Biometrics Aff and Neg - Northwestern 2015 Sophomores

Biometrics AffAKON Lab
Index
Contents
Biometrics AffAKON Lab.......................................................................................... 1
Index.......................................................................................................................... 2
***AFF***.................................................................................................................... 4
1AC.......................................................................................................................... 5
2ACSurveillance Bad.......................................................................................... 12
Surveillance BadGeneral................................................................................. 13
Surveillance BadBlackness.............................................................................. 18
Surveillance BadDiscourse Indict....................................................................20
Surveillance BadGovernmentality...................................................................21
Surveillance BadLegalism Ineffective..............................................................22
Surveillance BadNeoliberalism........................................................................25
2ACBiometrics Bad............................................................................................. 27
Biometrics BadGeneral................................................................................... 28
Biometrics BadBlackness................................................................................33
Biometrics BadEurocentrism/Securitization....................................................36
2ACIslamophobia............................................................................................... 37
IslamophobiaGeneral...................................................................................... 38
IslamophobiaDetachment Link........................................................................41
IslamophobiaIslamophobia Indict.................................................................42
IslamophobiaKhwaly Indict..............................................................................43
IslamophobiaOrientalism Indict....................................................................44
IslamophobiaOtherization............................................................................... 45
IslamophobiaPatriotism Link...........................................................................48
IslamophobiaStereotypes Bad.........................................................................49
IslamophobiaTravel Narratives Link.................................................................50
IslamophobiaUniversalism Bad.......................................................................51
2ACQueerness.................................................................................................... 52
QueernessSurveillance....................................................................................53
QueernessWalter Jenkins................................................................................. 55
2ACGender......................................................................................................... 56
GenderGeneral................................................................................................ 57
GenderMale Gaze............................................................................................ 59
2ACIntersectionality........................................................................................... 62
IntersectionalityGeneral.................................................................................. 63
IntersectionalityBlackness/Gender..................................................................65
2ACHuman Rights.............................................................................................. 67
Human RightsDiscourse/Epistemology Indict..................................................68
2ACT................................................................................................................... 69
AT TSurveillance.............................................................................................. 70
2ACK.................................................................................................................. 71
AT KFoucault................................................................................................... 72
***NEG***................................................................................................................. 77
Case...................................................................................................................... 78
Biometrics GoodBlackness..............................................................................79
Biometrics GoodTerrorism...............................................................................83
State GoodGender.......................................................................................... 90
Impacts/Framing.................................................................................................... 91
Bioterror............................................................................................................. 92
ExtinctionBostrom........................................................................................... 94
Nuclear Terrorism............................................................................................... 98
Pragmatism Good............................................................................................. 100
Black Nihilism K................................................................................................... 102
1NC.................................................................................................................. 103
K Links................................................................................................................. 106
LinkPanopticon.............................................................................................. 107
LinkNeolib..................................................................................................... 109
***AFF***
1AC
Civil society thrives on the ability to render black(end) bodies
abject biometric authentification has been central to that
process only focusing on the history of surveillance can we
rethink the ways bodies are mapped on the biometric
borders
Browne 09 [Dr. Simone Browne; Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics, 138-139
bodily surveillance is not a new phenomenon. He has illutrated how the
pseudo-science of criminal anthropometry claimed that body shapes,
especially the head, could spontaneously reveal the unlawful proclivities
of the person (2001: 291). It is worth noting here that the statistical knowledge of
anthropometry (Li et al. 2004: 173) is still being invoked in biometric technology R&D .
David Lyon suggests that
As Li et al. suggest, the difference of Races is obvious, and it is the core field of research of anthropology. Anthropometry is a key technique to find out this difference and abstract the
regulation from this difference (2004: 173). As the theoretical basis from which to develop a facial computational model that could qualify difference to allow for identity authentification,
Li et al. claim: as a result of using the statistical information of the Mongolian Races feature, our method is suitable to be used in the north of China (2004: 178). Claims such as these
demonstrate that some
advnances i biometric authentification are organized around
the idea of race or epidermal thinking
. Similar to Lyon in asserting that bodily surveillance is by no means a new occurrence,
Parenti discusses the surveillance system of the plantation of the

Antebellum South of the United States and names the information technologies
of the written slave pass, organized slave patrols and wanted posters for
runaways as key features of the surveillance practices of this system (2003).
Parenti situates plantation surveillance as the earliest form of surveillance
practices in the Americas. The following two excerpts from Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 19361938 detail the
Christian
disciplinary practices of the slave pass system. In the plantation system, mobility and its restriction for enslaved Africans, served as an exercise of power. Given this, mobility needed to
be tightly regulated by slave owners in order for the owners to maintain control: By 1845 there were many laws on the Statute books of Georgia concerning the duties of patrols ... Every
member of the patrol was required to arrest all slaves found outside their masters domain without a pass, or who was not in company with some white person. He was empowered to
whip such slave with twenty lashes. [Georgia Narratives] (Work Projects Administration 1941a: 322) The pattie-rollers was something else. I heard folks say they would beat the daylights
Slave branding was one of

