? This proposal is completely pointless. It
adds an unduly restrictive anti-immigrant act to our grand security theater . As I argued in this article, we
should be making our border with Canada work smarter and better. Restricting the market for labor, goods, and services is silly,
and there are ways to free up cross-border traffic while addressing security issues. Requiring every occupant of every IKEA-bound and
Galleria-bound vehicle to provide fingerprints or an iris scan upon exit from the United States is pointless,

redundant, theater , expensive, and would reverse and devastate WNY’s fragile and tentative
economic recovery. I can understand how some throwback fascist southern xenophobe might decide that exit visas or fingerprinting might be a great idea
for the Canadian border, but we’re talking here about New York congressmen who should know better than to destroy their own districts. The text of the bill where
Congressional Republicans seek to ruin the western New York economy is here. To call it a disgrace is a collossal understatement, and the only one who gets it is
Congressman Brian Higgins. Your liberty and wallet are under Republican attack.

Biometrics are only useful for the illusion created by “security theatre,” which is
used to justify racist state actions.
Magnet ’11 [Shoshana Ameille Magnet, phD, Associate Professor at Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at
the University of Ottwa, “When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity”, Published in 2011
in London]

I also examined the ways that the

representation of biometrics allowed for forms of state action that would not
have been possible without these new identification technologies. It would have been impossible to
install signs at border security locations in a post-9 / 11 world requiring different security clearance entry
points for "Caucasians," "Asian Americans," and "African Americans." It was easily possible,
however, to install biometric iris scanners. Using biometric technologies to perform mechanical
objectivity, we could encode into the technologies themselves assumptions about the usefulness Of
 Jaguar Debate 250

racial categories, while obscuring that a form Of racial profiling was in fact occurring. Biometrics
became useful as a form of what the security technologist Bruce Schneier (2006) has termed " security theatre ," or what the border
theorists Peter Andreas and Thomas J. Biersteker (2003) call a "politically successful policy failure." Regardless of how
often the technologies broke down, worked differentially depending on race and gender, or cost
rather than saved the state money, biometrics were used to suggest that something was happening .
Thus even when biometric technologies failed, they also succeeded . Whether they were used to assert

that the state was get- ting tough on crime, welfare, or terrorism, biometric technologies were
offered up as proof that public-private partnerships were working for the public good, whatever
the particular good of the moment might be. Studying biometric technologies offers a window into
state-making in the age Of security, including the symbiotic relationship between private enterprise and the state, the increase in information
sharing and surveillance, the resurgence of biological racialism, the rise of the prison industrial complex, the
criminalization of poverty, and the mutually constitutive relationship between science fiction and real life.

Security theatre creates cognitive biases that makes people less likely to understand
the risks associated with reality, increasing the possibility for an actual attack.
Schneier ’11 [Bruce Schneier is a Harvard professor, an American cryptographer, computer security and
privacy specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and
cryptography, “The Security Mirage”, https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier, TED Talk from Bruce Schneier,
Transcribed by TED Talks]

Now there
are several biases in risk perception. A lot of good experiments in this. And you can see certain biases that
come up again and again. So I'll give you four. We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and
downplay common risks -- so flying versus driving. The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar.
One example would be, people fear kidnapping by strangers when the data supports kidnapping by relatives is much more common. This is for children. Third,
personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks -- so Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name. And
the fourth is people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in
situations they don't control. So once you take up skydiving or smoking, you downplay the risks. If a risk is thrust upon you --
terrorism was a good example -- you'll overplay it because you don't feel like it's in your control.
There are a bunch of other of these biases, these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions.
There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something
by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must
be a lot of tigers around. You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around. This works until you invent newspapers. Because what newspapers do is
they repeat again and again rare risks. I tell people, if it's in the news, don't worry about it. Because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.
(Laughter) When
something is so common, it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- those
are the risks you worry about. We're also a species of storytellers. We respond to stories more than data. And there's
some basic innumeracy going on. I mean, the joke "One, Two, Three, Many" is kind of right. We're really good at small numbers. One mango, two mangoes, three
mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes -- it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot. So one half, one quarter, one fifth -- we're good at that. One in a
million, one in a billion -- they're both almost never. So we
have trouble with the risks that aren't very common. And
what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality. And the result is that
feeling and reality get out of whack, they get different. Now you either have a feeling -- you feel more
secure than you are. There's a false sense of security . Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity. I write a lot about
" security theater ," which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything .
There's no real word for stuff that makes us secure, but doesn't make us feel secure. Maybe it's what the CIA's supposed to do for us. So back to economics. If
economics, if
the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security,
then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives are to make people feel secure .
And there are two ways to do this. One, you can make people actually secure and hope they notice. Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't
notice. So what makes people notice? Well a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work. But if
you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality. Enough real world examples
helps. Now we all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a
 Jaguar Debate 251

feeling about it that basically matches reality. Security theater's exposed when it's obvious that it's
not working properly . Okay, so what makes people not notice? Well, a poor understanding. If you don't understand the risks,
you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't
match reality . Not enough examples. There's an inherent problem with low probability events. If, for example, terrorism almost
never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures . This is why you keep
sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great. There aren't enough examples of failures. Also , feelings that are clouding

the issues -- the cognitive biases I talked about earlier, fears, folk beliefs, basically an inadequate
model of reality.

Security theatre makes people feel safe when they aren’t, wasting money and
leaving the public open to terrorism.
Schneier ’09 [Bruce Schneier is a Harvard professor, an American cryptographer, computer security and
privacy specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and
cryptography, “Beyond Security Theater”, New Internationalist, November 2009]

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay
between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly
make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something

doesn't make any sense . Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event: we
confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on aeroplanes. But it's not the target and
tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if
we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning. If we spend billions defending our rail
systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we
concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide
explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what
they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in
their tactics or targets. Our penchant for movie plots blinds us to the broader threats. And security theater consumes resources
that could better be spent elsewhere . Any terrorist attack is a series of events: something like planning, recruiting,
funding, practising, executing, aftermath. Our most effective defences are at the beginning and end of that process --
intelligence, investigation, and emergency response -- and least effective when they require us to
guess the plot correctly. By intelligence and investigation, I don't mean the broad data-mining or
eavesdropping systems that have been proposed and in some cases implemented -- those are also movie-plot
stories without much basis in actual effectiveness -- but instead the traditional "follow the evidence" type of
investigation that has worked for decades. Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are
largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic
translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist
attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include
expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security
measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling. The arrest of
the "liquid bombers" in London is an example: they were caught through old-fashioned intelligence and police work. Their choice of target (aeroplanes) and tactic
(liquid explosives) didn't matter; they would have been arrested regardless. But even as we do all of this we cannot neglect the feeling of security, because it's how we
collectively overcome the psychological damage that terrorism causes. It's
not security theater we need, it's direct appeals to
our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of
reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability.
 Jaguar Debate 252

Contention 2: Privacy
Biometric data lasts forever, destroys privacy rights, and moves us towards an
authoritarian sate.
Sayani ’12 [Daniel Sayani is a journalist who analyzes and reports on a wide variety of issues., “Espionage and
Intelligence”, 2012]

Privacy advocates also are concerned about the ability of people to correct false information. "Unlike say, a
credit card number, biometric data is forever," noted Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster. He voiced his concern that the FBI,
whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the
data's security, "If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can't just get a new eyeball," he
explained. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be
captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera. By 2013, the FBI says that it
hopes to expand the NGI system to "fuse" fingerprint-, face-, iris-, and palm-matching capabilities
into one mega-database, according to Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's biometric services section chief. In addition, Lawrence Hornak, director of the
West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), indicated that the government's goal is "ubiquitous use
of biometrics." A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and
looking into a camera, he said. For those who champion constitutional rights, this latest milestone represents yet
another step in the erosion of natural rights and individual liberties, and a turn toward a more
robust, authoritarian police state.

Biometric data threatens privacy; particularly so when used with travel documents.
ACLU ’06 [The following viewpoint is excerpted from a letter to the ICAO penned by Privacy International and
the American Civil Liberties Union and signed by dozens of other rights organizations., “Privacy” 2006]

The right to movement is viewed as a fundamental right around the world, akin to the right to assemble. Border
and aviation security necessarily involves scrutinising travellers and the use of personal information , but in
light of the fundamental human rights involved, must be approached with the utmost thought and care. The ICAO's biometrics-based approach
to securing travel documents unfortunately does not reflect such care—in fact, it is enabling the creation of a global
surveillance infrastructure. Concern about biometric travel documents is high around the world,
and has been recognized even by many national governments. Central databases become privacy
risks through the disclosure of personal information, through the challenges of securing such large
data stores, and through the use of biometric data for other purposes. Additionally, the centralised
storage of biometric data increases the risk of the use of biometric data as a key to interconnecting
databases that, according to EU privacy officials "could lead to detailed profiles of an individual's habits both in
the public and in the private sector." Such databases will also lead to the increased transfer of
personal information across borders as individuals travel. When an EU citizen's identity is verified
in the U.S., for example, will the American authorities download the facial and fingerprint data from the EU databases, or will U.S.
authorities retain the biometric data they collect when verifying the document , along with other similar data for the next
50 years? Similarly, when citizens of other countries visit EU member states, will they be required to submit fingerprints even though the ICAO travel documentation
Already
standards do not require fingerprint data? Until these questions are resolved, no standards for interoperability should be established at the ICAO.
there is some discussion of sharing biometric information with private companies . Airline check-in
procedures will involve verifying the integrity of the travel documents, and airlines may retain the
biometrics data. As part of the Advance Passenger Information systems,1 some foresee the biometric information also being transferred by airlines to
government agencies at passengers' destinations. Biometrics is a fallible technology that will increase surveillance,
erroneously subject individuals to undue attention, and, unless implemented carefully, will lead to
increased collection and processing of data and transfer across borders.
 Jaguar Debate 253

Biometric surveillance poses huge threats to privacy.

Scientific American ’14 [Scientific American Editors, “Beware the Eye Spies”, January 2014, Scientific
American]

Security through biology is an enticing idea. Since 2011,

police departments across the U.S. have been scanning biometric
data in the field using devices such as the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System
(MORIS), an iPhone attachment that checks fingerprints and iris scans. The FBI is currently building its
Next Generation Identification database , which will contain fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans,
voice data and photographs of faces. Before long, even your cell phone will be secured by
information that resides in a distant biometric database. Unfortunately, this shift to biometric-
enabled security creates profound threats to commonly accepted notions of privacy and security. It
makes possible privacy violations that would make the National Security Agency's data sweeps
seem superficial by comparison. Biometrics could turn existing surveillance systems into something
categorically new—something more powerful and much more invasive. Consider the so-called Domain Awareness System, a network of
3,000 surveillance cameras in New York City. Currently if someone commits a crime, cops can go back and review sections of video. Equip the system with facial-
recognition technology, however, and the people behind the controls can actively track you throughout your daily life. “A
person who lives and
works in lower Manhattan would be under constant surveillance,” says Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group. Face-in-a-crowd detection is a formidable technical problem, but
researchers working on projects such as the Department of Homeland Security's Biometric Optical
Surveillance System (BOSS) are making rapid progress. In addition, once your face, iris or DNA
profile becomes a digital file, that file will be difficult to protect . As the recent NSA revelations have
made clear, the boundary between commercial and government data is porous at best. Biometric
identifiers could also be stolen. It's easy to replace a swiped credit card, but good luck changing the patterns on your iris. These days
gathering biometric data generally requires the cooperation (or coercion) of the subject: for your
iris to get into a database, you have to let someone take a close-up photograph of your eyeball. That
will not be the case for long . Department of Defense–funded researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are perfecting a camera that can take rapid-
fire, database-quality iris scans of every person in a crowd from a distance of 10 meters.

There is a moral right and importance to privacy.

Corlett ‘02 [J. Angelo, philosopher specializing in ethics and epistemology, author of more than 100 articles and
books on these and other topics, Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review,
founder of The Philosophy Laboratory, “The Nature and Value of the Moral Right to Privacy” Public Affairs
Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 329-350, University of Illinois Press, jstor, AB]

Having analyzed the concept of privacy and the moral right thereto, it is important to articulate the moral value51 of the right
to privacy.52 Assuming from the foregoing discussion of the right to privacy's nature that privacy has value for us, why is a moral right to
privacy important?53 An answer to this question seems to provide at least a partial answer to the
problem of the extent to which the law ought to protect privacy. In other words, the question of the moral
importance of privacy says something about the extent to which there ought to be a legal right to
privacy. This is especially important if Robert H. Bork is correct in stating that "the 'right of privacy' has become a loose canon
in the law,"54 and if it is plausible to argue that to interpret the U.S. Constitution as containing,
directly or indirectly, a "right of privacy" is "misleading, if not mistaken."55 William L. Prosser points out that
the law of privacy, in one form or another, is on the books in virtually every state in the United States, and
consists of four kinds of invasion of four distinct interests one might have: (1) Intrusion of a
person's seclusion or solitude, or into her private affairs; (2) Public disclosure of embarrassing
private facts about a person; (3) Publicity that places a person in a false light in the public eye; and
(4) Appropriation of one person's likeness or name by another for that other's advantage.56 The value of
the legal right to privacy, then, amounts to a protection against these classes of harms.57 But what about the value of the moral right to
 Jaguar Debate 254

privacy? As Aristotle averred, we are social animals. But as Nagel cautions, "It is very important for human freedom that
individuals should not be merely social or political beings."58 Moreover, if Feinberg is correct about the nature and value of
rights in general, then to have a right is to have a claim against someone whose recognition as valid is called
for by some set of governing rules (in the case of legal rights) or moral principles (in the case of moral rights). To have a claim is
to have a case meriting consideration. The act of claiming makes for self-respect and respect for others, and it is this that provides a rights-respecting society with a
partial foundation for human dignity. Feinberg adds that it
is insufficient for persons to have rights; they must know that
they possess them.59 Now what Feinberg articulates about rights in general holds for the moral right to privacy in particular. The moral right to privacy,
when respected, protects privacy itself. Judith W. DeCew writes about the value of privacy protection in medical contexts:
 Jaguar Debate 255

Contention 3: Covert Operations

Biometrics means the end of the covert spy
Clark ’14 [Colin Clark, editor of Breaking Defense, “Biometrics May Mean End Of The Spy’s Disguise”,
10/20/14]
Spy movie makers love retinal scans and ever-more inventive ways to steal or modify fingerprints. Former CIA Director David Petraeus and the Joint Special
Operations Command relied heavily on retinal scans, DNA sampling, fingerprints, facial and body recognition — all cross referenced with other intelligence — to
build enormous cross-linked databases that helped track and crack the bad guys in Baghdad. Wigs, fake beards, contact lenses, latex
masks, glasses, makeup and clothing have all long played important roles in masking or changing
the appearance of spies. But biometrics, considered key technologies by the Intelligence
Community, may spell the effective end of the covert spy , say several experienced intelligence
professionals. Imagine a suspect US intelligence officer is walking down the street in a hostile
capital. Someone walks into him from an office building, bumping him hard and leaving a small
scratch on the back of his hand. Several hours later a video of the encounter has been loaded into a
computer and the small sample of skin and blood are being analyzed. When a computer program
can read video or photos of a face, assess the subject’s movements and body shape, check his retina
and even track his DNA, it’s going to be awfully hard to keep agents in the field for long periods of
time without regularly changing their legends and appearance. Over the past month I’ve chatted with three experienced
experts in espionage — two long-time practitioners and one analyst — about the triple-edged sword that is biometrics. On the one hand, they help provide
superb defenses against unauthorized access to secure cyber and physical spaces. On the other, they allow the creation of enormously sophisticated databases that
provide the Intelligence Community and the military with the ability to track and identify relationships among and between both friendly and enemy forces. The third
edge of the sword comprises ability of opposing forces to use the same technologies against us. Two of my three
sources believe biometrics will spell the effective end of the disguised spy . Roger Mason, senior VP for national security and
intelligence at Nobilis, the former Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Systems and Resource Analyses, told me point blank recently that biometrics
will mean the end of the covert agent. The combined biometric technologies are so effective and the
databases built with them can be so powerful and rapidly accessed that they will provide tools that
will be very difficult to defeat. The third source, a senior former intelligence officer with long experience in the covert world, begged to qualify
that assessment. Disguises and forged documents can retain their effectiveness if the threat is properly judged. ‘”Long ago we recognized the limitations of alias travel
— there is an awful lot of biometrics integrated into airport security. But that does not stop alias operations in general,” the former intelligence officer writes in an
email. “You can always use a disguise or feign to be someone or something else — as long as it isn’t tied to a biometric — to meet people or travel within a country,
rent a room etc. You just have to know what the threats are.” Note the important caveat: “as long as it isn’t tied to a biometric…” Perhaps the approach of James
Bond, who never relied on legends — after all, he always identified himself to his erstwhile opponents as Bond, James Bond and worked for Universal Exports — will
remain useful.

Covert operations by the CIA are crucial to foreign policy actions, and need to be
used to contain United States adversaries.
Devine ’14 [Jack Devine, June, 13, 2014, “Post Iraq, U.S. must rely on covert action”, Jack Devine is a former
head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and president of the Arkin Group, a firm that specializes in crisis
management.]

Covert actions are now crucial to U.S. foreign policy. After the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Washington should rely more on CIA-driven covert operations and less on military force in the
world’s hotspots. Ukraine could be a case in point. For covert action means not just collecting information (espionage),
but also political or paramilitary efforts that help support political organizations, local media and
on occasion, insurgents. Under the CIA’s charter, the government maintains plausible deniability
for all these actions. I’ve long advocated for greater use of this tool of statecraft — and not only because I ran the CIA’s Afghanistan Task Force during
the successful effort to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in 1986-87, along with many other covert operations during my 32 years at the intelligence agency.
The ability to conduct activities below the radar is key . There has been a spike in instability across
regions where the United States and its allies have major national security interests. Yet
Washington is less able to exert influence through force. President Barack Obama noted this in his
May 28 West Point speech, saying the United States is unlikely to engage in another ground war
 Jaguar Debate 256

any time soon. Washington can rely on the CIA (working with Special Operations Forces) to provide clandestine
intelligence, training and, where necessary, political funding and paramilitary support for foreign
groups aligned to U.S. interests. A successful covert operation requires certain conditions on the
ground: broad-based political support for policy or regime change consistent with U.S. national
security interest; excellent local intelligence; forces in-country able to engage the opposition, and
substantial financial and political support from Congress and the White House. With Ukraine and its environs, all
these components are in place: the newly elected Kiev government and its pro-NATO orientation has significant popular support, Ukrainians have shown a history of
standing up for their country’s independence and freedom, and Obama and Congress strongly support the Kiev government, presumably also intending to supply the
necessary funding. To strengthen Kiev’s resistance against Russian interference, Washington should be providing robust financial and training support to the
appropriate security, military and political organizations as well as beefing up their intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities. The West also needs to “contain”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massive investment in covert action in Ukraine — and not-so-covert pro-Russian engagement. Putin, an experienced ex-KGB
operative, has been drawing straight from the covert action playbook in Ukraine. He is inserting Russian Special Forces into the fray, trying to pass them off as
Ukrainian pro-Russian activists. Though these efforts at concealment may look laughable, when combined with his carefully crafted propaganda campaign, Putin’s
plausible denial pronouncements have successfully muddied the water. Despite Russian denials, however, the political dissidents in Eastern Ukraine are being funded
and supported substantially by Moscow. Rest assured, Putin’s numerous in-place agents are collecting intelligence and pushing every possible lever to build a political
force in Eastern Ukraine against the Kiev government. At the same time, he is likely/assuredly inserting/ the plumbing into Western Ukraine in order to develop
sources of intelligence and agents of influence. To deal with this newly aggressive Russia, it may be instructive to study how Washington dealt with an aggressive
Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Putin’s heavy-handed behavior is beginning to feel like the Cold War is making a comeback — protestations to the contrary.
For me, this all feels like déjà vu — because I worked as a CIA chief of station in five major Cold War locations, and served as deputy director for worldwide
operations during the heyday of the struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. The similarities are uncanny. The Cold War kicked off with Joseph Stalin’s
postwar land grab of Eastern Europe and his aggressive efforts to promote Communism abroad. This round began with Putin’s assaults on Georgia, Armenia, Crimea
and now possibly part or all of Ukraine. In considering how to address this, Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Sinews of Peace” speech may still offer the best advice. “The
only thing that Russians respect,” Churchill said, “is strength.” Unfortunately, after
Washington’s failure to respond to Syria
crossing the red line of using chemical weapons, our adversaries and fair-weather friends are
starting to test the limits of where the United States will keep its word. Drawing red lines is hard –
difficult even with a weaker country. So, it may be with Putin. He will likely trim his aggressive sails in Ukraine only when he sees the
physical proof of the West’s “serious consequences.” So Washington and the European Union should impose extremely strong economic sanctions and ramp up the
NATO’s military and intelligence support for the Kiev government. Washington power brokers should also study the
“containment” policy that the United States used to counter Soviet aggression throughout the Cold
War. George Kennan, a State Department official and Russia expert, laid this out in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. In his article, which became the basis
of the Truman Doctrine, Kennan stated the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist and that its innate sense of
insecurity necessitated a hostile world to maintain power at home. Sound familiar? Kennan also postulated that the
West needed to apply vigilant counterforce wherever the Soviets pressed their advantage . That view
certainly has merit today in the wake of Putin’s most recent actions. The recent Ukrainian elections were promising because the new president, Petro
Poroshenko, is an experienced official and billionaire businessman with a long record of dealing with Russia. But the fact that very few were able to vote in the east of
the country, and that Putin will continue to push to maintain influence, means Poroshenko’s new government will have to stay alert to protect against Russian
encroachment. How does the West ensure the new Kiev government’s survival if we are not going to commit ground troops to counter Russia aggression? Much

like the cold warriors of the past, we should return to tightly focused covert action . This means a robust
relationship with the Ukraine Security Service and military intelligence, supplemented with direct financial support to political activists and groups. This must be done
with great care and strict compartmentalization because of Russia’s vast network of agents in Ukraine. But this program is necessary to balance the scale against
Russia’s massive covert activities there. In the tradition of Kennan, we should be able to “contain” Moscow’s subterfuge and its efforts to maximize influence in Kiev.

CIA support in Syria is key to stoppings the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
Miller 6/10 [June 10, 2015, Greg Miller, reporter for the Washington Post, “CIA running secret anti-terror hunt
in Syria”]

U.S. officials said theCIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past
several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-
Assad rebel who has gone through the program. The CIA declined to comment on the program or its budget. But U.S. officials defended the scale of the
expenditures, saying the money goes toward much more than salaries and weapons and is part of a broader, multibillion-dollar
effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to bolster a coalition of militias known as the
Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army. Much of the CIA’s money goes toward running secret
training camps in Jordan, gathering intelligence to help guide the operations of agency-backed
militias and managing a sprawling logistics network used to move fighters, ammunition and
weapons into the country. The move by the House intelligence panel to cut the program’s funds is not mentioned in the unclassified version of the
spending bill. But statements released by lawmakers alluded to some of their underlying concerns, including a line calling for an “effort to enhance the metrics
 Jaguar Debate 257

involved in a critically important [intelligence community] program.” That language, officials said, was a veiled reference to members’ mounting frustration with the
program and a perceived inability by the agency to show that its forces have gained territory, won battles or achieved other measurable results. “Assad is increasingly
in danger, and people may be taking bets on how long he can last, but it’s largely not as a result of action by so-called moderates on the ground,” said a senior
Republican aide in Congress, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject. In
the past two years, the goal of
the CIA’s mission in Syria has shifted from ousting Assad to countering the rise of extremist groups
including al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS
and ISIL. “Unfortunately, I think that ISIS, al-Nusra and some of the other radical Islamic factions are the best
positioned to capitalize on the chaos that might accompany a rapid decline of the regime,” Schiff said.
Even defenders of the CIA program acknowledge that moderate factions in Syria have often performed poorly and are likely to be overwhelmed in any direct
showdown with the Islamic State. Still, officials said U.S.-backed
fighters have made significant gains in recent weeks —
including the seizure of a government army base — and represent the only meaningful prospect for
the United States and its allies to maintain a foothold in the country if Assad falls. “This is especially
true in southern Syria, where [the U.S.-backed coalition] is emerging as a significant force capable
of capturing key regime bases,” the U.S. intelligence official said. “Slowly but surely, U.S. government support to
the moderate opposition forces has paid off.” Opposition leaders in southern Syria, where the CIA-trained fighters
are concentrated, said the groups have recently become better organized and more effective in their use of heavier weapons, including U.S.-made TOW
antitank missiles. “They have coherent command and control and have unified Sunni groups,” said Oubai Shahbandar, a former top adviser to the opposition
leadership who maintains regular contact with rebels on the ground. Moderate militias have kept control of border crossings into Jordan and the Israeli-occupied
Golan Heights and are fighting on the outskirts of Damascus. The training program, Shahbandar said, “is a precedent in terms of what works.” Rather than cut funds,
he said, the
United States “should really double down on its southern program.” Rebel units in the
area have set up functioning civilian governments that could be models for the kind of political
transition the United States says it seeks as a replacement for Assad, said Lina Khatib of the Carnegie Middle East
Center. Despite those gains south of Damascus, experts and officials said that the most significant pressure on Assad’s regime is in northern Syria, where the Islamic
State is on the offensive. At the same time, a separate coalition of rebel groups known as the Army of Conquest has taken advantage of infusions of new weapons and
cash from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. The intelligence spending bill would set budgets for the fiscal year beginning in October. The chairman of the House
intelligence panel, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), declined a request for an interview. The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to begin work this month on its
own budget for U.S. spy agencies. U.S. officials said the White House has signaled that it will seek to persuade the Senate panel to protect the CIA program from the
cuts sought by the House.

The US is the Microsoft of nations; US laws and policy gets modeled internationally.
Krotoszynski ’09 [2009, Ronald J. Krotoszynski is a John C. Stone Chair, Director of Faculty Research, and
Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law, “The Perils and the Promise of Comparative
Constitutional Law: The New Globalism and the Role of the United States in Shaping Human Rights”, 61 Ark. L.
Rev. 603]

In thinking about the reality and effects of the new globalism, we should be proactive and
thoughtful. This means defending our values, even if they appear exceptionalist from a global or comparative perspective, as much, if
not more, than modifying our legal rules to square them with foreign views. Just because Germany has a different rule does not imply that the German rule is better, or
a better rule for the United States. That said, we do need to at least think about the possibility that things could be different than they are presently. The fact that other
democratic societies value rights more, or less, highly than we do should at least make us pause. It seems rude either to pretend these differences do not exist or, worse
yet, that these differences simply do not matter. As I have observed in another context, "[A] circular jurisprudence that posits its own conclusions as justifications is
intellectually indefensible." n52 Thealternative to active global engagement, attempting to maintain a kind of
intellectual isolationism, is neither attractive nor feasible because ideas travel faster and more
easily than superbugs. We should be just as actively concerned and engaged about the transnational
marketplace of ideas as we are about the transnational sale of pet food, lead-painted toys, or the safety of air travel. As scholars like Anne-Marie
Slaughter and Harold Koh have suggested, it is not a question of whether transnational legal rules will develop - it is
a question of how they will develop and the role that the United States will play in their [*617]
development. n53 In the case of freedom of expression, foreign law is very different, in myriad ways, and the United States
contributes to the global discussion of this human right as much by refusing to get with the
program as it would by redefining domestic First Amendment law to bring it into conformity with prevailing foreign attitudes. The development of
new global legal understandings of fundamental human rights is not limited to courts. Courts are not the only
source of transnational understanding of human rights, as the behavior of Congress and the executive branch also signals the content and scope of our commitment to
human rights. To
say that we oppose torture generally but not in the specific context of the war on
terrorism has the effect of undermining the norm against torture as inconsistent with fundamental
 Jaguar Debate 258

human rights. Similarly, holding persons in indefinite detention, without access to lawyers or judicial
process sends a very mixed message. When the Soviet government engaged in this sort of behavior, the United States denounced it. n54 Our
credibility in arguing for a right to a fair trial by an impartial tribunal, to the assistance of counsel,
and to the right to be free of unreviewed (and unreviewable) executive detention has taken a hit
lately. Our behavior and our practices have the effect of modeling acceptable government practices,
whether we wish them to have that effect or not. We should be cautious in accepting an argument
that observance of the rule of law lies within the discretion of the executive branch of government. It
is said that "as one sows, so shall one reap." n55 The new legal globalism will reflect this truism. Simply put, if we ever had the luxury of
saying one thing while doing another, that time has come and gone. The best way of convincing
others that they must observe a particular human right would be that we observe it ourselves as a
matter of course. Thus, the process of exporting legal rules is not solely a job for the judiciary, nor should it be. [*618] V. AMERICAN
CONTRIBUTIONS Over the last 200 years, the United States has been remarkably successful at exporting its legal
ideas. Since World War II, the notion of limited government, checked by a written constitution with
judicially enforceable rights, has become the most commonly accepted model of legitimate
government. n56 The old British model of parliamentary supremacy, as a means of securing democratic control, has fallen into
something of a rut. n57 The modern trend has been entirely in favor of judicial review (judicial supremacy,
some might say) with democratically elected legislatures being limited by enumerated constitutional
rights. n58 The separation of powers is another structural innovation of the United States that has
proven quite popular. The British model of legislative, executive, and judicial power all being vested in a single body (like the Parliament) no longer
seems a successful way to run a railroad. Although parliamentary systems remain popular, and involve the merger of executive and legislative power, the
structural separation of courts has become a standard feature of modern democracies. In this sense, the
separation of powers has become the global norm rather than the exception. Federalism provides a
third major contribution to constitutionalism that the United States pioneered and which has
achieved substantial adoption abroad. In a nation featuring ethnic, religious, or cultural differences, federalism provides a means of securing
some measure of local autonomy that can accommodate these differences. Additionally, even in the contemporary United Kingdom, federalism has found a foothold,
with local parliaments now sitting for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and plans for an English Parliament. n59 The European Union itself represents a
federalism solution to [*619] the problem of a divided, and less efficient, Europe. By dividing power among various levels of government, centralization can coexist
with local autonomy and choice. Judicial review, the separation of powers, and federalism are all contributions
that the United States has made to constitutional democracy. Indeed, it would not be an overstatement to suggest that the
American model of constitutionalism is to modern government as the Microsoft Corporation's
"Windows" operating system is to computing. Having had so much success in defining the institutions and structures of a just
government with reference to the structures and doctrines reflected in our own Constitution, why should we fear the outcome of
constructive engagement with the world? n60 In this regard, it bears noting that our own framers, meeting in Philadelphia during the
summer of 1787, were themselves very familiar with government structures dating back to ancient Rome and Athens. The Framers consciously considered various
constitutional arrangements, including those of Great Britain, but also of Athens, Sparta, and Rome. n61 To be sure, the Framers did not overtly borrow any particular
constitutional system, but developed one of their own self-styled a new order for the ages ("novus ordo seclorum"). Given
this history of
familiarity with comparative constitutional law, the success of American constitutional innovations ,
and the stakes, why should we shrink from engaging the world in defense of our domestic conception of
fundamental human rights? VI. CONCLUSION We must recognize that we will participate in the new legal
globalism whether we choose to be active participants in the process or passive recipients of the
results. If the United States wants to impact the content of emerging human-rights norms, we need to join
the conversation, even if we do so as defenders [*620] (or exporters) of our legal norms. n62 The alternative, a kind of
default, will simply mean that the United States has less impact on the development and content of
both emerging legal systems and the scope and content of transnational human rights. n63 To engage the
world does not require the United States to abandon its own idiosyncratic legal values, any more than consideration of American legal norms requires the Supreme
Court of Canada or the German Federal Constitutional Court to abdicate responsibility for articulating and enforcing local legal imperatives.
 Jaguar Debate 259

An unchecked ISIS will attack the U.S.

Page 5/11 [Susan Page, May 11, 2015, “CIA veteran Morell: ISIS' next test could be a 9/11-style attack”, USA
Today, The Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, covering her 9th presidential campaign. She's interviewed
the past 8 presidents and reported from 5 continents.]

The Islamic State simply inspired the deadly assault by two men on an exhibit of cartoons depicting
the Prophet Muhammad near Dallas last week, CIA veteran Michael Morell said. But it's only a
matter of time, he warns, before the terrorist group is likely to be in a position to direct more
elaborate attacks on American soil that could result in mass casualties. “If we don't get ISIS under
control, we're going to see that kind of attack,” similar to the one al-Qaida mounted on 9/11, Morell
said. U.S. efforts have not been effective in countering the Islamic State's success in recruiting
hundreds of American converts, he said, “and we're not effective at it because it's very hard to do.”
Morell was by President George W. Bush's side at a Florida elementary school in 2001 when the president was told that hijacked airliners had crashed into the World
Trade Center, and he was in the White House Situation Room with President Obama nearly a decade later when the first word was relayed that Navy Seal Team Six
had killed Osama bin Laden. After 33 years in the CIA, including two stints as acting director, Morell has written an account of his experiences, to be published
Tuesday, titled “The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism From Al Qa'ida to ISIS.”