the key technologies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade . As Hortense Spillers emphasizes, this
trafficking marked a violent theft of the body rendering the captive body
a territory of cultural and political maneuver (2003: 206). Branding was a practice
and, borrowing from Hall, an enunciative strategy through which enslaved people were
signified as property and commodities to be bought and sold . At the scale of skin, the captive
almost out of you if they caught you without no pass. [Georgia Narratives] (Work Projects Administration 1941b: 241)
body was made site of political and economic maneuver through the use of hot irons to sear the flesh. The brand, often the crest of the sovereign, was a stamp of commodity, a signifier
of bondage and of the relation of the body to its said owner. For the Dutch West India Company, these marks of identification were used to identify those who were enslaved,
distinguishing them from those enslaved by the English, the French or other slaveholding entities (Hartman 2007). Enslaved persons were marked with numbers and letters that
with this
permanent marking on the flesh, one could hardly escape the identity
given to them as commodity, strictly in an economic sense . These markings
form the earliest imprint of mass state and corporate tracking of people
through registration tied to bodily identification . Slave branding, operated
in the plantation system as a practice of punishment, accounting and of
making the already hyper-visible body legible . Branding, as a means of knowing the body, was a pre-emptive practice
marking one as recognizable outside of the plantation site, whether outside through escape or other means. Surveillance practices such as
those mentioned above point to the longer history of boundary
maintenance occurring at the site of the body. Current biometric
technologies and slave branding are not one and the same; however, when
we think of our contemporary moment where suspect citizens, trusted
identified them as being part of a particular ships cargo. This practice also worked as a system of identification that enabled surveillance. So
travellers, prisoners and others are having their bodies informationalized

by way of biometric surveillance sometimes voluntarily and sometimes without consent or awareness and then stored in large-scale
databases some owned by the state and some owned by private interests we can find histories of these accountings
and inventories of the bodies in slave registers, slave branding and the
slave vessel manifests that served insurance purposes. My suggestion here is that
questioning the historically present workings of branding, the body and
race, particularly in regard to biometrics, could allow for a critical
rethinking of our moments of contact with our increasingly technological
border.
Racialization is the foundation for newer biometric techniques

from branding, finger printing emerges as the new
mechanism for colonial powers to map, govern and control
the Black
Maguire 12 [Mark Maguire; Biopower, racialization and new security technology, 596-598]
William Herschels
The origin of fingerprinting (1916), written just prior to his death, looks back over his career as an imperial administrator
and his contribution to the development of fingerprinting in colonial India. He includes the following descrip- tion of the genesis moment in 1858 when he demanded a local
contractor, Rajyadhar Konai, sign an agreement augmented with his hand print: I was only wishing to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his signature hereafter. He, of
course, had never dreamt of such an attestation, but fell in readily enough. I dabbed his palm and fingers over with the home-made oil-ink used for my official seal, and pressed the
whole hand on the back of the contract, and we studied it together, with a good deal of chaff about palmistry, comparing his palm with mine on another impression . . . One of
these contracts I gave to Sir Francis (then Mr.) Galton...The very possibility of such a sanction (to use a technical expression) to the use of a finger-print did not dawn upon me till
Here, Herschel
marks off his contribution as being that of an experimenting amateur
capable of sanctioning useful knowledge. Upon being appointed
Magistrate for the Hoogley District in 1877, he oversaw the Department
of Registration, the courts and the jails and was quick to make use of
fingerprinting, especially to combat fraud in pension claims, but also
the hiring of prisoners and the faking of deaths. In 1877, Social
Identities 597 Herschel wrote to the Inspector of Jails and the RegistrarGeneral, and his comments on fingerprinting for criminal administration
are striking: Here is the means of verifying the identity of everyman in jail with the man sentenced by the court, at any moment day or night. Call the number up
after long experience, and even then it became no more than a personal conviction for many years more. (Herschel, 1916, p. 9)
and make him sign. If it is he, it is he; if not, he is exposed on the spot. Is No. 1302 really dead, and is that his corpse or a sham one? The corpse has two fingers that will answer
that question at once. Is this man brought into jail the real Simon Pure sentenced by the magistrate? The sign- manual . . . is there to testify. (Herschel, 1916, p. 24)
Instead of a world filled with persons indistinguishable to the imperial

gaze, Herschels sign-manuals allowed individual identity verification to
enter into governmental calculation (see also Caplan & Torpey, 2001). Undoubtedly, his experiments
must be situated in a thoroughly racialized world, but in many ways
Herschel sought to go beyond race: for him, truly useful knowledge
involved individual identities. Simon Cole (2001) takes the example of the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 as a way through which to
understand how race and security intersected in colonial India. For example, the jurist James Fitzjames Stephens categorized professional criminals as a tribe whose ancestors
were criminals from time immemorial, who are themselves destined by the usage of caste to commit crime, and whose descendants will be offenders against the law, until the
whole tribe is exterminated or accounted for (as cited in Cole, 2001, p. 7). Cole further cites the extraordinary descriptions of such tribes: the criminal habits of the Rajwars, for
example, included their being neglected, half-starved, and utterly degraded (p. 68). But it is the latter part of Stephenss comments on criminal tribes that resonate most
The hereditary characteristics of race marked them off as

different, impossible to assimilate into imperial order, and thus marked
them out for possible extermination. The securitization of identity , however,
powerfully.
by means of which they could be accounted for, offered a form of

incorporation that cannot be detached from racialization. What, then,
is the relationship between Herschels experiments in fingerprinting and
race? It seems logical to simply state that racialization was one of the
conditions for the possibility of fingerprinting, which was itself a

mechanism for capturing the individual within broader efforts to map,
know and govern colonial populations. However, it is also possible to argue that there is a deeper set of relationships
between calculation, individual identity and race. Herschels experiments in fingerprinting were returned to Europe and to the scientific gaze of Darwins cousin Francis Galton,
For Galton, the

core question in the science of fingerprinting was whether it could be
used to distinguish a man from his fellows, and not just on the level of
the individual. From the 1880s onwards Galton examined the prints of different English classes, Welsh from the remotest districts, Jewish schoolchildren,
as were Herschels own prints, which would stand as an example of the persistency of patterns throughout the life of an individual.
Africans from the territories of the Royal Niger Company, and Basques. In Finger Prints (1892) he notes that the differences between races are generally not larger than those
between groups within races. Students in science could not be distinguished from the lowest idiots in the London district (1892, p. 19). Jewish examples showed particular
The
impressions from Negros betray the general clumsiness of their fingers,
but their patterns are not, so far as I can find, different from those of
others . . . Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or from the
way in which they were printed, or from some real particularity, the
general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteris- tic . . . they
give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes that I have not yet
succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement. (Galton, 1892, pp. 195196) Though
he could find no trace of temperament or race in the arches, loops or
whorls of the papillary ridges, Galton was sure that such traces would
eventually be found. As late as 1903, he embarked on massive drive to collect new samples, but, again, without success. Paul Rabinows essay,
whorled patterns, and Galton held out hope that very remote populations might in disappointed to note that there were no specifically Negro patterns:
Galtons Regret concludes a section on the polymaths efforts with fingerprints and race by saying that his regret remains (Rabinow, 1992, p. 115; see also Cohen, 1994, pp.
343347). However, as Simon Cole has recently shown,
the correlation between race and fingerprints
was pushed further by Galtons contemporaries and his students. Writing in 1920, Ethel M. Elderton noted that until the end of his life Galton clung
onto the hope that a quantitative measurement applicable to any type would be found. Eldertons own research suggested that there was at least some evidence for arguing that
inheritance could be found in fingerprints (Elderton, 1920). Even earlier, the Zoologist Harris Hawthorne Wilder envisaged the systematic use of fingerprints, palm and sole prints
for the official identification of Chinese, negroes, and other races, the features of which, at least to the Caucasian eye, offer hardly sufficient individuality to be at all times
trustworthy (Wilder, 1902, pp. 439440; see also Cole, 2007, p. 247). With Inez Whipple, Wilder went on to develop an evolutionary hierarchy which separated European and Asian
fingerprint patterns. More recently, in 1982, Lin, Liu, Osterburg and Nicol provided hereditary evidence of fingerprint similarities in samples of twins. In both the colonial context of
its birth and in its uses in criminal investigation especially in the Western World, fingerprinting offered a seemingly value free, a-cultural, and purely scientific method of individual
identity verification. But the haunting presence of race has always threatened to reappear in the loops, arches and whorls. And, outside of the laboratory fingerprinting offered a
Fingerprinting seems race

neutral because it averts its gaze; it looks only at the detailed level of
papillary ridges . . . Fingerprinting, with its focus on the minute details
of skin, could coexist with racial distinctions that were crude and
arbitrary . . . The preservation of race, despite the development of a
purportedly individualized identification technology, must be viewed not
merely as an administrative convenience, but rather as being bound up
with an entire culture and operationalization of institutional and
individual racism. (Cole, 2007, pp. 258259)
way to govern without evoking race but did not do away with it. To again quote Simon Cole:
The intersections of race and gender cant be ignored herean

intersectional analysis is key
Dubrofsky and Magnet 15(Rachel, Associate Professor in the Departments of Humanities &
Cultural Studies and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Southern Flordia, Shoshana Amielle, Associate
Professor in the Institute of Feminist and Gender studies at the University of Ottawa, 5/15/2015, Feminist
Surveillance Studies, https://books.google.com/books?
id=v7_FCQAAQBAJ&pg=PT20&lpg=PT20&dq=bell+hooks+surveillance&source=bl&ots=a_bKaW9HNO&sig=Eokzod
qnyj9Pf8-KwGatslh0YI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDEQ6AEwA2oVChMIrcCUpcPqxgIVUTGICh0VMQbe#v=onepage&q&f=false, Duke
University Press, mew)
A feminist approach to surveillance studies highlights the ways that surveillance is integral to many of our foundational structural systems, ones that breed disenfranchisement, and that
In an extension of Bell Hooks's notion of "white supremacist

capitalist patriarchy" (hooks 1997), we suggest the (clumsy, but illustrative) term white
continue to be institutionalized.
supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal surveillance": the use of

surveillance practices and technologies to normalize and maintain
whiteness, able-bodiedness, capitalism, and heterosexuality, practices
integral to the foundation of the modern state. Smith's contribution to this collection reminds that while
the modern bureaucratic state is often the focus of surveillance studies,
the surveillance of native peoples is a key foundational strategy of
colonialism: technologies of surveillance were integral to settler
colonialism. Smith calls for the centering of an anticolonial feminist analysis within the field of surveillance studies, as she recounts how the violence
of surveillance through organized settler colonial practices transformed
First Peoples into racialized communities, thus facilitating the
bureaucratically managed rape of indigenous people, making them
"rapeable." State surveillance practices, which we might simply call state practices (since surveillance is so seamlessly
embedded), are processes that are simultaneously about seeing and not-seeing-that is, some bodies are made invisible, while others are made
hypervisible (see Smith, Moore, Jiwani, and Hall, this volume). The underlying structures of domination
that created the conditions for violence in communities of colorsuch as
the incarceration of indigenous peoples in residential schools or the
institutionalized rape that accompanied slavery are made invisible, while
the cycle of violence that residential schools or that slavery created in
terms of ongoing violence in communities of color are hypervisibilized,
surveilled, and then subject to violent state intervention . As Yasmin Jiwani notes in her essay in this
volume, which looks at how the commercial Canadian media covered the Shafia murders (four Afghan women murdered by family members in Canada), when
violence happens in communities of color, it is understood as ordinary and
expected--people from these communities are configured as always already criminals--whereas violence in white communities is imagined to be exceptional. This
racist imagining of violence as key to communities of color justifies new
forms of surveillance by the state in ways that facilitate the
disproportionate criminalization of communities of color . As Hall notes in her essay on body scanners
in airports, whiteness is transparent--a racialization that does not require
monitoringwhereas racialized bodies are opaque and therefore suspect .
Similarly, Moore's contribution to this volume examines the increasing reliance on a genre of institutional photographyphotographs of battered women--by police in cases involving
battery, under a system of white supremacy. Moore shows that women of color (particularly dark-skinned women) are not revealed through the mechanism of photography, especially
subjecting
female bodies to observation has long been a practice in the United States .
their injuries, in the same way as white women. Laura Hyun Yi Kang's piece in this volume, about the history of anti-trafficking, highlights how
She examines the surveillance of the "differentially stratified mobilities" of women across borders, noting that the surveillance and scrutiny of women immigrating to the United States
bespeaks founding imperialist racialist narratives in the United States. Focusing on trafficking in the League of Nations, Kang asserts that women were simultaneously hailed as objects
and subjects of surveillance. The women were, on one one hand, seen as involved in the policing of other women, but on the other hand, at the borders of the nation where they were
imagined to be trafficked, they were placed under greater surveillance which resulted in racialized sexist scrutiny. As Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Curcah (this volume) show in their
gender and sexuality are inextricably bound to surveillant