ISIS will become the first true terrorist state and will use chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons to kill indiscriminately
Morris ’14 [Nigel, Deputy political director at The Independent, “Isis could become 'world’s first truly terrorist
state' and bomb UK with nuclear and chemical weapons, Theresa May warns”, September 30, 2014]

Isis could acquire nuclear and biological weapons to launch attacks on Britain, the Home Secretary warned today as she set
out new measures to clamp down on extremist groups. In a speech to the Tory party conference that concentrated almost entirely on the threat from terrorism at home
and abroad, Theresa May warned that the jihadist group could become the “world's first truly terrorist state“ in
Iraq and Syria. “If [Isis] succeed in firmly consolidating their grip on the land they occupy in Syria and Iraq, we will see
the world’s first truly terrorist state established within a few hours flying time of our country,” she said . “We will see terrorists given the
space to plot attacks against us, train their men and women, and devise new methods to kill
indiscriminately.” “We will see the risk, often prophesied but thank God not yet fulfilled, that with the capability of a state behind them, the
terrorists will acquire chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons to attack us. “We must not flinch. We must
not shy away from our responsibility. We must not drift towards danger and insecurity. While we still have the chance, we must act to destroy them.
 Jaguar Debate 260

Security Theatre
 Jaguar Debate 261

Link
Biometrics is useless, harmful, and ultimately just “security theatre.”
Bedenko ’15 [Alan Bedenko is a Journalist for The Daily Public, “New GOP Congress to Destroy Canadian
Border”, January 28, 2015, The Daily Public]

Congress’ latest idea is to require biometric testing — e.g., fingerprinting or iris scans — for people departing the
United States via the northern border. Every person in every vehicle would be required to exit the vehicle and provide biometric information. As you might
imagine, the impact that this would have on routine cross-border visits for business, tourism, or just
shopping, would be catastrophic. It would quite literally shut the border down, and it would deal a
devastating blow to the western New York economy, which relies heavily on Canadian shoppers
and cross-border traffic for jobs and tax revenue. The “Secure Our Borders First Act” is billed in national media as being a
Republican slap at President Obama’s recent executive action on immigration. But the affect on the Canadian border isn’t some
inadvertent accident — it was a deliberate amendment brought forward by freshman Republican congressman from
Syracuse John Katko. Add to that criticism the fact that this is a fundamentally idiotic, pointless, and
harmful piece of legislation. You picked a doozy, Syracuse. Requiring biometric testing upon departure from
the US would require the construction of inspection booths on the outbound lanes. Requiring every
occupant of every vehicle to exit and provide biometric information would be time-consuming and
accomplish absolutely nothing. Every effort to better integrate the WNY economy into that of Southern Ontario would simply vanish. Erie County
sales tax revenue from Canadian shoppers would plummet and put more pressure on WNY taxpayers. There’s no exception made for citizens
of Canada or the US, who don’t need visas to visit each other’s countries. Because a small
percentage of visitors to the US on tourist visas stay longer than they’re allowed, we will effectively
shut down the Canadian border. This is bad government, and it introduces exit controls rivalling what the Warsaw Pact
countries concocted pre-1989. It’s also a breach of contract with the Canadians, and completely unnecessary. The US and Canada share information on who is
crossing the border. When you enter Canada and the agent takes your passport, that information is transmitted to the US, and vice-versa. We
don’t need to
construct a new infrastructure and biometric testing to secure the Canadian border. When did we
abandon that careful balance between security and liberty? This proposal is completely pointless. It
adds an unduly restrictive anti-immigrant act to our grand security theater . As I argued in this article, we
should be making our border with Canada work smarter and better. Restricting the market for labor, goods, and services is silly,
and there are ways to free up cross-border traffic while addressing security issues. Requiring every occupant of every IKEA-bound and
Galleria-bound vehicle to provide fingerprints or an iris scan upon exit from the United States is pointless,

redundant, theater , expensive, and would reverse and devastate WNY’s fragile and tentative
economic recovery. I can understand how some throwback fascist southern xenophobe might decide that exit visas or fingerprinting might be a great idea
for the Canadian border, but we’re talking here about New York congressmen who should know better than to destroy their own districts. The text of the bill where
Congressional Republicans seek to ruin the western New York economy is here. To call it a disgrace is a collossal understatement, and the only one who gets it is
Congressman Brian Higgins. Your liberty and wallet are under Republican attack.

Biometrics are only useful for the illusion created by “security theatre,” which is
used to justify racist state actions.
Magnet ’11 [Shoshana Ameille Magnet, phD, Associate Professor at Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at
the University of Ottwa, “When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity”, Published in 2011
in London]

I also examined the ways that the

representation of biometrics allowed for forms of state action that would not
have been possible without these new identification technologies. It would have been impossible to
install signs at border security locations in a post-9 / 11 world requiring different security clearance entry
points for "Caucasians," "Asian Americans," and "African Americans." It was easily possible,
however, to install biometric iris scanners. Using biometric technologies to perform mechanical
objectivity, we could encode into the technologies themselves assumptions about the usefulness Of
 Jaguar Debate 262

racial categories, while obscuring that a form Of racial profiling was in fact occurring . Biometrics
became useful as a form of what the security technologist Bruce Schneier (2006) has termed " security theatre ," or what the border
theorists Peter Andreas and Thomas J. Biersteker (2003) call a "politically successful policy failure." Regardless of how
often the technologies broke down, worked differentially depending on race and gender, or cost
rather than saved the state money, biometrics were used to suggest that something was happening .
Thus even when biometric technologies failed, they also succeeded. Whether they were used to assert

that the state was get- ting tough on crime, welfare, or terrorism, biometric technologies were
offered up as proof that public-private partnerships were working for the public good, whatever
the particular good of the moment might be. Studying biometric technologies offers a window into
state-making in the age Of security, including the symbiotic relationship between private enterprise and the state, the increase in information
sharing and surveillance, the resurgence of biological racialism, the rise of the prison industrial complex, the
criminalization of poverty, and the mutually constitutive relationship between science fiction and real life.
 Jaguar Debate 263

Internal Links & Impacts

Security theatre creates cognitive biases that makes people less likely to understand
the risks associated with reality, increasing the possibility for an actual attack.
Schneier ’11 [Bruce Schneier is a Harvard professor, an American cryptographer, computer security and
privacy specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and
cryptography, “The Security Mirage”, https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier, TED Talk from Bruce Schneier,
Transcribed by TED Talks]

Now there
are several biases in risk perception. A lot of good experiments in this. And you can see certain biases that
come up again and again. So I'll give you four. We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and
downplay common risks -- so flying versus driving. The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar.
One example would be, people fear kidnapping by strangers when the data supports kidnapping by relatives is much more common. This is for children. Third,
personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks -- so Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name. And
the fourth is people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in
situations they don't control. So once you take up skydiving or smoking, you downplay the risks. If a risk is thrust upon you --
terrorism was a good example -- you'll overplay it because you don't feel like it's in your control.
There are a bunch of other of these biases, these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions.
There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something
by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must
be a lot of tigers around. You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around. This works until you invent newspapers. Because what newspapers do is
they repeat again and again rare risks. I tell people, if it's in the news, don't worry about it. Because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.
(Laughter) When
something is so common, it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- those
are the risks you worry about. We're also a species of storytellers. We respond to stories more than data. And there's
some basic innumeracy going on. I mean, the joke "One, Two, Three, Many" is kind of right. We're really good at small numbers. One mango, two mangoes, three
mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes -- it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot. So one half, one quarter, one fifth -- we're good at that. One in a
million, one in a billion -- they're both almost never. So we
have trouble with the risks that aren't very common. And
what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality. And the result is that
feeling and reality get out of whack, they get different. Now you either have a feeling -- you feel more
secure than you are. There's a false sense of security . Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity. I write a lot about
" security theater ," which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything .
There's no real word for stuff that makes us secure, but doesn't make us feel secure. Maybe it's what the CIA's supposed to do for us. So back to economics. If
economics, if
the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security,
then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives are to make people feel secure .
And there are two ways to do this. One, you can make people actually secure and hope they notice. Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't
notice. So what makes people notice? Well a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work. But if
you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality. Enough real world examples
helps. Now we all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a
feeling about it that basically matches reality. Security theater's exposed when it's obvious that it's
not working properly . Okay, so what makes people not notice? Well, a poor understanding. If you don't understand the risks,
you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't
match reality . Not enough examples. There's an inherent problem with low probability events. If, for example, terrorism almost
never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures . This is why you keep
sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great. There aren't enough examples of failures. Also , feelings that are clouding

the issues -- the cognitive biases I talked about earlier, fears, folk beliefs, basically an inadequate
model of reality.
 Jaguar Debate 264

Security theatre makes people feel safe when they are really not. This wastes money
and leaves the public open to terrorism.
Schneier ’09 [Bruce Schneier is a Harvard professor, an American cryptographer, computer security and
privacy specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and
cryptography, “Beyond Security Theater”, New Internationalist, November 2009]

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay
between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly
make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something

doesn't make any sense . Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event: we
confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on aeroplanes. But it's not the target and
tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if
we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning. If we spend billions defending our rail
systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we
concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide
explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what
they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in
their tactics or targets. Our penchant for movie plots blinds us to the broader threats. And security theater consumes resources
that could better be spent elsewhere . Any terrorist attack is a series of events: something like planning, recruiting,
funding, practising, executing, aftermath. Our most effective defences are at the beginning and end of that process --
intelligence, investigation, and emergency response -- and least effective when they require us to
guess the plot correctly. By intelligence and investigation, I don't mean the broad data-mining or
eavesdropping systems that have been proposed and in some cases implemented -- those are also movie-plot
stories without much basis in actual effectiveness -- but instead the traditional "follow the evidence" type of
investigation that has worked for decades. Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are
largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic
translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist
attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include
expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security
measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling. The arrest of
the "liquid bombers" in London is an example: they were caught through old-fashioned intelligence and police work. Their choice of target (aeroplanes) and tactic
(liquid explosives) didn't matter; they would have been arrested regardless. But even as we do all of this we cannot neglect the feeling of security, because it's how we
collectively overcome the psychological damage that terrorism causes. It's
not security theater we need, it's direct appeals to
our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of
reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability.
 Jaguar Debate 265

Privacy
 Jaguar Debate 266

Link
Biometric data lasts forever, destroys privacy rights, and moves us towards an
authoritarian sate.
Sayani ’12 [Daniel Sayani is a journalist who analyzes and reports on a wide variety of issues., “Espionage and
Intelligence”, 2012]

Privacy advocates also are concerned about the ability of people to correct false information. "Unlike say, a
credit card number, biometric data is forever," noted Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster. He voiced his concern that the FBI,
whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the
data's security, "If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can't just get a new eyeball," he
explained. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be
captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera. By 2013, the FBI says that it
hopes to expand the NGI system to "fuse" fingerprint-, face-, iris-, and palm-matching capabilities
into one mega-database, according to Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's biometric services section chief. In addition, Lawrence Hornak, director of the
West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), indicated that the government's goal is "ubiquitous use
of biometrics." A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and
looking into a camera, he said. For those who champion constitutional rights, this latest milestone represents yet
another step in the erosion of natural rights and individual liberties, and a turn toward a more
robust, authoritarian police state.

Biometric data threatens privacy; particularly so when used with travel documents.
ACLU ’06 [The following viewpoint is excerpted from a letter to the ICAO penned by Privacy International and
the American Civil Liberties Union and signed by dozens of other rights organizations., “Privacy” 2006]

The right to movement is viewed as a fundamental right around the world, akin to the right to assemble. Border
and aviation security necessarily involves scrutinising travellers and the use of personal information , but in
light of the fundamental human rights involved, must be approached with the utmost thought and care. The ICAO's biometrics-based approach
to securing travel documents unfortunately does not reflect such care—in fact, it is enabling the creation of a global
surveillance infrastructure. Concern about biometric travel documents is high around the world,
and has been recognized even by many national governments. Central databases become privacy
risks through the disclosure of personal information, through the challenges of securing such large
data stores, and through the use of biometric data for other purposes. Additionally, the centralised
storage of biometric data increases the risk of the use of biometric data as a key to interconnecting
databases that, according to EU privacy officials "could lead to detailed profiles of an individual's habits both in
the public and in the private sector." Such databases will also lead to the increased transfer of
personal information across borders as individuals travel. When an EU citizen's identity is verified
in the U.S., for example, will the American authorities download the facial and fingerprint data from the EU databases, or will U.S.
authorities retain the biometric data they collect when verifying the document , along with other similar data for the next
50 years? Similarly, when citizens of other countries visit EU member states, will they be required to submit fingerprints even though the ICAO travel documentation
Already
standards do not require fingerprint data? Until these questions are resolved, no standards for interoperability should be established at the ICAO.
there is some discussion of sharing biometric information with private companies. Airline check-in
procedures will involve verifying the integrity of the travel documents, and airlines may retain the
biometrics data. As part of the Advance Passenger Information systems,1 some foresee the biometric information also being transferred by airlines to
government agencies at passengers' destinations. Biometrics is a fallible technology that will increase surveillance,
erroneously subject individuals to undue attention, and, unless implemented carefully, will lead to
increased collection and processing of data and transfer across borders.
 Jaguar Debate 267

Biometric surveillance poses huge threats to privacy.

Scientific American ’14 [Scientific American Editors, “Beware the Eye Spies”, January 2014, Scientific
American]

Security through biology is an enticing idea. Since 2011,

police departments across the U.S. have been scanning biometric
data in the field using devices such as the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System
(MORIS), an iPhone attachment that checks fingerprints and iris scans. The FBI is currently building its
Next Generation Identification database , which will contain fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans,
voice data and photographs of faces. Before long, even your cell phone will be secured by
information that resides in a distant biometric database. Unfortunately, this shift to biometric-
enabled security creates profound threats to commonly accepted notions of privacy and security. It
makes possible privacy violations that would make the National Security Agency's data sweeps
seem superficial by comparison. Biometrics could turn existing surveillance systems into something
categorically new—something more powerful and much more invasive. Consider the so-called Domain Awareness System, a network of
3,000 surveillance cameras in New York City. Currently if someone commits a crime, cops can go back and review sections of video. Equip the system with facial-
recognition technology, however, and the people behind the controls can actively track you throughout your daily life. “A
person who lives and
works in lower Manhattan would be under constant surveillance,” says Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group. Face-in-a-crowd detection is a formidable technical problem, but
researchers working on projects such as the Department of Homeland Security's Biometric Optical
Surveillance System (BOSS) are making rapid progress. In addition, once your face, iris or DNA
profile becomes a digital file, that file will be difficult to protect. As the recent NSA revelations have
made clear, the boundary between commercial and government data is porous at best. Biometric
identifiers could also be stolen. It's easy to replace a swiped credit card, but good luck changing the patterns on your iris. These days
gathering biometric data generally requires the cooperation (or coercion) of the subject: for your
iris to get into a database, you have to let someone take a close-up photograph of your eyeball. That
will not be the case for long . Department of Defense–funded researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are perfecting a camera that can take rapid-
fire, database-quality iris scans of every person in a crowd from a distance of 10 meters.
 Jaguar Debate 268

Impacts
There is a moral right and importance to privacy.
Corlett ‘02 [J. Angelo, philosopher specializing in ethics and epistemology, author of more than 100 articles and
books on these and other topics, Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review,
founder of The Philosophy Laboratory, “The Nature and Value of the Moral Right to Privacy” Public Affairs
Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 329-350, University of Illinois Press, jstor, AB]

Having analyzed the concept of privacy and the moral right thereto, it is important to articulate the moral value51 of the right
to privacy.52 Assuming from the foregoing discussion of the right to privacy's nature that privacy has value for us, why is a moral right to
privacy important?53 An answer to this question seems to provide at least a partial answer to the
problem of the extent to which the law ought to protect privacy. In other words, the question of the moral
importance of privacy says something about the extent to which there ought to be a legal right to
privacy. This is especially important if Robert H. Bork is correct in stating that "the 'right of privacy' has become a loose canon
in the law,"54 and if it is plausible to argue that to interpret the U.S. Constitution as containing,
directly or indirectly, a "right of privacy" is "misleading, if not mistaken."55 William L. Prosser points out that
the law of privacy, in one form or another, is on the books in virtually every state in the United States, and
consists of four kinds of invasion of four distinct interests one might have: (1) Intrusion of a
person's seclusion or solitude, or into her private affairs; (2) Public disclosure of embarrassing
private facts about a person; (3) Publicity that places a person in a false light in the public eye; and
(4) Appropriation of one person's likeness or name by another for that other's advantage.56 The value of
the legal right to privacy, then, amounts to a protection against these classes of harms.57 But what about the value of the moral right to
privacy? As Aristotle averred, we are social animals. But as Nagel cautions, "It is very important for human freedom that
individuals should not be merely social or political beings."58 Moreover, if Feinberg is correct about the nature and value of
rights in general, then to have a right is to have a claim against someone whose recognition as valid is called
for by some set of governing rules (in the case of legal rights) or moral principles (in the case of moral rights). To have a claim is
to have a case meriting consideration. The act of claiming makes for self-respect and respect for others, and it is this that provides a rights-respecting society with a
partial foundation for human dignity. Feinberg adds that it
is insufficient for persons to have rights; they must know that
they possess them.59 Now what Feinberg articulates about rights in general holds for the moral right to privacy in particular. The moral right to privacy,
when respected, protects privacy itself. Judith W. DeCew writes about the value of privacy protection in medical contexts:
 Jaguar Debate 269

Covert Operations
 Jaguar Debate 270

Uniqueness
CIA is running a covert operation in Syria to cooperate with rebels and eliminate
ISIS.
Miller 9/1 [September 1, 2015, Greg Miller, reporter for the Washington Post, “CIA running secret anti-terror
hunt in Syria”]

WASHINGTON — The CIA and U.S. special operations forces have launched a secret campaign to hunt terrorism
suspects in Syria as part of a targeted killing program that is run separately from the broader U.S. military offensive against the Islamic State, U.S. officials
said. The CIA and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command are both flying armed drones over
Syria in a collaboration responsible for several recent strikes against senior Islamic State
operatives, the officials said. Among those killed was a British militant believed to be an architect of the terror group’s effort to use social media to incite
attacks in the United States, the officials said. The clandestine program represents a significant escalation of the
CIA’s involvement in the war in Syria, enlisting the agency’s powerful Counterterrorism Center
against a militant group that many officials believe has eclipsed al-Qaida as a terror threat . But while the
CTC has been given an expanded role in identifying and locating senior Islamic State figures, U.S. officials said that the strikes are being carried out exclusively by
JSOC. The officials said the program is aimed at terrorism suspects deemed “high value targets.” “These
people are being identified and targeted through a separate effort,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with the operation,
referring to the British militant, Junaid Hussain, and others killed in a recent weeks. The decision to enlist the CIA and JSOC reflects
rising anxiety among U.S. counterterrorism officials about the danger posed by the Islamic State, as
well as frustration with the failure so far of conventional strikes to degrade the group’s strength.
This new adversary poses different challenges. Unlike al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has extensive
territory, a seemingly endless stream of recruits, and a deep roster of senior operatives , many of whom
served in the military of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The U.S. move complicates one of Obama’s remaining counterterrorism policy goals of gradually
reversing the CIA’s evolution from spy service to paramilitary force. Obama last year signaled his intent to have the agency cede control of drone strikes to the
Department of Defense and return the spy service’s focus to more traditional categories of espionage. The White House had sought in recent months to revive its plan
to shift control of drone operations to the Pentagon, but encountered renewed opposition on Capitol Hill.