practices of documentation. Beginning with the binary system of gender
imposed on babies born on U.S. soil, each of whom must be categorized
and documented as a boy or a girl, living in the modem bureaucratic state
is about the policing of gendered identities . Of course, as Moore and Currah demonstrate, the process
of documenting citizens via birth certificate is not a simple recording of
bodily identities, but a process of surveillance that produces gendered
identities in ways that do both epistemological and ontological violence to
bodies that do not fit the male-female binary. In fact, statistics (including tracking and gathering information about
analysis of the birth certificate,
gender) is intimately tied to the rise of statehood, as states gain the power to govern in part by collecting knowledge about their citizenry (Bowker and Star 1999, 110). Thus, in the
words of the communication theorist Armand Mattelart, "measurement, computing, and recording have been the recurrent traits of the long process of construction of the modem mode
). A feminist approach to surveillance

studies demonstrates how the production of knowledge, when it comes to
vulnerable bodies, is always already bound up with gendered and
of communication, starting with the first manifestations of 'statistical reason (1996, xvi
sexualized ways of seeing. The essays in part. 1 make clear .that

surveillance practices are actually part of the founding mechanisms of
many nation- states, as well as of the practices used to keep track of the
citizens of these nation-states.
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]
biometrics is the idea that the body will reveal the truth about the
subject despite the subjects claim. So the idea that I might say my name is Rob Ford, but my bodywhether its 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, Im suggesting here that biometrics research and development
continues to rely on certain practices of what Im 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 Im 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 genderyes thats 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
Simply put,
and D coming out of this industry. With this gender classification system,
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
what happened here is that
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 classifiers better

suited as classifying Asian women as well as Caucasian women or White women. So using actor Will
Smiths face as a model for generic Black masculinity, the studys authors are left to conclude that the accuracy of gender classifier
on Africans is not as high as on Mongoloid or Caucasoid. Another studyIm going to talk a little bit about failure to enrollthis 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
we can see how epidermalizationand what I mean by that is the

imposition of race on the skinis present, for example, in comparative testing with control groups with higher failure to enroll
rates than others. The study statesIm just going to read. This is a popular quote thats 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,
and public ways like this. In another study
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
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 cameraIm 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
theres 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 theres important questions that I think need to
be asked, such as: How do we understand the body once its converted into data ?
What are the underlying assumptions with surveillance technologies such as
passport verification machines, facial recognition software, and fingerprint template technology? Well theres the notion that these
technologies are infallible, that theyre 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.
profession.
Surveillance normalizes deviant bodies and imposes selfregulation

Conrad 09 (Kathryn Conrad, Nothing to Hide Nothing to Fear : Discriminatory Surveillance and Queer
Visibility in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney
and Michael ORourke. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009)
surveillance technologies seem to have become a commonplace for

many who are regularly subjected to them, fading into the background
and out of the consciousness of most people unless they are confronted with them directly (as when and if, for
instance, they are arrested). But the Foucauldian thesis, as I will suggest, may be more
applicable to those for whom the notion of visibility is already charged:
that is, those who fall outside the realm of the normative and who are
thus more likely to be sensitive to the possibility of exposure . The practice of
surveillance, as I will suggest, normalises visibility, which in turn helps to
shape and reinforce the very narratives of normality and the spaces in
which normative and non-normative behaviour is allowed; and
participating in those narratives of normality can be, as Warner suggests
in The Trouble with Normal (2000), particularly attractive to the alreadymarginalised in this case, both queer and Northern Irish subjects more generally. Predictably, surveillance impacts the
already-marginalised more heavily, as we will see; but I will also suggest that the self-regulation
that emerges from surveillance, the pressure toward normalisation,
creates a kind of cultural inertia that facilitates the shrinkage of the space
"Indeed,
both literal and figurative for challenges to surveillance practices. "
Non normative behavior pushes against the unidirectional

moral imperatives that surveillance reinforces
Conrad 09 (Kathryn Conrad, Nothing to Hide Nothing to Fear : Discriminatory Surveillance and Queer
and Michael ORourke. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009)
it is almost as though operators construct a map

of moral progress through the streets which is unidirectional. People of
good moral character know where they are going and proceeded to their
destination without signs of deviation (1999, 144). This phrasing resonates with
the notion of queer, particularly insofar as queer invokes a path that is not straight, in several senses of the word. When seeking to engage in queer
"Perhaps the most striking analysis is their observation that
sexual behaviour, a person may not follow a straight path in the most literal sense as well, inviting surveillance regardless of the legality of the behaviour as s/he attempts to cruise,
Non-normative behaviour, however

legal, is more visible than normative behaviour, and precipitates
surveillance. Once begun, surveillance piques interest and fills the human need for story and, like all of us, operators like to know the end of the story even if it has
make eye contact and engage in other codes, often unspoken, that will enable a connection.
a happy ending (1999, 132). But the storys beginning the impetus for surveillance is shaped by previous stories, and the necessarily incomplete nature of surveillance encourages
the surveillers to draw on previous experiences and assumptions to complete the story. The comments Norris and Armstrong make about narrative highlight the fact that those who
surveil and act on surveillance must fill in the epistemological gaps provided by surveillance, which only provides, often quite literally, part of the picture"
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 doesnt get much better than Will Smith who was named one of the highest paid actors by Forbes in 2008. Hes 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 therere lessons about
the surveillance technologies and practices are regularly broadcasted; Will Smiths in a starring role. Hes often seen saving America, and by extension the planet, from alien others,
whether its 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 9/11and Im going to do my German translation with Google Translate herebut his answer was If you grew up as a Black man in America, you have a very
Blacks live with a constant feeling of malaise and if

youre attacked by a racist cop now or wounded and attacked by terro rists,
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 hes giving us a bit of Black counter-framing as
well too. So given thisthe histories, the failure to enroll rates, the idea around prototypical whiteness, the racializing surveillance
Im calling for a critical biometric consciousness , and this is following Eugene Thackers call for a critical genomic
consciousness. And a critical biometric consciousness entails informed public debate
around these technologies and their application . Its a demand of
accountability by the state and by private sectors who might have our datatrade it, sell it, rent it out. And a
critical biometric technologies sees biometric technology and the
ownership and access to ones own body data and information that is
derived or generated from ones body data so think about the idea of your fingerprint being turned into a code and that
being your intellectual propertythat 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 thepeople have
done, [?] Nakamura has done work on thisthe 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
profilingthe 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 violencethe 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.
different view of the world than white Americans. We
2ACSurveillance Bad
Surveillance BadGeneral
Mass surveillance stems from Otherizationthey stifle the
ability to rebel against problematic systems
Lockton 05 (Vance, Master of Science in the Faculty of Graduate Studies, The Technological Assault on
Anonymity, The University of British Columbia, October 2009)
surveillance breeds control. This is the core of each of the ethical issues surrounding its use.
Surveillance, it will be shown, can create public discomfort; this is because the public (rightly)
does not trust the motives of those exerting this control over them. If
each government agency, corporation and individual that chose to install
a surveillance system were trusted not to abuse the information being
gathered, there would be no discomfort. Similarly, surveillance can be used to
control and silence public dissent. Henry David Thoreau wrote "All men
recognize the right of revolution: that is, the right to refuse allegiance to,
and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are
great and unendurable." [Thoreau, 1849] The ability to revolt against an
unjust controller is a necessity, but unbounded surveillance makes
resistance very difficult. There is almost no question that during the
1960's American Civil Rights movement, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used
every surveillance ability within his power to harass activists , unionists
and peaceniks [Parenti, 2003]; it is interesting to consider whether or not this movement could have been as effective had Hoover had access to all of today's
surveillance tools. As surveillance technologies increase in power and functionality,
so does the potential for abuse. If any organization is allowed to gather
limitless information about their opponents, they will become a nearly unresistible force; mass surveillance allows this to happen. Marginalized
groups in any society are a natural target for information gathering.
People are frightened of the unknown; thus, minorities [people of color]
are frequently singled out for higher levels of observation . David Lyon notes that this is
actually the way that many new surveillance technologies are introduced
to society; they begin by being focused on society's weakest, most
marginalized groups, and then through 'function creep' make their way
into the mainstream. [Lyon, 1994] This is a very oppressive practice, however. When any
group is singled out for scrutiny, they will inevitably be found to be in
violation of some set of societal norms. Should this group, though, be
unaware of (due to cultural differences), unable to achieve (i.e. the
homeless), or simply un-accepting of the norms, increased surveillance
will only serve to highlight the differences between this group and the
majority, and slow acceptance of the group into general society. Care must
be taken not to unintentionally develop a system of total surveillance; as
tools combine, we form a 'soft cage.' This may be a worse scenario than
the classic Big Brother. Against Big Brother the masses can rebel, but the
'soft cage' is mundane, decentralized, even convenient - and frighteningly
thorough. [Parenti, 2003]
While it may not always be intentional,
Surveillance tactics such as COINTELPRO are utilized to

suppress dissent
Deflem 08 (Mathieu, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, Surveillance and
Governance: Crime Control and Beyond)
FBI's counter- intelligence activities were

intentionally designed to produce particular types of costs for their
targets. The SWP's lawsuit against the FBI provided a rare window into both sides of that process: the motives of FBI agents,
codified in their assessments of the "tangible results" realized by each
counter- intelligence act, and the actual and perceived impact of those
acts on SWP members themselves. Courtroom claims made by SWP adherents and their representatives provided first-hand evidence
Each of the examples in Table I demonstrates how the
of the latter, with presiding judge Thomas Griesa agreeing that "there Can hardly be a more compelling case" for demonstration of harm. The Bureau, argued Griesa, "embarked on a
series of actions with the express purpose of harming the SWP by causing internal mistrust and strife, by weakening its alliances with other groups, by hampering its scheduled activities
"There was no legal authority Or justification for such

operations" (quoted in Jayko, 1988, p. 1 12). l. Create a negative public image In 1963, agents in the FBI's
Chicago field office exploited the public visibility of Clifton DeBerry, a SWP
member and candidate for public office in New York . After learning that DeBerry had lapsed in his child
support payments to his ex-wife, agents obtained his speaking schedule from an informant
placed in the SWP. They then worked with the Cook County (IL) Department Of Welfare to secure an arrest
warrant and ensure that DeBerry was detained immediately before he was to give a speech to
and by other means. Moreover, he concluded,
the Militant Labor Forum. The short-term impact of that event was limited when DeBerry was immediately able to post bond and return for his scheduled speech, but agents then
proceeded to exploit DeBerry's later conviction for non-support, providing information about his personal problems to cooperative media contacts to generate negative publicity about
Break down internal organization To exacerbate simmering