The CIA is hunting terrorism suspect in Syria.

RT News ‘9/2 [“Secret US drone operation stalking ISIS in Syria – report” September 2, 2015, RT News is a
Russian television network which runs cable and satellite television channels, as well as Internet content directed to
audiences outside the Russian Federation.]

In order to track and lethally target high-level members of the Islamic State in Syria, the US has
initiated a secret drone operation that involves the CIA and American Special Forces, the Washington Post
reported. Additionally, the campaign is being run separately from America’s overall mission against the
terrorist group, with the newspaper citing increasing concern over the fact that some 2,500 airstrikes have been unable to significantly pushback the militant
organization. Already, the mission has conducted several recent strikes , according to the newspaper, which cited unnamed
officials as its source. The most recent strike involved the targeted killing of a British-born, 21-year-old hacker named
Junaid Hussain, who was believed to have been leading the Islamic State’s cyber division . In reference to Hussain, a
US official told the Post that “these people are being identified and targeted through a separate effort.” That effort is apparently the product
of a collaboration between the CIA and the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which
houses elite military units such as the one that ultimately killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden .
Unlike in Pakistan and Yemen, where the CIA conducts drone strikes on its own, the agency is not actually carrying out the attacks in Syria. That responsibility falls
to JSOC, while the CIA has taken on the challenge of finding and locating specific “high value targets.”
Though Hussain himself was not believed to have been directly part of any violent attack, the Post stated that "even militants only involved in the Islamic State’s
media efforts are regarded as legitimate US military targets." The National Security Agency has also begun participating in the battle against the Islamic State (IS, also
known as ISIS/ISIL), the Post stated, specifying that it “has been tasked with penetrating the communications networks” of the group. According to the newspaper,
getting the CIA involved in the drone campaign, even if the agency is not directly conducting the airstrikes, will make it harder for President Barack Obama to transfer
drone operations out of their capacity. In the past, reports have suggested that Obama wanted to put the Pentagon in charge of the agency’s drone program, but
opposition in Congress has continuously stalled that agenda. Lawmakers have specifically inserted language into legislation stating that funds cannot be used to take
control of the program away from the CIA. If true, the CIA’s participation represents another sign of an increasing
 Jaguar Debate 271

American presence in Syria. In May, the US conducted a raid against a senior IS commander who
was in charge of the group’s oil and gas operations. The US has also continued to conduct airstrikes
against militants and maintained that it will keep training any moderate Syrian rebels that it can to
join the fight. The National Security Agency has also begun participating in the battle against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS/ISIL), the Post stated,
specifying that it “has been tasked with penetrating the communications networks” of the group. According to the newspaper, getting the CIA involved in the drone
campaign, even if the agency is not directly conducting the airstrikes, will make it harder for President Barack Obama to transfer drone operations out of their
capacity. In the past, reports have suggested that Obama wanted to put the Pentagon in charge of the agency’s drone program, but opposition in Congress has
continuously stalled that agenda. Lawmakers have specifically inserted language into legislation stating that funds cannot be used to take control of the program away
from the CIA. If true, the
CIA’s participation represents another sign of an increasing American presence in
Syria. In May, the US conducted a raid against a senior IS commander who was in charge of the
group’s oil and gas operations. The US has also continued to conduct airstrikes against militants
and maintained that it will keep training any moderate Syrian rebels that it can to join the fight.
 Jaguar Debate 272

Link
Biometric identification technologies could expose CIA operations worldwide.
Sternstein ’14 [Aliya Sternstein reports on cybersecurity and homeland security systems. She’s covered
technology for more than a decade at such publications as National Journal’s Technology Daily, Federal Computer
Week and Forbes., “The CIA has a problem with Biometric Surveillance,” 12/13/14]

Some tactics that CIA operatives use to avoid blowing their cover at airports could be foiled by one of the
spy agency’s best surveillance tools: biometric identification. The growing use of digital fingerprint matching at
European airports troubles Langley, according to January 2012 CIA guidelines for using fake IDs that Wikileaks released on
Sunday. The agency’s discontent could present an awkward situation for the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS is assisting with the rollout of biometric screening at borders worldwide, including in Europe. The region of
concern, called the Schengen area, covers most of the European Union, along with Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Right now, according to
“CIA Advice for US Government Operatives Infiltrating Schengen,” the region’s travel system presents minor obstacles, because unofficial
persons are not required to carry visas. But that is expected to change. In 2015, a new entry-exit system that mandates
fingerprint identification is scheduled to go live, the guidelines note: “The European Commission is considering requiring
travelers who do not require visas to provide biometric data at their first place of entry into the Schengen area, which
would increase the identity threat level for all U.S. travelers” – spies included . In October, border control stations
at Zurich Airport were outfitted with fingerprint readers to screen visitors. The project “rigorously implements the current requirements of the Schengen Borders Code
and is equipped to meet future standards,” Heinz Lusti, a project leader with the airport division of the Zurich Cantonal Police, said in a statement. Russia recently
announced a similar fingerprint directive for foreigners, in response to Europe’s policy. Some U.S. national security experts say the CIA just has to deal. “ It
contradicts what at least should be U.S. policy in supporting more secure borders around the world
by saying — for our very, very narrow purposes and to the exclusion of the rest of the world, we
don’t want biometrics in the Schengen area,” said Janice Kephart, border counsel to the 9/11 Commission. “It’s extremely narrow-
minded.” Those checkpoint upgrades will provide biometric data on tourists that is valuable to both the CIA and Schengen partners, she said. Operatives already
have learned techniques to circumvent biometric ID rules in other countries, Kephart added, declining to go into specifics for national security reasons. “So they really
don’t have anything to complain about,” she said. “It will affect their operations in the Schengen area, but they’ve already been dealing with this in other countries so
they can basically just adjust.” The
CIA’s discomfort with biometric-based screening abroad is unlikely to interfere
with DHS’ plans to expand the technology, said Kephart, now CEO of the Secure Identity & Biometrics Association. “Biometrics
has changed their operational intelligence dramatically in the field for the better, being able to learn — often in close to real-time
— who it is they are really dealing with. The CIA knows this better than anyone,” she said. Foreign spies entering the United States are subject to the same fingerprint
test. By law, almost all international visitors to the U.S. are required to submit their prints for entry. CIA officials declined to comment on the Wikileaks disclosures or
the expanded use of biometric identification abroad. DHS officials were not able to comment immediately.

Biometrics means the end of the covert spy

Clark ’14 [Colin Clark, editor of Breaking Defense, “Biometrics May Mean End Of The Spy’s Disguise”,
10/20/14]
Spy movie makers love retinal scans and ever-more inventive ways to steal or modify fingerprints. Former CIA Director David Petraeus and the Joint Special
Operations Command relied heavily on retinal scans, DNA sampling, fingerprints, facial and body recognition — all cross referenced with other intelligence — to
build enormous cross-linked databases that helped track and crack the bad guys in Baghdad. Wigs,
fake beards, contact lenses, latex
masks, glasses, makeup and clothing have all long played important roles in masking or changing
the appearance of spies. But biometrics, considered key technologies by the Intelligence
Community, may spell the effective end of the covert spy , say several experienced intelligence
professionals. Imagine a suspect US intelligence officer is walking down the street in a hostile
capital. Someone walks into him from an office building, bumping him hard and leaving a small
scratch on the back of his hand. Several hours later a video of the encounter has been loaded into a
computer and the small sample of skin and blood are being analyzed. When a computer program
can read video or photos of a face, assess the subject’s movements and body shape, check his retina
and even track his DNA, it’s going to be awfully hard to keep agents in the field for long periods of
time without regularly changing their legends and appearance. Over the past month I’ve chatted with three experienced
 Jaguar Debate 273

experts in espionage — two long-time practitioners and one analyst — about the triple-edged sword that is biometrics. On the one hand, they help provide
superb defenses against unauthorized access to secure cyber and physical spaces. On the other, they allow the creation of enormously sophisticated databases that
provide the Intelligence Community and the military with the ability to track and identify relationships among and between both friendly and enemy forces. The third
edge of the sword comprises ability of opposing forces to use the same technologies against us. Two of my three
sources believe biometrics will spell the effective end of the disguised spy. Roger Mason, senior VP for national security and
intelligence at Nobilis, the former Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Systems and Resource Analyses, told me point blank recently that biometrics
will mean the end of the covert agent. The combined biometric technologies are so effective and the
databases built with them can be so powerful and rapidly accessed that they will provide tools that
will be very difficult to defeat. The third source, a senior former intelligence officer with long experience in the covert world, begged to qualify
that assessment. Disguises and forged documents can retain their effectiveness if the threat is properly judged. ‘”Long ago we recognized the limitations of alias travel
— there is an awful lot of biometrics integrated into airport security. But that does not stop alias operations in general,” the former intelligence officer writes in an
email. “You can always use a disguise or feign to be someone or something else — as long as it isn’t tied to a biometric — to meet people or travel within a country,
rent a room etc. You just have to know what the threats are.” Note the important caveat: “as long as it isn’t tied to a biometric…” Perhaps the approach of James
Bond, who never relied on legends — after all, he always identified himself to his erstwhile opponents as Bond, James Bond and worked for Universal Exports — will
remain useful.

Biometric travel surveillance undermines the CIAs ability to perform covert

operations.
Stein ’12 [Washington investigative reporter Jeff Stein writes the SpyTalk blog. He served as a military
intelligence case officer in Vietnam., “CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover”,
Wired, 4/12/12]
WHEN TOM CRUISE had to break into police headquarters in Minority Report, the futuristic crime thriller, he got past the iris scanners with ease: He just swapped
out his eyeballs. CIA agents may find that just a little beyond the call of duty. But meanwhile, they’ve got to come up with something else: The
increasing
deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business
headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that
require CIA spies to travel under false identities. Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U.
points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name . Likewise, the
increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s
face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing
the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way
ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport
they used. “If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another
name,” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. “So it’s a one-time thing —
one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked
forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time. You can’t show up again under a
different name with the same data.” The issue is exceedingly sensitive to agency operatives and
intelligence officials, past and present. “I think you have finally found a topic I can’t talk about,” said Charles Faddis, a CIA operations
officer who retired in 2008. “I can’t help you with this,” added a former intelligence agency chief. “I do think this is a significant issue with
great implications for the safety and security of our people, so I recommend you not publish anything on this. You can do a lot
of harm and no good.” Other former operatives would not even allow their polite refusals to comment to be quoted. The CIA, naturally, refused to comment for this
story. But several
intelligence sources speaking on condition of anonymity agreed to discuss the issue with
Danger Room, on
the grounds that the problem is already well known to foreign spy agencies and
terrorist groups, since it effects everyone seeking to operate covertly or illegally across a border. In
“the old days,” as one put it — that would be before 9/11 — deep-cover CIA operatives could use and discard false
passports like hand wipes. “The only way immigration could tell if the passports were fake was to look at the stamps, paper, photo, and so on,” said
another recently retired CIA operative, whose worked on sensitive projects under non-official cover. Operatives could land at, say, Dubai, with a passport with one
false name, then pick up another from the local CIA station to register at the hotel and conduct a mission. Then the same operative could return the country several
times under different names, repeating the process. Biometrics are making that impossible. Even crossing the border with a real identity,
then donning a fake one in-country, presents its own risks. “When you go to check into a hotel room for a meeting with an asset, or even rent a car to drive to the
meeting — or hold the meeting in the car — many hotels and car rental agencies upload their customer data, including passport number, to immigration every day,”
the former spook notes. “Most countries are looking for visa overstays. But when you show up on the list as never having entered the country … it brings the police
around to ask questions.” If the CIA is working in concert with a local intelligence agency, as it commonly does in E.U. countries, Jordan, Thailand and other spots,
 Jaguar Debate 274

undercover entries and exits can be smoothed over. But “unilateral ops” — where the agency is trying to conceal its activities from the host country —
“have deteriorated significantly” because of the new technologies , the career spook said. The agency saw the windows
closing, of course: The clamor for new counterterrorism border controls reached high decibels after 9/11. By mid-decade, the E.U. was requiring member states to
issue biometric passports and testing iris scanners. Right away, the
new world of border controls loomed as a big headache
for the CIA. The ability to travel under false identities is as basic to spy work as motor oil is to
engines. The day of the trench-coated, fast-talking spy easily slipping in and out of countries on
false papers multiple times was coming to an end. Often, a CIA operations officer traveling under nonofficial cover (so-called NOCs)
can pick up a new set of documents from a CIA courier or dead drop once he or she is in the country. There’s nothing new about that. But since the better hotels
require guests to present their passports, which are scanned into the system, that ruse is increasingly rendered moot, especially in hostile climes like Iran, where the
interior ministry’s computers are assumed to be hard-wired into the airline passenger and hotel guest lists. “Not that they couldn’t duplicate the technology or the
bonafides of the passports themselves — watermarks, holograms, et cetera…” the retired operative added. “Their biggest worry was getting the [false] passport and
travel data into the country’s databases.” One obvious workaround is for operatives to book one-star hotels where such impediments are less likely. But if they’re
traveling undercover as, say, a prosperous Western business executive, booking a room in a seedy joint only raises red flags with the desk clerks and local gendarmes.
So after 9/11, intelligence sources said, CIA ops managers began putting renewed emphasis on recruiting spies in foreign border-control agencies — people with
access to the electronic files, who can change, add or eliminate documents. “Just before I left, they were gearing up to make a request for CIA officers to recruit
foreigners with access to immigration databases,” said the retired NOC. “I’m sure that several people made careers out of just this kind of operation, much as some
officers did when the NSA suddenly lost millions of access points to intelligence when the world switched from microwave towers to fiber optic lines — whole
departments were formed to recruit telephone company assets in foreign countries.” The challenge isn’t just the CIA’s, of course.
Every intelligence agency faces it. The problem is especially acute for Israel’s Mossad. “That’s right,” says former Mossad operative Michael
Ross. “I remember discussions about that in the latter part of my career, just before 9/11. Obviously for Mossad the issue of documents and identity are an ongoing
huge, huge project…. You can’t go into Syria, say, or basically anywhere in the Middle East, with an Israeli passport, for obvious reasons, so we have to use other
documents.” Mossad puts its documents through test runs, said Ross, who retired in 2001. “We get into, say, France, with a document, then change our appearance,
then go into Germany and see if they pick up the physical change, to see if the two speak to each other and say, ‘Wait a minute, is this the same guy? Before he had a
beard and glasses, and now he’s clean-shaven and wears contacts.'” “There are some very smart people in Mossad who spend a lot of time and energy ensuring that we
can get our people in and out of countries without a document flap,” Ross added. But something went wrong in a Dubai hotel in January 2010. A Hamas official was
assassinated, almost certainly at the hands of Mossad. As it turned out, Israeli operatives, who entered Dubai on forged passports from the United Kingdom, Ireland,
France and Germany, were videotaped in the hotel by its security cameras. The resulting dust-up mystified longtime intelligence observers, who thought Mossad
incapable of such sloppy tradecraft. Either Mossad hadn’t locked down its relations with Dubai authorities as tightly as it thought, Ross speculated, or an Iranian mole
leaked the surveillance tapes. For day-in, day-out CIA espionage operations abroad, “biometrics is a problem
only if you have the same case officer traveling into the country multiple times with multiple aliases,” said the former NOC. “The easy fix to that is to break up the
workload among several case officers who only travel to that country under one alias.” Or to meet your spies someplace else, others suggested, where border controls
are looser, such as Cyprus. Or better yet, introducing malware into the computers of foreign immigration and border control services, to change data on demand. But
the electronic curtain is descending all over the world. All EU countries are now required to issue second-generation biometric passports, however, the EU does not
require foreign visitors to present a biometric passport. By last September, only Belgium had not complied, according to a scolding press release by the European
Commission. At most American airports and seaports, foreign nationals have to produce biometric
passports to submit to a fingerprint check before entering the country. Meanwhile, a business newsletter anticipated
last year that “Research analysts predict that in five years, iris scans will be commonly used for airport
security and border control.” That might be a little ambitious. Britain’s groundbreaking iris-scanning system is being quietly scaled back, according
to reports from last November. It’s not that the machines weren’t accurate. They just didn’t work as fast as planned. Lines were long. “We currently do not have any
iris scanners in use,” said Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Stephanie Malin. Testing continues. One company alone, Eyelock Corp., has deployed
machines in some U.S. ports, as well as Mexico, Singapore and Columbia, a company spokeswoman said. It has pilot programs running in Brazil, Chile, France,
Spain, the U.K. and unspecified “Middle East” ports. Dubai loves it. In 2009, Ministry of Interior officials claimed its iris scans had netted 54,000 criminals and 1,088
forged passports the previous year. Did they catch any CIA operatives in their biometric dragnet? If so, no one is talking.
 Jaguar Debate 275