racial tensions within the SWP in 1969 stemming from black SWP leader Paul Boutelle's claims that the organization had a "patronizing" attitude toward AfricanAmericans, FBI agents in the New York field office sent an inflammatory
anonymous letter to Boutelle. Purporting to be from "Your nasty friends in the SWPI" the letter suggested that Boutelle
and his "fellow party monkeys" leave the SWP , so that the (white) membership could work on "the job Trotsky had in mind for us.'
DeBerry and the SWP generally. 2.
Due to this letter and a follow-up anonymous missive suggesting that his exit from the SWP would not result in any significant "brain-drain,' Boutelle angrily discussed the attacks at
intensifying conflicts within the membership. 3. Create dissension

between groups In 1962, the SWP became a central supporter of a group of African- Americans arrested after an incident of racial violence in Monroe, NC. To
disrupt the group's participation in the coalition organization the "Committee to Aid the
Monroe Defendants" (CAMD), FBI agents sent anonymous letters and phone
calls to an SWP member, to promote the (false) accusation that an
unnamed African-American partner organization was misusing resources
intended for CAMD. 4. Restrict access to organizational resources The FBI
again targeted CAMD as a vehicle to stigmatize the SWP and reduce
support for the Monroe defendants. Agents from the New York field office
sent an anonymous letter to the NAACP criticizing that organization's
support of CAMD. The criticism was due to the SWP's role, which the FBI
painted as "domination by the Trotskyist branch of the communist
movement." Likely as a result, the NAACP ceased providing CAMD with
financial support. 5. Restrict organizational capacity to protest To disrupt the
planning of a 1969 anti-war parade jointly sponsored by the SWP, the Young Socialists Alliance, and the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in
Vietnam, FBI agents in the New York office constructed and distributed a leaflet
purportedly composed by radical leftists at Columbia University. The
leaflet criticized the organizing coalition for their general lack of militancy,
including their unwillingness to attack the police and incur the necessary
"battle wounds." As the organizers had been stressing the importance of a
peaceful event, such accusations generated "difficulties in managing the
subsequent meetings,
march.' 6 Hinder the ability of targeted individuals to participate in group

activities To harm the efforts of SWP member John Franklin, a candidate
for Manhattan Borough President in 1961, agents in the FBI's New York
field office furnished information about Franklin's past criminal record to
the New York Daily News. Due to the resulting negative news story, which
the FBI proceeded to circulate anonymously, Franklin discontinued his
involvement with the SWP.
Surveillance has expanded to massive proportions new tech

makes it easier to collect data.
Parenti 03 (Christian, Has a PhD in sociology (co-supervised in geography) from the London School of
Economics and is a professor in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. His latest book, Tropic of
Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011), explores how climate change is already causing
violence as it interacts with the legacies of economic neoliberalism and cold-war militarism. The book involved
several years of travel and research in conflict zones of the Global South., The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America
from Slavery to the War on Terror, September/2/2003)
everyday surveillance has increased to

sci-fi proportions. Thanks to the proliferation of computers , databanks, and
networks, once distinct spaces of knowledgecredit records here,
medical records there, criminal records elsewherenow form a single,
coherent informational landscape that is easily mapped and controlled by
government and business.1 Everywhere, one leaves a trail of digital information; all daily tasksworking, driving, shopping, tending to health
now create retrievable records. Consider this: More than 111 million Americans carry mobile phones,
each of which creates a rough electronic account of the users location in
time and space. Cell phones communicate with networks of transmission
points that monitor and note a phones location whenever it is on. These
records, stored by phone companies, can be subpoenaed when needed or
their aggregate patterns can be data-mined for commercial uses. And now, in the age of
terror and permanent emergency, the federal government has ordered
wireless carriers to create systems for tracking mobile phones in real
time. As a result, the latest wireless communications devices often contain builtin Global Positioning System (GPS) chips that transmit the gadgets
geographic coordinates to twenty-four Pentagon-maintained satellites,
tracking users as they move. The resulting records can be archived,
aggregated, disaggregated, and correlated with other information to
create a broad overview of group behavior or detailed portraits of individual habits. Thus, a convenience, an
Information Age accessory, becomes an electronic tag.2
The future is already here. Over the last three decades the prevalence of routine,
Surveillance has expanded to massive proportions new tech

makes it easier to collect data.
Parenti 03 (Christian, Has a PhD in sociology (co-supervised in geography) from the London School of
everyday surveillance has increased to

sci-fi proportions. Thanks to the proliferation of computers , databanks, and
The future is already here. Over the last three decades the prevalence of routine,
networks, once distinct spaces of knowledgecredit records here, medical

records there, criminal records elsewherenow form a single, coherent
informational landscape that is easily mapped and controlled by
government and business.1 Everywhere, one leaves a trail of digital information; all daily tasksworking, driving, shopping, tending to health
now create retrievable records. Consider this: More than 111 million Americans carry mobile phones,
each of which creates a rough electronic account of the users location in
time and space. Cell phones communicate with networks of transmission
points that monitor and note a phones location whenever it is on. These
records, stored by phone companies, can be subpoenaed when needed or
their aggregate patterns can be data-mined for commercial uses. And now, in the age of
terror and permanent emergency, the federal government has ordered
wireless carriers to create systems for tracking mobile phones in real
time. As a result, the latest wireless communications devices often contain builtin Global Positioning System (GPS) chips that transmit the gadgets
geographic coordinates to twenty-four Pentagon-maintained satellites,
tracking users as they move. The resulting records can be archived,
aggregated, disaggregated, and correlated with other information to
create a broad overview of group behavior or detailed portraits of individual habits. Thus, a convenience, an
Information Age accessory, becomes an electronic tag.2
Modern surveillance on urban communities is not effective for

crime and terrorism prevention only captures petty crimes,
and post-event terror.
Fussey and Coaffee 12 (Pete & Jon, Dr Fussey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex.
He is a criminologist specializing in a number of areas including surveillance and society, terrorism and counterterrorism, critical studies of resilience, major-event security, organized crime and urban sociology. Professor Fussey
has published extensively in these areas, was recently elected a director of the Surveillance Studies Network and,
during 2015, was part of a small team of co-investigators awarded an ESRC Large Grant on Human Rights and
Information Technology in the Era of Big Data. Jon Coaffee is Professor in Urban Geography based in the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) with associate status in PAIS. His research focuses upon the interplay of
physical and socio-political aspects of urban resilience and he has also published widely, especially on the impact of
terrorism and other security concerns on the functioning of urban areas., b. Urban spaces of surveillance, Routledge
Handbook of Surveillance Studies April/27/2012)
Mirroring similar developments in the realms of policing and jurisprudence, the post-9/11 period has seen increasing convergence of surveillance strategies aimed at tackling both crime
Urban surveillance strategies originally conceived to

tackle crime are increasingly used to counter terrorism. At the same time,
formerly anti-terrorist measures, such as Automatic Number Plate
Recognition (ANPR) (Automatic License Plate Recognition or ALPR in North
America), have become applied to more routine criminal and civil
infractions. Together, such processes point to a coalescence of crime
control and security, and raise considerable concerns over surveillance
creep, the retention of legitimacy and issues of governance (see below). Added to these socioethical concerns are practical operational considerations. Crime and terrorism are distinct phenomena and
the utility of urban surveillance cameras varies across these differing
applications. Proponents of surveillance cameras have consistently cited
their utility in stopping a criminal act before its commission via its
deterrence effectsan argument with some evidential basis with regard to
preventing property and vehicle crime, although not more serious
and terrorism. This process is multi-directional.
interpersonal crimes. With reference to terrorism, this utility often shifts

to the post-event context. It is thus unlikely in the extreme that cameras
patrol urban spaces with equal efficacy across these divergent tasks.
Surveillance is not effective in deterrence reactionary

measures and strong sense of governmentality lead to
otherization.
criminological literature is saturated with debate over the

deterrence value of such visible security measures with no definitive
consensus, one clear function is to patrol the spatial and moral borders of
these geographies. In addition to excluding those who do not belong,
repeated experience relates how the inhabitants of new and gentrified
padded bunkers demand protection from the heavily stereotyped
incumbent populations. Surveillance is emblematic that these security
concerns are being addressed and thus enhances the attractiveness and
commercial value of such developments. In such geographies,
surveillance-based security is highly symbolic. Such principles and processes extend far beyond the global North to
Although the
become a globalized lingua franca of security planning. Of the abundant potential candidates, it is perhaps the gated Alphaville development, So Paulo, that most closely resembles the
UK the most high-profile massing of surveillance

technologies occurs within the central financial zones of London as a
direct response to fears of terrorist attack. Following the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) bombings of Londons
apotheosis of this approach. In the
financial heart in 1992 and 1993 a so-called Ring of Steel was created to foment a technologically delineated securitized zone predicated on monitoring and restricting access (Coaffee
Whilst target-hardening measures (such as security bollards and

barriers) altered the urban landscape, it was camera surveillance that
police considered the most important feature. An additional phase of
expansion, intensification and hardening subsequently occurred during
the late 1990s with the introduction of ANPR and further camera network
upgrades, rendering the Square Mile area the most intensely monitored
space in the UK (Coaffee 2009), and, at that time, Europe. This template
has since been applied more broadly both domestically within the UK and
internationally. Given heightened security fears surrounding the development of Londons second corporate centre at Canary Wharf since the late 1980s, and
2009).
particularly following the PIRA bombing of February 1996, a fortified Iron Collar (Coaffee 2009) was developed. This was designed along similar security principles as the Ring of Steel
for analogous reasons of reassurance and resilience. Increasingly this Ring of Steel model is applied internationally as a component of the global war on terror. In New York a ring of
steel for Lower Manhattan is currently being developed comprising the strategic deployment of hundreds of cameras, many with an array of functionality which extends to the detection
of radioactive material. This security systemofficially called the Lower Manhattan Security Initiativeaims to throw a surveillance cloak over the area so that terrorists can be tracked,
monitored and ultimately deterred (Coaffee 2009).
Surveillance establishes a strong sense of governmentality and