Internal Links & Impacts

Biometrics will and have exposed covert agents. An example is the attempted
assassination of a leader of a Palestinian militant group, which was exposed due to
biometric surveillance.
Brannen ’15 [Kate Brannen, “To Catch a Spy: Biometrics is making it far more difficult for the U.S.
intelligence community to conduct clandestine operations.” Foreign Policy Magazine, April 6, 2015, Kate Brannen
is a contributor to Foreign Policy, where she previously worked as a senior reporter.]
In December, WikiLeaks released a secret CIA document from 2012 that gave advice to U.S. government undercover operatives traveling in and out of the European
Union. It specifically describes how biometric data is collected and used, and it shows that as Europe expands its collection and introduces
more-sophisticated systems, the risk to U.S. individuals traveling undercover has increased. But the best-known
example of the new spy world is the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a leader of the Palestinian
militant group Hamas. His killing was considered a fiasco for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad because its
spies’ covers were completely blown — thanks to biometrics and surveillance technology . The Israeli
agents made a handful of mistakes throughout the mission. But crucial to their exposure was new border security and
surveillance technology. Investigators ultimately identified 27 Israeli agents involved in the killing
by piecing together photographs inside fraudulent passports, immigration records, credit card
receipts, and high-resolution closed-circuit TV footage inside the airport and various hotels. The Mossad
agents had forged passports by copying the authentic ones of dual Israeli citizens from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia, provoking
As DNA and other
widespread anger from those countries. In retaliation, Britain expelled a senior Mossad official at the Israeli Embassy in London.

biometric collection and analysis become more routine and more sophisticated, officials and
experts said it is only going to become more dangerous for spies to operate. “There is no simple solution to this,”
Flynn said, “so we’re going to have to be far more creative than, I think, what we’re looking at right now.”

Covert operations by the CIA are crucial to foreign policy actions, and need to be
used to contain United States adversaries.
Devine ’14 [Jack Devine, June, 13, 2014, “Post Iraq, U.S. must rely on covert action”, Jack Devine is a former
head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and president of the Arkin Group, a firm that specializes in crisis
management.]

Covert actions are now crucial to U.S. foreign policy. After the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Washington should rely more on CIA-driven covert operations and less on military force in the
world’s hotspots. Ukraine could be a case in point. For covert action means not just collecting information (espionage),
but also political or paramilitary efforts that help support political organizations, local media and
on occasion, insurgents. Under the CIA’s charter, the government maintains plausible deniability
for all these actions. I’ve long advocated for greater use of this tool of statecraft — and not only because I ran the CIA’s Afghanistan Task Force during
the successful effort to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in 1986-87, along with many other covert operations during my 32 years at the intelligence agency.
The ability to conduct activities below the radar is key . There has been a spike in instability across
regions where the United States and its allies have major national security interests. Yet
Washington is less able to exert influence through force. President Barack Obama noted this in his
May 28 West Point speech, saying the United States is unlikely to engage in another ground war
any time soon. Washington can rely on the CIA (working with Special Operations Forces) to provide clandestine
intelligence, training and, where necessary, political funding and paramilitary support for foreign
groups aligned to U.S. interests. A successful covert operation requires certain conditions on the
ground: broad-based political support for policy or regime change consistent with U.S. national
security interest; excellent local intelligence; forces in-country able to engage the opposition, and
substantial financial and political support from Congress and the White House. With Ukraine and its environs, all
these components are in place: the newly elected Kiev government and its pro-NATO orientation has significant popular support, Ukrainians have shown a history of
 Jaguar Debate 276

standing up for their country’s independence and freedom, and Obama and Congress strongly support the Kiev government, presumably also intending to supply the
necessary funding. To strengthen Kiev’s resistance against Russian interference, Washington should be providing robust financial and training support to the
appropriate security, military and political organizations as well as beefing up their intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities. The West also needs to “contain”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massive investment in covert action in Ukraine — and not-so-covert pro-Russian engagement. Putin, an experienced ex-KGB
operative, has been drawing straight from the covert action playbook in Ukraine. He is inserting Russian Special Forces into the fray, trying to pass them off as
Ukrainian pro-Russian activists. Though these efforts at concealment may look laughable, when combined with his carefully crafted propaganda campaign, Putin’s
plausible denial pronouncements have successfully muddied the water. Despite Russian denials, however, the political dissidents in Eastern Ukraine are being funded
and supported substantially by Moscow. Rest assured, Putin’s numerous in-place agents are collecting intelligence and pushing every possible lever to build a political
force in Eastern Ukraine against the Kiev government. At the same time, he is likely/assuredly inserting/ the plumbing into Western Ukraine in order to develop
sources of intelligence and agents of influence. To deal with this newly aggressive Russia, it may be instructive to study how Washington dealt with an aggressive
Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Putin’s heavy-handed behavior is beginning to feel like the Cold War is making a comeback — protestations to the contrary.
For me, this all feels like déjà vu — because I worked as a CIA chief of station in five major Cold War locations, and served as deputy director for worldwide
operations during the heyday of the struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. The similarities are uncanny. The Cold War kicked off with Joseph Stalin’s
postwar land grab of Eastern Europe and his aggressive efforts to promote Communism abroad. This round began with Putin’s assaults on Georgia, Armenia, Crimea
and now possibly part or all of Ukraine. In considering how to address this, Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Sinews of Peace” speech may still offer the best advice. “The
only thing that Russians respect,” Churchill said, “is strength.” Unfortunately, after
Washington’s failure to respond to Syria
crossing the red line of using chemical weapons, our adversaries and fair-weather friends are
starting to test the limits of where the United States will keep its word. Drawing red lines is hard –
difficult even with a weaker country. So, it may be with Putin. He will likely trim his aggressive sails in Ukraine only when he sees the
physical proof of the West’s “serious consequences.” So Washington and the European Union should impose extremely strong economic sanctions and ramp up the
NATO’s military and intelligence support for the Kiev government. Washington power brokers should also study the
“containment” policy that the United States used to counter Soviet aggression throughout the Cold
War. George Kennan, a State Department official and Russia expert, laid this out in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. In his article, which became the basis
of the Truman Doctrine, Kennan stated the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist and that its innate sense of
insecurity necessitated a hostile world to maintain power at home. Sound familiar? Kennan also postulated that the
West needed to apply vigilant counterforce wherever the Soviets pressed their advantage . That view
certainly has merit today in the wake of Putin’s most recent actions. The recent Ukrainian elections were promising because the new president, Petro
Poroshenko, is an experienced official and billionaire businessman with a long record of dealing with Russia. But the fact that very few were able to vote in the east of
the country, and that Putin will continue to push to maintain influence, means Poroshenko’s new government will have to stay alert to protect against Russian
encroachment. How does the West ensure the new Kiev government’s survival if we are not going to commit ground troops to counter Russia aggression? Much

like the cold warriors of the past, we should return to tightly focused covert action . This means a robust
relationship with the Ukraine Security Service and military intelligence, supplemented with direct financial support to political activists and groups. This must be done
with great care and strict compartmentalization because of Russia’s vast network of agents in Ukraine. But this program is necessary to balance the scale against
Russia’s massive covert activities there. In the tradition of Kennan, we should be able to “contain” Moscow’s subterfuge and its efforts to maximize influence in Kiev.

CIA support in Syria is key to stoppings the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
Miller 6/10 [June 10, 2015, Greg Miller, reporter for the Washington Post, “CIA running secret anti-terror hunt
in Syria”]

U.S. officials said theCIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past
several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-
Assad rebel who has gone through the program. The CIA declined to comment on the program or its budget. But U.S. officials defended the scale of the
expenditures, saying the money goes toward much more than salaries and weapons and is part of a broader, multibillion-dollar
effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to bolster a coalition of militias known as the
Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army. Much of the CIA’s money goes toward running secret
training camps in Jordan, gathering intelligence to help guide the operations of agency-backed
militias and managing a sprawling logistics network used to move fighters, ammunition and
weapons into the country. The move by the House intelligence panel to cut the program’s funds is not mentioned in the unclassified version of the
spending bill. But statements released by lawmakers alluded to some of their underlying concerns, including a line calling for an “effort to enhance the metrics
involved in a critically important [intelligence community] program.” That language, officials said, was a veiled reference to members’ mounting frustration with the
program and a perceived inability by the agency to show that its forces have gained territory, won battles or achieved other measurable results. “Assad is increasingly
in danger, and people may be taking bets on how long he can last, but it’s largely not as a result of action by so-called moderates on the ground,” said a senior
Republican aide in Congress, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject. In
the past two years, the goal of
the CIA’s mission in Syria has shifted from ousting Assad to countering the rise of extremist groups
including al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS
and ISIL. “Unfortunately, I think that ISIS, al-Nusra and some of the other radical Islamic factions are the best
positioned to capitalize on the chaos that might accompany a rapid decline of the regime,” Schiff said.
 Jaguar Debate 277

Even defenders of the CIA program acknowledge that moderate factions in Syria have often performed poorly and are likely to be overwhelmed in any direct
showdown with the Islamic State. Still, officials said U.S.-backed
fighters have made significant gains in recent weeks —
including the seizure of a government army base — and represent the only meaningful prospect for
the United States and its allies to maintain a foothold in the country if Assad falls. “This is especially
true in southern Syria, where [the U.S.-backed coalition] is emerging as a significant force capable
of capturing key regime bases,” the U.S. intelligence official said. “Slowly but surely, U.S. government support to
the moderate opposition forces has paid off.” Opposition leaders in southern Syria, where the CIA-trained fighters
are concentrated, said the groups have recently become better organized and more effective in their use of heavier weapons, including U.S.-made TOW
antitank missiles. “They have coherent command and control and have unified Sunni groups,” said Oubai Shahbandar, a former top adviser to the opposition
leadership who maintains regular contact with rebels on the ground. Moderate militias have kept control of border crossings into Jordan and the Israeli-occupied
Golan Heights and are fighting on the outskirts of Damascus. The training program, Shahbandar said, “is a precedent in terms of what works.” Rather than cut funds,
he said, the
United States “should really double down on its southern program.” Rebel units in the
area have set up functioning civilian governments that could be models for the kind of political
transition the United States says it seeks as a replacement for Assad, said Lina Khatib of the Carnegie Middle East
Center. Despite those gains south of Damascus, experts and officials said that the most significant pressure on Assad’s regime is in northern Syria, where the Islamic
State is on the offensive. At the same time, a separate coalition of rebel groups known as the Army of Conquest has taken advantage of infusions of new weapons and
cash from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. The intelligence spending bill would set budgets for the fiscal year beginning in October. The chairman of the House
intelligence panel, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), declined a request for an interview. The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to begin work this month on its
own budget for U.S. spy agencies. U.S. officials said the White House has signaled that it will seek to persuade the Senate panel to protect the CIA program from the
cuts sought by the House.

An unchecked ISIS will attack the U.S.

Page 5/11 [Susan Page, May 11, 2015, “CIA veteran Morell: ISIS' next test could be a 9/11-style attack”, USA
Today, The Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, covering her 9th presidential campaign. She's interviewed
the past 8 presidents and reported from 5 continents.]

The Islamic State simply inspired the deadly assault by two men on an exhibit of cartoons depicting
the Prophet Muhammad near Dallas last week, CIA veteran Michael Morell said. But it's only a
matter of time, he warns, before the terrorist group is likely to be in a position to direct more
elaborate attacks on American soil that could result in mass casualties. “If we don't get ISIS under
control, we're going to see that kind of attack,” similar to the one al-Qaida mounted on 9/11, Morell
said. U.S. efforts have not been effective in countering the Islamic State's success in recruiting
hundreds of American converts, he said, “and we're not effective at it because it's very hard to do.”
Morell was by President George W. Bush's side at a Florida elementary school in 2001 when the president was told that hijacked airliners had crashed into the World
Trade Center, and he was in the White House Situation Room with President Obama nearly a decade later when the first word was relayed that Navy Seal Team Six
had killed Osama bin Laden. After 33 years in the CIA, including two stints as acting director, Morell has written an account of his experiences, to be published
Tuesday, titled “The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism From Al Qa'ida to ISIS.”

ISIS can and will go nuclear - they claim the ability to smuggle nukes over the
southern border.
Blake 2015, Eben Blake (intern covering general affairs at IBTimes in New York City. He is currently pursuing a degree in English and
History at Brown University and previously worked at The Brown Daily Herald as the Arts and Culture Editor), Islamic State Nuclear Weapons:
ISIS Claims It Can Smuggle Devices Through Nigeria, Mexico To The United States, 3 June 2015, International Business Times,
http://www.ibtimes.com/islamic-state-nuclear-weapons-isis-claims-it-can-smuggle-devices-through-nigeria-1950280. PE

The Islamic State group claims it could purchase a nuclear device from Pakistan and transport it to
the United States through drug-smuggling channels. The group, also known as ISIS and ISIL, would transfer
the nuclear weapon from Pakistan to Nigeria or Mexico, where it could be brought to South
America and then up to the U.S., according to an op-ed allegedly written by kidnapped British
photojournalist John Cantlie and published in Dabiq, the group's propaganda magazine.¶ The op-ed said that Boko
Haram, the Nigerian jihadist group that announced its formal allegiance to ISIS in March, would
make their efforts to transport a weapon to the U.S. much easier, reported Nigerian newspaper Premium Times. ISIS
claims the Nigerian army is in a "virtual state of collapse" because of its war against Boko Haram. ¶ While U.S. officials have dismissed the
ability of the group to acquire or transport a nuclear weapon, Indian Minister of State Defense Rao
 Jaguar Debate 278

Inderjit Singh said at the Shangri-La regional security conference in Singapore last weekend that "[w]ith the
rise of ISIL in West Asia, one is afraid to an extent that perhaps they might get access to a nuclear
arsenal from states like Pakistan," Bloomberg reported. ¶ Cantlie describes how ISIL would hypothetically call on
supporters in Pakistan to "purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to
corrupt officials in the region," after which it would be "transported overland until it makes it to
Libya" when "the mujahedeen move it south to Nigeria." It would then be moved to South America
in the same method that "drug shipments bound for Europe pass through West Africa," according to
Premium Times. After transporting the device through the "porous borders of South America" to Mexico, it would be " just a quick hop through a

smuggling tunnel" to bring the nuclear bomb into America . ¶ Since his abduction in 2012, Cantlie has appeared in multiple
ISIS propaganda videos, including the series "Lend Me Your Ears."

ISIS will become the first true terrorist state and will use chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons to kill indiscriminately
Morris ’14 [Nigel, Deputy political director at The Independent, “Isis could become 'world’s first truly terrorist
state' and bomb UK with nuclear and chemical weapons, Theresa May warns”, September 30, 2014]

Isis could acquire nuclear and biological weapons to launch attacks on Britain, the Home Secretary warned today as she set
out new measures to clamp down on extremist groups. In a speech to the Tory party conference that concentrated almost entirely on the threat from terrorism at home
and abroad, Theresa May warned that the jihadist group could become the “world's first truly terrorist state“ in
Iraq and Syria. “If [Isis] succeed in firmly consolidating their grip on the land they occupy in Syria and Iraq, we will see
the world’s first truly terrorist state established within a few hours flying time of our country,” she said . “We will see terrorists given the
space to plot attacks against us, train their men and women, and devise new methods to kill
indiscriminately.” “We will see the risk, often prophesied but thank God not yet fulfilled, that with the capability of a state behind them, the
terrorists will acquire chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons to attack us. “We must not flinch. We must
not shy away from our responsibility. We must not drift towards danger and insecurity. While we still have the chance, we must act to destroy them.

Nuclear terrorism will cause global thermonuclear war.

Ayson ’10 [Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New
Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic
Effects,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via
InformaWorld)]
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the
there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be
nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed,
regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with
the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign
states that possess these weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside
considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states
have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place precipitated
. But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a
entirely by state possessors themselves
catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort
of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive
exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might
assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear
war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the
It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible
so-called n+1 problem.
situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war . For
example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the
picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible
to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves.
For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian
stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not
be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in
tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the
if the act of nuclear
explosion, the materials used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively,
terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible
 Jaguar Debate 279

at all)suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United
Washington would be left with a very short list
Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in
consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage
would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In
particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in
Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been
traded between these major powers, would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume
the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed
conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present
time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with
the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of
the attack? Washington’s early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the
possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in
the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might
be expected to place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of
alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that
Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and
possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions
might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of
nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier)Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear)
retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to
support that group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret
such action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their
spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment
in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims
is the “Chechen insurgents’ … long-standing interest in all things nuclear.”42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in
There is also the
Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to provide.
question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another
member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, both Russia and China
would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a
slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to
discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply underwhelming,
(neither “for us or against us”) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a
major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway,
and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability?
If Washington decided to use, or decided to threaten the use of, nuclear weapons, the responses of Russia and China would be crucial to the chances of avoiding a
more serious nuclear exchange. They might surmise, for example, that while the act of nuclear terrorism was especially heinous and demanded a strong response, the
response simply had to remain below the nuclear threshold. It would be one thing for a non-state actor to have broken the nuclear use taboo, but an entirely different
thing for a state actor, and indeed the leading state in the international system, to do so. If Russia and China felt sufficiently strongly about that prospect, there is then
the question of what options would lie open to them to dissuade the United States from such action: and as has been seen over the last several decades, the central
If some readers find this simply too fanciful, and
dissuader of the use of nuclear weapons by states has been the threat of nuclear retaliation .
perhaps even offensive to contemplate, it may be informative to reverse the tables. Russia, which possesses an arsenal of thousands
of nuclear warheads and that has been one of the two most important trustees of the non-use taboo, is subjected to an attack of nuclear
terrorism. In response, Moscow places its nuclear forces very visibly on a higher state of alert and
declares that it is considering the use of nuclear retaliation against the group and any of its state
supporters. How would Washington view such a possibility? Would it really be keen to support Russia’s use of nuclear
weapons, including outside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence? And if not, which seems quite plausible, what options would Washington have to communicate
If China had been the victim of the nuclear terrorism and seemed likely to retaliate in
that displeasure?
kind, would the United States and Russia be happy to sit back and let this occur? In the charged
atmosphere immediately after a nuclear terrorist attack, how would the attacked country respond
to pressure from other major nuclear powers not to respond in kind? The phrase “how dare they
tell us what to do” immediately springs to mind. Some might even go so far as to interpret this
concern as a tacit form of sympathy or support for the terrorists. This might not help the chances of
nuclear restraint.
 Jaguar Debate 280

Nuclear war causes extinction.

Germanos ’13 [Andrea Germanos, December 10, 2013, “Nuclear War Could Mean 'Extinction of the Human
Race'”, Common Dream]

A war using even a small percentage of the world's nuclear weapons threatens the lives of two
billion people, a new report warns. The findings in the report issued by International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and
Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) are based on studies by climate scientists that show how nuclear war would alter the climate and agriculture, thereby
the groups' April of
threatening one quarter of the world's population with famine. Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? offers an updated edition to
2012 report, which the groups say "may have seriously underestimated the consequences of a limited
nuclear war." "A nuclear war using only a fraction of existing arsenals would produce massive
casualties on a global scale—far more than we had previously believed," Dr. Ira Helfand, the
report’s author and IPPNW co-president, said in a statement. As their previous report showed, years after even a
limited nuclear war, production of corn in the U.S. and China's middle season rice production
would severely decline, and fears over dwindling food supplies would lead to hoarding and
increases in food prices, creating further food insecurity for those already reliant on food imports.
The updated report adds that Chinese winter wheat production would plummet if such a war broke
out. Based on information from new studies combining reductions in wheat, corn and rice, this new
edition doubles the number of people they expect to be threatened by nuclear-war induced famine
to over two billion. "The prospect of a decade of widespread hunger and intense social and
economic instability in the world’s largest country has immense implications for the entire global
community, as does the possibility that the huge declines in Chinese wheat production will be matched by similar declines in other wheat producing
countries," Helfand stated. The crops would be impacted, the report explains, citing previous studies, because of the black carbon particles that
would be released, causing widespread changes like cooling temperatures, decreased precipitation and decline in solar radiation. In this scenario of famine, epidemics
Within nations where famine is
of infectious diseases would be likely, the report states, and could lead to armed conflict. From the report:
widespread, there would almost certainly be food riots, and competition for limited food resources
might well exacerbate ethnic and regional animosities. Among nations, armed conflict would be a
very real possibility as states dependent on imports attempted to maintain access to food supplies .
While a limited nuclear war would bring dire circumstances, the impacts if the world's biggest nuclear arms holders were involved would be even worse. "With a
large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible —not certain, but possible—extinction of the
human race," Helfand told Agence-France Presse. "In this kind of war, biologically there are going to be people surviving somewhere on the
planet but the chaos that would result from this will dwarf anything we've ever seen ," Helfand told the news agency.
As Helfand writes, the data cited in the report "raises a giant red flag about the threat to humanity posed." Yet, as Dr. Peter Wilk, former national executive director of
PSR writes in an op-ed today, the "threat is of our own creation." As a joint statement by 124 states delivered to the United Nations General Assembly in October
stated: "It is in the interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances."
 Jaguar Debate 281

Space Program Add-On

Covert operations helped the United States beat the soviets in the space race.
Coleman ’14 [Timothy W. Coleman, July 22, 2014, “CIA covert operation helped America win the race to the
Moon”, Timothy W. Coleman is a writer, analyst, and a technophile. He co-founded two security technology startup
firms, one of which was selected as Entrepreneur Magazine’s “100 Most Brilliant Companies.” Tim started off on
Capitol Hill, worked on a successful U.S. Senate campaign, and subsequently joined a full-service, technology
marketing communications firm. Previously, he was an intelligence analyst for a DC-based service providing global
intelligence and forecasting from former CIA, U.S. intelligence and national security officers.]

Recently declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) present a clearer picture of the all-
encompassing and wide reaching efforts to win the Cold War’s Space Race. George Washington University’s
National Security Archive, a repository of declassified U.S. documents described as the world’s largest nongovernmental collection, unveiled a new batch of once
highly sensitive CIA documents in a release titled, “Soldiers, Spies and the Moon: Secret U.S. and Soviet Plans from the 1950s and 1960s.” The
newly
released cache of formerly classified reports focuses on a series of military initiatives, as well as
covert and surreptitious efforts to advance America’s lunar programs. During the 1960s, following
President John F. Kennedy’s iconic May 25, 1961 address to Congress in which he set the goal of putting a man on the Moon
within the decade, the Cold War was reaching epic proportions. President Kennedy’s speech served to
throw the gauntlet by setting the terms and singling out the ultimate prize for the soon to be
gargantuan and nationally ambitious Space Race – a successful manned mission to the Moon.
During an unspecified year, the declassified CIA document titled “The Kidnapping Of the Lunik,” from the Winter of 1967,
notes that the Soviet Union embarked upon a worldwide tour of multiple countries to show off and
amaze foreign nations with exhibits designed to personify the Soviet Union’s economic, industrial
and scientific achievements. As part of the effort, the Soviets included what was initially assumed to
be generic mock-ups of their successful space vehicles such as the Sputnik, and the Lunik,
respectively, the first successfully launched satellite and the first man-made object to reach the
Moon. The Lunik was also the first to send photographs of the Moon’s far side, which was never before seen from Earth. As the CIA paper
explains, when the exhibition came to the U.S., American intelligence officials realized that there
was a slim possibility some valuable technological insights could be gleaned if there were an
opportunity to investigate the Lunik vehicle should surreptitious access be afforded. Initial
excitement over the possibility of securing Soviet technology and space vehicle design details was
soon tempered, as American intelligence officials doubted the Soviets would send production value
examples to tour the public, especially on U.S. soil. Indeed, many intelligence officials assumed that any Soviet exhibition, including
space technologies and vehicles, would unquestionably not be the real McCoy. “It was presumably a mock-up made especially for the exhibition; the Soviets would
not be so foolish as to expose a real production item of such advanced equipment to the prying eyes of imperialist intelligence,” notes the CIA. Before adding, “Or
would they?” Like something out of a Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy spy-novel, it was soon decided that whether or
not the Lunik exhibit visiting America was real or even partially real, it was necessary to determine
if it had any intelligence value. American intelligence officials, in turn, decided a look was worth the risk. Following the exhibition’s closure at an
unspecified U.S. location, intelligence officers were able to secure 24-hours of uninterrupted access to the
Lunik. It wasn’t long before these intelligence officers determined that the Lunik model in question was an actual “production item” that had been scaled down to
a degree with some precautions made by the Soviets, since the “engine and most of the electrical and electronic components had been removed.” Even so, there
was much to be gained and as the CIA notes, “A few REDACTED, had been copied from the Lunik
during the operation, but not with sufficient detail or precision to permit a definitive identification
of the producer or determination of the REDACTED system used. It was therefore decided to try to
get another access for a factory REDACTED team.” The decision was made and the plans by the
CIA to somehow figure out a way to “borrow” the Lunik while it was in transport from one city to
the next was put into motion. In a section of the declassified report appropriately titled ‘Lunik on
loan,’ the CIA proceeds to explain how its team set out to secure some extended quality time with
 Jaguar Debate 282

the Lunik, away from the prying, and most undoubtedly disapproving, Soviet minders’ eyes. What
transpired next will go down in Cold War espionage-lore.
 Jaguar Debate 283

Generic
 Jaguar Debate 284

Biometrics Bad
Biometric systems do not work well in practice.
Patrick ’12 [Andrew Patrick is an Ottawa, Canada-based research and development consultant and scientist who
specializes in human behavior and technology. He also is an adjunct research professor of psychology and computer
science at Carleton University. Patrick conducts research focused on the abilities, characteristics, and behaviors of
people and application of that knowledge to the design and development of new technologies., “Identity Theft”,
2012]
Even though biometrics have the potential for increasing the accuracy of identification and authentication, and thus reducing chances for identity theft, there are
limitations. First, the performance of biometric systems is not perfect, and it can vary a great deal from system to
system. Overall, the data currently available on fingerprint matching accuracy, for example, suggests that
the performance can be quite good in laboratory studies and when high quality images are
captured in the field. Caution is appropriate, however, because the results from real-world trials suggest that actual
accuracy can be much lower and capturing high quality biometric information can be difficult in
practice. Failures to enroll are often a serious problem when deploying biometric systems, and yet they have not received as much
attention as matching failures. Failures to enroll can be caused by missing or damaged biometric characteristics,
poor user training, poor devices, etc. For many biometric technologies, enrollment may be more
difficult for disabled people and older participants. Any biometric system will have to plan for
participants who are not able to enroll in the system, and this may be a sizeable portion of the participants depending on the target
customers. Potential users are also concerned about the reliability of new technology . Social and human factors, particularly
the usability and acceptance of the biometric system, will also be very important for their success. If the users have difficulty using the system or fail to accept it, the
service is likely to fail. There
is a relationship between biometric usability and accuracy. The methods that
are the most accurate, such as iris and retina recognition, tend to be the least usable. Conversely,
the methods that are most usable, such as speech and face recognition, tend to be the least accurate .
Fingerprint systems tend to provide moderate levels of accuracy and usability. Concerning the acceptance of biometric systems, research has shown that although
acceptance is increasing, users are still wary because the benefits are not always evident (both in terms of security and convenience). Security systems, including
biometrics, are "enabling tasks" that differ from the "production tasks" (actual work) that users are interested in. If the enabling task is at all awkward, slow, or
unusable, it is natural for users to try to avoid it. For biometrics, perceived convenience can be a bigger driver than any increase in security.

Biometric data submits people to authoritarian governments, and allows for massive
civil rights abuses.
Jacobs ’12 [Ethan Jacobs is a licensed California attorney with a degree in political science. He writes on
political and social issues for a large number of publications, including BeforeItsNews.com and
OldThinkerNews.com., “DNA Databases”, 2012]

Providing biometric data, including a fingerprint scan, is an act of submission that is being required by
government and private venues more and more. To obtain a driver's license, you must submit to a
thumb scan. If you refuse, you will not be issued a license, your right to travel will be severely
limited, and you will lack a common form of personal identification. In California, a thumb scan is
required to obtain a real estate/mortgage broker's license. Beginning February 1, 2011, the Golden State will also require
fingerprints to purchase ammunition, a substantial infringement on privacy and the right to bear arms. International travelers that want to skip
lines at customs are encouraged to enroll in the Global Entry Program. After landing, find the
Global Entry kiosk, "scan your passport and fingerprints," and be on your way. Amusement parks are also
requiring biometric identification. To utilize an annual pass at SeaWorld, one must participate in the Touch-n-Go finger scan ID verification system. Walt Disney
World has also employed a biometric finger scanner at their theme parks. Beyond gathering biometric data on citizens,
governments have also been stealing infants' blood samples without parental consent. Of course, this is done
under the guise of protecting babies from diseases: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of
genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it's often done without the parents'
consent ... Now, states mandate that newborns be tested for anywhere between 28 and 54 different conditions, and the DNA samples are stored in state labs for
anywhere from three months to indefinitely, depending on the state. During March of this year [2010], the U.S. House of Representatives
 Jaguar Debate 285

approved the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act of 2010 (H.R. 4614) by a vote of 357 to 32. If approved by the Senate, "millions of
Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted
and added to a national database." [President Barack] Obama has also endorsed forcing people arrested to
submit DNA to a national database." [This bill did not become law in the 111th Congress.] In Orange County, California, the District
Attorney's office has a policy of dropping charges against low-level offenders who agree to submit
DNA samples. During 2009, the office nearly quadrupled its DNA database in nine months, with
about half of the 15,000 samples being obtained from cases pertaining to minor offences. The Orange
County DNA database is separate from the Department of Justice database and those that consent to providing samples commonly do so without legal counsel.
Why are governments so interested in obtaining DNA samples from their citizens and what is the
long-term agenda? Will the DNA collected be used in experiments or research? This is a vital issue
given the fact that "scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA
evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in
criminal cases." We should also recall that globalists sponsored the eugenics polices (eliminating the gene pools of those deemed
unfit by the state) in the United States that inspired [Adolf] Hitler's Nazis. [According to Edwin Black in "Eugenics and the Nazis—the
California Connection," November 9, 2003, at SFGate.com.] Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and
exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race. But the concept of a white, blond-
haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the
United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power ... California
eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's
campaign for ethnic cleansing. Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate
philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune ... the main solution for
eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as more
marriage restrictions. California led the nation, performing nearly all sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first 25 years of
eugenics legislation, California sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women. In short, history clearly demonstrates that the global elite
and governments they control cannot be trusted with the DNA of individuals.
 Jaguar Debate 286

Solvency
 Jaguar Debate 287

Customs
US Customs has launched three new biometric technology programs along United
States borders.
Franceschi-Bicchierai ’15 [Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is a staff writer at VICE Motherboard in
Brooklyn, New York, where he covers hacking, information security, and digital rights. Prior to working at
Motherboard, Lorenzo worked at Mashable and at Wired's Danger Room. He graduated from Columbia's Graduate
School of Journalism., “Leaked Document Reveals Upcoming Biometric Experiments at US Customs,” 3/18/15,
Vice News]

The facial recognition pilot program launched last week by US Customs and Border Protection, which civil
liberties advocates say could lead to new potentially privacy-invading programs, is just the first of
three biometric experiments that the feds are getting ready to launch. The three experiments involve
new controversial technologies like iris and face scanner kiosks, which CBP plans to deploy at the
Mexican border, and facial recognition software, according to a leaked document obtained by Motherboard. All three pilots
are part of a broader Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program to modernize screenings at
American entry and exit ports, including at the highly politicized Mexican border, with the aid of
new biometric technologies. The program is known as Apex Air Entry and Exit Re-Engineering (AEER) Project, according to the leaked slides.
These pilot programs have the goal of “identifying and implementing” biometric technologies that
can be used at American borders to improve the immigration system as well as US national
security, according to the slides. The facial recognition pilot is up and running at Washington Dulles International airport, as first
reported as operational by Motherboard, while the other two programs appear to have not been deployed yet. Unlike the facial recognition one,
the other two appear to only target foreigners. The CBP did not respond to Motherboard’s questions regarding these programs. The
slides were leaked to Motherboard by Arjun Sethi, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) legislative counsel, who attended a presentation held on March 10 at
the CBP headquarters. The second pilot is called Biometric Exit (BE) Mobile Experiment and has the goal of
helping CBP “confirm with certainty that a foreigner traveler has departed the United States.” As
part of this experiment, the slides say that the CBP officers at the Atlanta Hartsfield International airport will use a “handheld
device” to record the exit of a foreign national from the US and create a match with the person’s
entry records, in order to figure out whether a foreigner has stayed in the US more than he or she
was allowed to. It’s unclear what the device actually does, but according to another person who attended the presentation at the CBP, the device is probably
a fingerprint reader. The third pilot is called Pedestrian Biometric Experiment and it will be deployed at the
Otay Mesa border between the United States and Mexico, according to the slides. This experiment has the
goal of testing “the viability of facial and iris image capture” in a land border such as the one in Otay Mesa, and
create “an additional layer of security” at the US southern border to “combat national security and public safety threats.” The CBP will install
devices capable of scanning a traveler’s face and iris, replacing existing entry kiosks , the agency explains in
the slides. Other gizmos to be deployed include RFID document readers, iris biometric scanners, and
facial biometric cameras, according to a sketch of the border station included in the slides. While
both these two programs, as well as the facial recognition one, are just experiments at the moment,
privacy advocates warn that there’s a risk of mission creep, and that technologies like those used
for these experiments could soon be deployed more widely. Moreover, given the ever-increasing political pressure to secure the
border with Mexico, the third program has good chances to be fully implemented. "The public should take notice,” Sethi, of the ACLU, told
Motherboard. “These programs may be coming to a theater near you."
 Jaguar Debate 288

FBI Solvency Advocate

The FBI takes fingerprints and photos when a person is applying for employment in
order to use them in their criminal database.
Lynch 9/18 [Jennifer Lynch is a Senior Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and works on
privacy and civil liberties issues. Jennifer is a frequent speaker and lecturer at law schools and legal conferences on
law enforcement surveillance programs, government transparency, domestic drones, location data, and biometrics.
She has written an influential white paper on biometric data collection in immigrant communities and has testified
about facial recognition and its Fourth Amendment implications before the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy,
Technology and the Law., “With Little Fanfare, FBI Ramps Up Biometrics Programs”, 9/18/15, Electronic Frontier
Foundation]

Being a job seeker isn’t a crime. But the FBI has made a big change in how it deals with fingerprints that might make it
seem that way. For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a
background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal
purposes. The change, which the FBI revealed quietly in a February 2015 Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), means that if you ever
have your fingerprints taken for licensing or for a background check, they will most likely end up
living indefinitely in the FBI’s NGI database. They’ll be searched thousands of times a day by law
enforcement agencies across the country—even if your prints didn’t match any criminal records
when they were first submitted to the system. This is the first time the FBI has allowed routine
criminal searches of its civil fingerprint data. Although employers and certifying agencies have submitted prints to the FBI for decades,
the FBI says it rarely retained these non-criminal prints. And even when it did retain prints in the past, they “were not readily accessible or searchable.” Now,
not only will these prints—and the biographical data included with them—be available to any law
enforcement agent who wants to look for them, they will be searched as a matter of course along
with all prints collected for a clearly criminal purpose (like upon arrest or at time of booking). This seems part of an
ever-growing movement toward cataloguing information on everyone in America—and a
movement that won’t end with fingerprints. With the launch of the face recognition component of
NGI, employers and agencies will be able to submit a photograph along with prints as part of the
standard background check. As we’ve noted before, one of FBI’s stated goals for NGI is to be able to track
people as they move from one location to another. Having a robust database of face photos, built
out using non-criminal records, will only make that goal even easier to achieve. This change will
impact a broad swath of Americans. It’s not just prospective police officers or childcare workers who have to submit to fingerprint
background checks. In Texas, for example, you’ll need to give the government your prints if you want to be an engineer, doctor, realtor, stockbroker, attorney, or even
an architect. The California Department of Justice says it submits 1.2 million sets of civil prints to the FBI annually. And, since 1953, all jobs with the federal
government have required a fingerprint check—not just for jobs requiring a security clearance, but even for part-time food service workers, student interns, designers,
customer service representatives, and maintenance workers. The FBI seems to think we should all be OK with this because it has (ostensibly) given people notice and
because the program is limited to only those people who are required by federal or state rules to provide prints. But in many parts of the country, this
could
amount to a very large percentage of workers (including each and every attorney at EFF)—and for
many people, especially the poor and underemployed, opting out of this program by choosing a
different line of work is truly a not a choice at all.

FBI has contracted Lockheed Martin to increase their biometric surveillance

capabilities.
Sayani ’12 [Daniel Sayani is a journalist who analyzes and reports on a wide variety of issues., “Espionage and
Intelligence”, 2012]

The FBI announced last week [in mid-March 2011] that its new identification system has reached its initial
operating capacity. Known as Next Generation Identification (NGI), the Lockheed Martin-built
program serves as an incremental upgrade of the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or
IAFIS—which will revolutionize law enforcement's ability to process fingerprints. NGI provides
 Jaguar Debate 289

automated fingerprint and latent search capabilities, electronic image storage and electronic
exchange of fingerprints to more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies and other authorized
criminal justice partners 24/7. Upon completion, the system will have the ability to process
fingerprint transactions much more effectively and accurately. "The implementation announced today represents a
tremendous achievement in enhancing our identification services. Already, we're seeing how the NGI system is revolutionizing fingerprint identification in support of
our mission," said Louis E. Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI Science and Technology Branch. "Lockheed Martin was there supporting the FBI when
IAFIS went live in 1999, and we're thrilled to be here for NGI today," affirmed Linda Gooden, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Information Systems and
Global Solutions. "Technology like this is a powerful tool when it comes to protecting America's citizens, and we're proud to serve as a partner in that mission."
"While IAFIS has been effective, criminal and terrorist threats have evolved over the past decade. Today's environment demands faster and more advanced
identification capabilities," said Assistant Director Daniel D. Roberts, of the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division. " NGI
represents a
quantum leap in fingerprint identification that will help us in solving investigations, preventing crime, and apprehending criminals and
terrorists." Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest recipient of defense industry contracts, and a leader in the field of biometrics,
says that the new technology enhances the FBI's background-check programs by giving
investigators expanded and more timely access to fingerprints. They also note that they see the FBI
contract as a means by which biometric surveillance can be increased: a press release from the defense contractor states
that "[W]hile this meets the challenges of today, tomorrow holds the possibility of developing iris
scanners, genetic scanners, and other advanced biometric solutions." The biometrics company was awarded the $1 billion
contract to develop the new, enhanced identification system in February 2008. According to Leslie Holoweiko, a Lockheed representative, the company has also
received government contracts to open the Biometric Experimentation and Advanced Concepts (BEACON™) center in White Hall, W.Va., to serve as a collaborative
center in the development of integrated biometrics solutions for both current and future initiatives. She also indicates that the company is the lead systems integrator
for the Registered Traveler program led by Verified Identity Pass, Inc. Lockheed is also the lead contractor for the Transportation Worker Identification Credential
(TWIC) program, a TSA [Transportation Security Administration] initiative to protect ports by issuing a biometrically-based credential to vetted workers requiring
unescorted access to the ports. To date, the
NGI system is the world's largest biometric database, which the FBI
expects to make available to a wide variety of federal, state, and local agencies, all in the name of keeping America safe from terrorists (and illegal
immigration). The FBI also intends to retain (upon employer request) the fingerprints of any employee who has
undergone a criminal background check, and will inform the employer if the employee is ever
arrested or charged with a crime. The increasing use of biometrics for identification ... is drawing
criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification
cards.
 Jaguar Debate 290

Supreme Court Solvency

US democratic law is modeled internationally and sets the foundations for other
democracies: our biometric policies will get modeled
Krotoszynski, 2009 [Ronald J. John C. Stone Chair, Director of Faculty Research, and Professor of Law,
University of Alabama School of Law. The Perils and the Promise of Comparative Constitutional Law: The New
Globalism and the Role of the United States in Shaping Human Rights. Arkansas Law Review 2009.
http://www.lexisnexis.com.ezproxy .samford.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/? 06/24/2015.]
Only a few years ago, former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, of the Supreme Court of Israel, tied these developments directly to the contribution of United States
constitutional law stating, "United States public
law in general, and United States Supreme Court decisions in
particular , have always been, to me and to many other judges in modern democracies, shining
examples of constitutional thought and constitutional action." n10 He also noted that "the United States is the
richest and deepest source of constitutionalism in general and of judicial review in particular ." n11
Further, he acknowledged, "We foreign jurists all look to developments in the United States as a source of
inspiration." n12

The US is the Microsoft of nations; US laws and policy gets modeled internationally.
Krotoszynski 9 [2009, Ronald J. Krotoszynski is a John C. Stone Chair, Director of Faculty Research, and
Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law, “The Perils and the Promise of Comparative
Constitutional Law: The New Globalism and the Role of the United States in Shaping Human Rights”, 61 Ark. L.
Rev. 603]

In thinking about the reality and effects of the new globalism, we should be proactive and
thoughtful. This means defending our values, even if they appear exceptionalist from a global or comparative perspective, as much, if
not more, than modifying our legal rules to square them with foreign views. Just because Germany has a different rule does not imply that the German rule is better, or
a better rule for the United States. That said, we do need to at least think about the possibility that things could be different than they are presently. The fact that other
democratic societies value rights more, or less, highly than we do should at least make us pause. It seems rude either to pretend these differences do not exist or, worse
yet, that these differences simply do not matter. As I have observed in another context, "[A] circular jurisprudence that posits its own conclusions as justifications is
intellectually indefensible." n52 Thealternative to active global engagement, attempting to maintain a kind of
intellectual isolationism, is neither attractive nor feasible because ideas travel faster and more
easily than superbugs. We should be just as actively concerned and engaged about the transnational
marketplace of ideas as we are about the transnational sale of pet food, lead-painted toys, or the safety of air travel. As scholars like Anne-Marie
Slaughter and Harold Koh have suggested, it is not a question of whether transnational legal rules will develop - it is
a question of how they will develop and the role that the United States will play in their [*617]
development. n53 In the case of freedom of expression, foreign law is very different, in myriad ways, and the United States
contributes to the global discussion of this human right as much by refusing to get with the
program as it would by redefining domestic First Amendment law to bring it into conformity with prevailing foreign attitudes. The development of
new global legal understandings of fundamental human rights is not limited to courts. Courts are not the only
source of transnational understanding of human rights, as the behavior of Congress and the executive branch also signals the content and scope of our commitment to
human rights. To say that we oppose torture generally but not in the specific context of the war on
terrorism has the effect of undermining the norm against torture as inconsistent with fundamental
human rights. Similarly, holding persons in indefinite detention, without access to lawyers or judicial
process sends a very mixed message. When the Soviet government engaged in this sort of behavior, the United States denounced it. n54 Our
credibility in arguing for a right to a fair trial by an impartial tribunal, to the assistance of counsel,
and to the right to be free of unreviewed (and unreviewable) executive detention has taken a hit
lately. Our behavior and our practices have the effect of modeling acceptable government practices,
whether we wish them to have that effect or not. We should be cautious in accepting an argument
that observance of the rule of law lies within the discretion of the executive branch of government. It
is said that "as one sows, so shall one reap." n55 The new legal globalism will reflect this truism. Simply put, if we ever had the luxury of
 Jaguar Debate 291

saying one thing while doing another, that time has come and gone. The best way of convincing
others that they must observe a particular human right would be that we observe it ourselves as a
matter of course. Thus, the process of exporting legal rules is not solely a job for the judiciary, nor should it be. [*618] V. AMERICAN
CONTRIBUTIONS Over the last 200 years, the United States has been remarkably successful at exporting its legal
ideas. Since World War II, the notion of limited government, checked by a written constitution with
judicially enforceable rights, has become the most commonly accepted model of legitimate
government. n56 The old British model of parliamentary supremacy, as a means of securing democratic control, has fallen into
something of a rut. n57 The modern trend has been entirely in favor of judicial review (judicial supremacy,
some might say) with democratically elected legislatures being limited by enumerated constitutional
rights. n58 The separation of powers is another structural innovation of the United States that has
proven quite popular. The British model of legislative, executive, and judicial power all being vested in a single body (like the Parliament) no longer
seems a successful way to run a railroad. Although parliamentary systems remain popular, and involve the merger of executive and legislative power, the
structural separation of courts has become a standard feature of modern democracies. In this sense, the
separation of powers has become the global norm rather than the exception. Federalism provides a
third major contribution to constitutionalism that the United States pioneered and which has
achieved substantial adoption abroad. In a nation featuring ethnic, religious, or cultural differences, federalism provides a means of securing
some measure of local autonomy that can accommodate these differences. Additionally, even in the contemporary United Kingdom, federalism has found a foothold,
with local parliaments now sitting for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and plans for an English Parliament. n59 The European Union itself represents a
federalism solution to [*619] the problem of a divided, and less efficient, Europe. By dividing power among various levels of government, centralization can coexist
with local autonomy and choice. Judicial review, the separation of powers, and federalism are all contributions
that the United States has made to constitutional democracy. Indeed, it would not be an overstatement to suggest that the
American model of constitutionalism is to modern government as the Microsoft Corporation's
"Windows" operating system is to computing. Having had so much success in defining the institutions and structures of a just
government with reference to the structures and doctrines reflected in our own Constitution, why should we fear the outcome of
constructive engagement with the world? n60 In this regard, it bears noting that our own framers, meeting in Philadelphia during the
summer of 1787, were themselves very familiar with government structures dating back to ancient Rome and Athens. The Framers consciously considered various
constitutional arrangements, including those of Great Britain, but also of Athens, Sparta, and Rome. n61 To be sure, the Framers did not overtly borrow any particular
constitutional system, but developed one of their own self-styled a new order for the ages ("novus ordo seclorum"). Given
this history of
familiarity with comparative constitutional law, the success of American constitutional innovations ,
and the stakes, why should we shrink from engaging the world in defense of our domestic conception of
fundamental human rights? VI. CONCLUSION We must recognize that we will participate in the new legal
globalism whether we choose to be active participants in the process or passive recipients of the
results. If the United States wants to impact the content of emerging human-rights norms, we need to join
the conversation, even if we do so as defenders [*620] (or exporters) of our legal norms. n62 The alternative, a kind of
default, will simply mean that the United States has less impact on the development and content of
both emerging legal systems and the scope and content of transnational human rights. n63 To engage the
world does not require the United States to abandon its own idiosyncratic legal values, any more than consideration of American legal norms requires the Supreme
Court of Canada or the German Federal Constitutional Court to abdicate responsibility for articulating and enforcing local legal imperatives.
 Jaguar Debate 292

ATs
 Jaguar Debate 293

Terror DA
The Syria scenario of the covert operations advantage as well as the security theatre
advantages are link turns to terrorism.

No Link - Biometric technologies are ineffective, easy to trick, and won’t stop any
terrorist attacks.
Mann ’05 [Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics. His 1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus won the National Academies Communication Award for best
book of the year, "Reliance on Technology May Make America Less Secure from Terrorism", Homeland Security,
Greenhaven Press, 2005]

The potential for subtractive failure, different and more troublesome, is raised by recent calls to deploy biometric
identification tools across the nation. Biometrics—"the only way to prevent identity fraud," according to the former senator Alan K.
Simpson, of Wyoming—identifies people by precisely measuring their physical characteristics and matching
them up against a database. The photographs on driver's licenses are an early example, but engineers have developed many
high-tech alternatives, some of them already mentioned: fingerprint readers, voiceprint recorders,
retina or iris scanners, face-recognition devices, hand-geometry assayers, even signature-geometry
analyzers, which register pen pressure and writing speed as well as the appearance of a signature.
Appealingly, biometrics lets people be their own ID cards—no more passwords to forget! Unhappily, biometric measures are often
implemented poorly. This past spring [2002] three reporters at c't, a German digital-culture magazine, tested a
face-recognition system, an iris scanner, and nine fingerprint readers. All proved easy to outsmart.
Even at the highest security setting, Cognitec's FaceVACS-Logon could be fooled by showing the sensor a short digital movie of someone known to the system—the
president of a company, say—on a laptop screen. To beat Panasonic's Authenticam iris scanner, the German journalists photographed an authorized user, took the
photo and created a detailed, life-size image of his eyes, cut out the pupils, and held the image up before their faces like a mask. The scanner read the iris, detected the
presence of a human pupil—and accepted the imposture. Many
of the fingerprint readers could be tricked simply by
breathing on them, reactivating the last user's fingerprint. Beating the more sophisticated Identix
Bio-Touch fingerprint reader required a trip to a hobby shop. The journalists used graphite powder to dust the latent
fingerprint—the kind left on glass—of a previous, authorized user; picked up the image on adhesive tape; and pressed the tape on the reader. The Identix reader, too,
was fooled. Not all biometric devices are so poorly put together, of course. But all of them fail badly. Consider the
legislation introduced in May [2002] by Congressmen Jim Moran and Tom Davis, both of Virginia, that would mandate biometric data chips in driver's licenses—a
sweeping, nationwide data-collection program, in essence....1 Although Moran and Davis tied their proposal to the need for tighter security after [the 9/11] attacks,
they also contended that the nation could combat fraud by using smart licenses with bank, credit, and Social Security cards, and for voter registration and airport
identification. Maybe so, Schneier says. "But think about screw-ups, because the system will screw up." Smart
cards that store non-biometric
data have been routinely cracked in the past, often with inexpensive oscilloscope-like devices that detect
and interpret the timing and power fluctuations as the chip operates. An even cheaper method, announced in May [2002] by two Cambridge security researchers,
requires only a bright light, a standard microscope, and duct tape. Biometric ID cards are equally vulnerable. Indeed, as a recent National
Research Council study points out, the extra security supposedly provided by biometric ID cards will raise the
economic incentive to counterfeit or steal them, with potentially disastrous consequences to the
victims. "Okay, somebody steals your thumbprint," Schneier says. "Because we've centralized all the
functions, the thief can tap your credit, open your medical records, start your car, any number of
things. Now what do you do? With a credit card, the bank can issue you a new card with a new
number. But this is your thumb—you can't get a new one." The consequences of identity fraud might be offset if biometric
licenses and visas helped to prevent terrorism. Yet smart cards would not have stopped the terrorists who attacked the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. According to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], all
the hijackers seem to have been who they said they were; their intentions, not their identities, were
the issue. Each entered the country with a valid visa, and each had a photo ID in his real name (some
obtained their IDs fraudulently, but the fakes correctly identified them). "What problem is being solved here?" Schneier asks. Good security is
built in overlapping, cross-checking layers, to slow down attacks; it reacts limberly to the unexpected. Its most important components are almost always human.
"Governments have been relying on intelligent, trained guards for centuries ," Schneier says. "They spot
 Jaguar Debate 294

people doing bad things and then use laws to arrest them. All in all, I have to say, it's not a bad
system.

None of the terrorists were refugees or snuck in through the refugee crisis. Every
one was a radicalized European national.
Abrams 11/19 [Abigail Abrams is a breaking news reporter covering politics. She is originally from St. Louis,
Missouri and has previously reported for FiveThirtyEight and TIME, among others., “Paris Attack 2015: Named
Terrorists All European Nationals, Not Syrian Refugees”, 11/19/15, International Business Times]

In the days since the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday, many have made the claim the large
number of refugees coming from Syria has allowed terrorists to sneak into European countries such as France,
Germany and Belgium. These fears were exacerbated when a Syrian passport was found near the body of one of the suicide bombers. However, as more
information has come out about the attackers involved in Friday’s events, the perpetrators identified so
far all have been European Union nationals , EU officials said. This further complicates the international discussion around Syrian
refugees, as several countries have already taken steps to close their borders following the Paris terror attacks, and politicians in the United States are calling for a
“pause” in Syrian immigration as well. The Syrian passport found near the bomber at the Stade de France said it
belonged to Ahmad al-Mohammad, 25, and the Greek government confirmed someone by that name came to Greece in October before
crossing into Serbia. But there have been concerns it was fake, and the Independent reported French officials said it may have been

“planted” by the Islamic State group, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, to take
advantage of the refugee crisis. The Paris prosecutor’s office announced Thursday Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the man suspected of being the
mastermind of the Paris attacks, was killed in a raid Wednesday on a building in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. Abaaoud, who is of Moroccan descent, grew up in
the Molenbeek suburb of Brussels, and is believed to have had close ties to the senior leadership of ISIS. While
several of the assailants had
been to Syria, the majority have been identified as French or Belgian nationals. The Independent
published Wednesday a list of the attackers with their nationalities. None of them was a refugee
from Syria.

The refugees fleeing countries like Syria are fleeing from the same kind of terrorists
that carried out the attack in Paris. To mix these two categories is to give in to
cognitive biases and fear.
Eleftheriou-Smith 11/16 [Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, Paris terror attacks: Jean Claude Juncker warns
European leaders 'do not mix up terrorists with refugees', The Independent, November 15, 2015, Loulla-Mae
Eleftheriou-Smith is a freelance reporter. She was nominated for business journalist of the year at the Press Gazette
British Journalist Awards 2012 and her name is so long that she has a double-decker byline in print. ]

As countries across Europe observe a minute’s silence for the 129 people killed in the brutal attack
on Paris, the president of the European Commission has issued a stark warning to member states
seeking to use the tragedy claimed by Isis as a reason to question their intake of refugees – many of
whom are fleeing the same militants operating in their home countries . Speaking at a news conference at the G20
summit in Turkey, Jean Claude Juncker said: “We should not mix the different categories of people coming to Europe.
“Those who organised these attacks and those that perpetrated them are exactly those that the
refugees are fleeing and not the opposite,” he said. Right-wing European politicians have highlighted
the discovery of a Syrian passport near the body of one of the suicide bombers and that the holder of the document, Ahmed Almuhamed, had
entered the EU in a group of 69 refugees after their boat sank off the Greek Island of Leros last month as a cause for concern. But intelligence sources
have thrown doubt on whether the passport was real or not, while French officials have stated there
is no proof that the bomber himself was Mr Almuhamed. Mr Juncker made it clear that “the one responsible for
the attacks in Paris… he is a criminal and not a refugee and not an asylum seeker,” and told those
seeking to change the migration agenda that has already been adopted in Europe not to “give in” to these basic
reactions following Friday night’s attack. More than 800,000 refugees and asylum seekers are expected to have entered Germany this year alone, mostly fleeing
 Jaguar Debate 295

war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, while in September European members agreed to a plan to see 120,000 refugees resettled from Italy and Greece across
the 28-nation bloc. In Poland, the new ruling party has been quick to voice its opposition to taking in its previously agreed quota of refugees since the Paris attacks,
which stood at 4,500, and has demanded security guarantees

Refugees from Syria and countries like it are the victims of violence, not the
perpetrators.
Benson 11/15 [Thor Benson, “Why It's Disgraceful to Blame Refugees for the Attacks in Paris” November 15,
2015, ATTN, Thor Benson is a traveling writer based in Los Angeles, California. He regularly contributes to ATTN,
and his writing has also been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, Rolling Stone, Vice, The Verge, and elsewhere.]

With the news updating every moment, people around the world trying to put together the pieces of what happened
in Paris Friday. Like the Charlie Hebdo attacks before it, people are looking for an explanation while they still absorb the reports. We
still do not know exactly who is behind these deadly attacks, which at the time of publishing have left at least 127 dead,
according to Reuters. Yet some on Twitter are already looking for someone or something to blame: "It's Islam!" "It's
the refugees!" The last one will certainly have an impact in the days and weeks to come. Thousands of refugees have died trying
to get to Europe from Syria. Bodies wash up on the Mediterranean shores. These people are trying
to escape poverty, radical terrorism and repressive regimes, but we too often close the door on them
or call them by disparaging names. The refugees are victims of extreme ideologies , and they are
trying to get to a safer place. It is not right to blame the victims of violence for the existence of
violence, and doing so creates the sort of cultural divisions that often breeds violence. Any claim
that the refugee situation allows bad people to fly in under the radar assumes they couldn't find an
alternate way there in the first place, when history shows they can.
 Jaguar Debate 296

Consensual
Biometric surveillance is not something you can opt out of --- it’s involuntary.
Das ’14 [Ravi – owns a biometrics consultancy firm (Apollo Biometrics) based in Chicago, Illinois, “An
Introduction to Biometrics,” in Biometric Technology: Authentication, Biocryptography, and Cloud-Based
Architecture, p. 47]

The form of biometric technology that has been widely used with these types of surveillance activities has been and continues to be facial recognition.
Obviously, with surveillance, you want a contactless form of biometric technology to be used—which is why facial recognition is the popular choice. Another
biometric technology that can be potentially used in surveil lance applications is iris recognition. It is also non-contact, and with the recent advancements in
iris recognition technology, iris images can be captured of people on the move and at even further distances. Finally, another potential biometric technology that can
be used for surveillance activities and which is still under heavy research and devel opment is gait recognition, i.e., the actual verification and identification
of an individual is based upon how they walk or their unique stride. A key point to be made here is that these biometric technologies just mentioned

do not require a cooperative subject because the most widely used surveillance activity is that of
covert operations. However, despite the advantages that these biometric technologies offer to a particular type of surveillance application, all surveillance
activities suffer from a number of limitations, which are as follows:

Biometric identification is not a choice.

Liu ’13 [Nancy Yue – Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, Ph.D. in IT law from the University of
Oslo and an LL.M. in IT law from Stockholm University, “5. Biometrics and privacy protection in the United
States,” in Bio-Privacy: Privacy Regulations and the Challenge of Biometrics, Routledge, 2013, p. 176]
Hence, where the Fourth Amendment is concerned, the court needs to assess whether the individual had the ability to choose to refuse such invention. Put simply, the
justification of the ‘stop’ hinges on the ‘consent’ of the individual. If the individual is notified and given the possibility to accept or refuse such inquiry, there is no
Fourth Amendment violation. This idea is in accordance with most other privacy legislation, such as the European Data Protection Directive 95/46/ EC and the
Australian Privacy Act 1988.,,u The slight difference is that in US case analysis there is no clear requirement of‘notice’, which means the government is not required
to tell individuals about their right to decline; as long as the individual is not prohibited from asserting his right to terminate the search, the intervention may be
justified. The same analysis applies for biometric technology. The government could seek to justify its intervention into individual privacy by initiating a voluntary
program. However, in
most occasions when biometric identification or authentication is used, individuals
are not given any choice . This renders this justification irrelevant to most biometric applications.

Biometrics is T
Abernathy et al 13 (William, S-American professor at the Harvard University Business School, 9-14-
2003, "Biometrics: Who's Watching You?," Electronic Frontier Foundation,
https://www.eff.org/wp/biometrics-whos-watching-you)
Among the many reactions to the September 11 tragedy has been a renewed attention to biometrics.
The federal government has led the way with its new concern about border control . Other proposals
include the use of biometrics with ID cards and in airports, e.g. video surveillance enhanced by facial-
recognition technology. The purpose of this document is to sketch out EFF's concerns about biometrics. In today's public arena,
biometric technologies are being marketed as a "silver bullet" for terrorism; however, very little independent, objective scientific testing of
biometrics has been done. Deploying biometric systems without sufficient attention to their dangers makes them likely to be used in a way
dangerous to civil liberties. This document is very much a work in progress and we welcome comments. Biometrics refers to the automatic
identification or identity verification of living persons using their enduring physical or behavioral characteristics. Many body parts, personal
characteristics and imaging methods have been suggested and used for biometric systems: fingers, hands, feet, faces, eyes, ears, teeth, veins,
Biometric technology is inherently individuating and interfaces
voices, signatures, typing styles, gaits and odors.
easily to database technology, making privacy violations easier and more damaging . If we are to deploy
such systems, privacy must be designed into them from the beginning, as it is hard to retrofit complex systems for privacy. Biometric
systems are useless without a well-considered threat model . Before deploying any such system on the national stage,
we must have a realistic threat model, specifying the categories of people such systems are supposed
to target, and the threat they pose in light of their abilities, resources, motivations and goals . Any such
system will also need to map out clearly in advance how the system is to work, in both in its successes and in its failures. Despite these concerns,
political pressure for increasing use of biometrics appears to be informed and driven more by
 Jaguar Debate 297

marketing from the biometrics industry than by scientists. Much federal attention is devoted to
deploying biometrics for border security. This is an easy sell, because immigrants and foreigners are, politically speaking, easy
targets. But once a system is created, new uses are usually found for it, and those uses will not likely stop at the border. With biometric ID
systems, as with national ID systems, we must be wary of getting the worst of both worlds: a system that enables greater social
surveillance of the population in general, but does not provide increased protection against terrorists. Sec. 403(c) of the USA-
PATRIOT Act specifically requires the federal government to "develop and certify a technology standard that can be used to verify the identity of
persons" applying for or seeking entry into the United States on a U.S. visa "for the purposes of conducting background checks, confirming
identity, and ensuring that a person has not received a visa under a different name." The recently enacted Enhanced Border Security and Visa
Entry Reform Act of 2002, Sec. 303(b)(1), requires that only "machine-readable, tamper-resistant visas and other travel and entry documents that
use biometric identifiers" shall be issued to aliens by October 26, 2004. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the State
Department currently are evaluating biometrics for use in U.S. border control pursuant to EBSVERA. The chronic, longitudinal capture of
Biometric systems
biometric data is useful for surveillance purposes. Our Surveillance Monitor page highlights some of these issues.
entail repeat surveillance, requiring an initial capture and then later captures. Another major issue
relates to the "voluntariness" of capture. Some biometrics, like faces, voices, and fingerprints, are
easily "grabbed." Other biometrics, at least under present technology, must be consciously "given." It is difficult, for instance, to capture
a scan of a person's retina or to gather a hand geometry image without the subject's cooperation. Easily grabbed biometrics are a
problem because people can't control when they're being put into the system or when they're being
tracked. But even hard-to-grab biometrics involve a trust issue in the biometric capture device and the overall system architecture. To be
effective, a biometric system must compare captured biometric data to a biometric database . Our National
ID System page highlights issues surrounding database abuse, which has both static and dynamic dimensions. The static issues surrounding
databases are mainly about safeguarding large and valuable collections of personally identifying information. If these databases are part of an
important security system, then they (and the channels used to share PII) are natural targets for attack, theft, compromise, and malicious or
Databases
fraudulent use. The dynamic issues surrounding databases mainly concern the need to maintain reliable, up-to-date information.
that seek to maintain accurate residence information must be updated whenever one moves.
Databases that are used to establish eligibility for benefits must be updated so as to exclude persons
no longer eligible. The broader the function of the system, the more and broader the updating that
is required, increasing the role of general social surveillance in the system. By far the most
significant negative aspect of biometric ID systems is their potential to locate and track people
physically. While many surveillance systems seek to locate and track, biometric systems present the greatest danger
precisely because they promise extremely high accuracy . Whether a specific biometric system actually poses a risk of
such tracking depends on how it is designed. Why should we care about perfect tracking? EFF believes that perfect tracking is inimical to a free
society. A society in which everyone's actions are tracked is not, in principle, free. It may be a livable society, but would not be our society. EFF
believes that perfect surveillance, even without any deliberate abuse, would have an extraordinary chilling effect on artistic and scientific
inventiveness and on political expression. This concern underlies constitutional protection for anonymity, both as an aspect of First Amendment
freedoms of speech and association, and as an aspect of Fourth Amendment privacy. Implemented improperly, biometric
systems could: increase the visibility of individual behavior. This makes it easier for measures to be
taken against individuals by agents of the government, by corporations, and by our peers . result in
politically damaging and personally embarrassing disclosures, blackmail and extortion. This hurts democracy, because it
reduces the willingness of competent people to participate in public life . All biometric technology systems have
certain aspects in common. All are dependent upon an accurate reference or "registration" sample. If a biometric system is to
identify a person, it first must have this sample, positively linked to the subject, to compare against .
Modern biometric identification systems, based on digital technology, analyze personal physical
attributes at the time of registration and distill them into a series of numbers. Once this reference
sample is in the system, future attempts to identify a person are based on a comparison of a "live"
sample and the reference sample or samples.

Counter-interpretation – Surveillance is the collection of personal information

Fernback 13 (Jan, 1/11/15, Culture Digitally, “In Context: Digital Surveillance, Ethics, and Prism”,
http://culturedigitally.org/2013/06/in-context-digital-surveillance-ethics-and-prism/, 7/3/15, WG*)
 Jaguar Debate 298

Nissenbaum advocates understanding privacy “neither as a right to secrecy nor as a right to control
but as a right to appropriate flow of personal information” [p. 127]. I am interested in examining
the notion of appropriate flow as it regards information gleaned from surveillance. Clearly,
information assembled from Google searches, disassociated from the user, and then bundled with
millions of other data subjects to be sold for predictive data modeling differs contextually from
RFID chips implanted into a data subject’s body.