fear
Fussey and Coaffee 12(Pete & Jon, Dr Fussey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex.
The rise and application of urban surveillance cameras is not only connected to
the goals of direct enforcement. More diffuse, abstract and symbolic applicationssuch as the
removal of fear or enticement to use particular spaces or reside in
formerly dangerous parts of the cityare also common. Of central
importance is the embedding of surveillance cameras within urban
regeneration projects. In the 1990s, the response of urban authorities to
perceived insecurity was dramatic, especially in North America, and in particular Los Angeles (LA). LA
assumed a theoretical primacy within urban studies with strong academic
emphasis on its militarization, portraying the city as an urban laboratory
for anti-crime and surveillance measures. This reflected a process of fortress
urbanism where, stimulated by middle-class paranoia and the desire to
protect pockets of economic vibrancy, a profusion of security features
had become immersed within the urban landscape (see also Arteaga Botello and Wilson, this volume). As Mike
Davis noted in City of Quartz in cities like Los Angeles on the hard edge of postmodernity , one
observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single comprehensive security effort (1990: 203). Here, the
boundaries between the two traditional methods of crime preventionlaw
enforcement and fortificationhave become blurred. Defensible space and
technological surveillance, once used at a micro-level, were being rolled
out across the city. In Ecologies of Fear (1998), Davis further extrapolated current social, economic and political trends to create a vision for the future city (in
the year 2019), technologically and physically segmented into zones of protection
and surveillance, incorporating high-security financial districts and gated
communities. In this vision economic disparities created a spatial
apartheid, an urban landscape of cages covered by a scanscape of
omnipresent surveillance. In the 1990s, despite Fortress LA becoming a powerful symbol of the post-modern city, many critics argued that Davis
had portrayed a partial and dystopian image of the city; one shackled with terror, fear and anxiety and under the constant gaze of surveillance cameras. That said, the
broad trend of parachuting accommodation for the affluent into the
formerly dangerous spaces and the attendant shepherding of intensified
urban surveillance regimes into specific urban geographies has
undoubtedly spread internationally (see Arteaga Botello, this volume). There are many reasons for this, operating simultaneously at
the macro-market and micro-social levels.
Surveillance BadBlackness
America uses programs to surveil the black community in order
to keep them oppressed in the current system.
Cyril 15 (Malkia Amala Cyril, 15, Founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice and cofounder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, April 2015, Black Americas State of Surveillance, The
Progressive, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-statesurveillance#sthash.aMyFDruE.dpuf)
the FBI
came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret
trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk,
refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didnt get to
do that. My mother died just two weeks later. My mother was not the only black person to come under
the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual
dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971
revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoovers largest target group, didnt have
to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be
black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance
technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States.
Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the
revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being
spied on by the NSA. Yet my mothers visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that
deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have
lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a
racial hierarchy. Its time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the
clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance . We need to
understand that data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor
perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished
underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement
agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. Concerned
advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as
the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answer it may be discriminatory, but it helps
protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently
innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private
data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime . For targeted communities, there
is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers.
We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, weve birthed a complex and coded culturefrom jazz to spoken dialectsin
Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died,
order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets
covered in our blood. In a recent address,
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear:
2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department
Predictive policing, also known as Total Information Awareness, is described as

using advanced technological tools and data analysis to preempt crime. It
utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is
deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They arent. In a racially discriminatory
criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of
technology that wouldve been unheard of even a few years ago.
reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crowa de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police
practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment.
In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is Broken Windows. This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimeslike selling loose cigarettes, the
kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profilingindiscriminate
data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices.
As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt
surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen

in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of
individuals and groups; and to observe data trends . Police departments like Brattons aim to use sophisticated
technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color
and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by
local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on
the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray
technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying
information. When used to track a suspects cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic
drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming
these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the
purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on
record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used suspicious activity reportsdescribed as official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational
planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity. These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody whos ever dealt
Predictive
policing doesnt just lead to racial and religious profilingit relies on it.
with gang databases knows, its almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true.
Just as
stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities
reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of
color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesnt, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of
One of the most terrifying

aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it
disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on
white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power.
Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat mainstream Muslims as supporters of terrorism,
to view charitable donations by Muslims as a funding mechanism for combat, and to view Islam itself as a Death Star that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From
New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime.
There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of
torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing
practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are
the widest net is cast over black communities. Black

people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were
racial and ethnic minorities. But by far,
held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30
This is not a broken system, it is a system

working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of
cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are
increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today,
racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that
has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural
racism.
percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime.
Surveillance BadDiscourse Indict

Reject discourses of national safety thats why we got here in
the first place. Plus, surveillance hasnt stopped terror at all.
Monahan 8 (Torin Monahan, Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, Surveillance and terrorism, 2012, Print Pg 490)
role of surveillance in post-9/11 institutional arrangements,

legislation, policing practices, and public responses, with a focus on the USA. The USA
PATRIOT Act brought about an intensification of surveillance through
national security letters, tip hotlines, government spying on citizens and
others, and illegal wiretaps. With the formation of the Department of
Homeland Security, the missions of government agencies included in DHS
were modified to prioritize national security over service provision and the
public was conditioned to surveillance through airport screening and
exposure to the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System. Counterterrorism
organizations known as fusion centers operate as decentralized organizations that model
surveillance functions upon intelligence-led policing , preemptive risk
management, and industry partnerships. Discourses of preparedness
and readiness contribute to a paradigm of risk management (and selfsurveillance) that stresses individual over institutional responsibility and
may in turn aggravate conditions of human insecurity. Finally, several
attempted terrorist attacks on the USA since 9/11 have failed largely due
to errors on the part of would-be terrorists or the successful use of human
intelligence, not technological surveillance, which calls into question the
effectiveness of many of the developments in national security over the
past decade. The field of surveillance studies grew up in response to the changes wrought by 9/11. Just as state surveillance existed before these dramatic terrorist
This chapter explored the
attacks, so did scholarship on surveillance, but it did not have the stability or coherence typically associated with well-established academic fields, such as having a dedicated journal,
regular conferences, or academic degree programs. One of the first moves made by this rapidly maturing field was to correct the mistake of media and other commentators who
perceived a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the 9/11 attacks and the unveiling of state surveillance programs and systems. Surveillance studies scholars drew attention
instead to the intensification or surge of already present but largely hidden forms of systematic monitoring, tracking, analysis, and control by police and other state agents (Ball and
Webster 2003; Lyon 2003; Wood et al. 2003). By the time of the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005 the field was honed to analyze the surveillance failures and police responses
with depth and sensitivity.
Surveillance BadGovernmentality
Reactionary measures taken through the lenses of
governmentality will lead to a dystopian society in which every
last bit of data is stored and easily accessible recent trends
point toward this dystopia.
Parenti 03(Christian, Has a PhD in sociology (co-supervised in geography) from the London School of
9/11 was only fuel to a fire already raging out of control. The states
drive to tag, monitor, and criminalize, and the medias compulsion to
summon fear at every turn, are matched or surpassed only by the
aggressive proliferation of commercially based identification, registration,
and tracking. This privatized regime of observation and discipline is
crystallized in the inexorable slide toward a cashless cyber- society in
which every transaction is recorded and correlated to a subjects location
in time and space. In Europe, microchip-integrated smart cardsthe next logical step toward
electronic moneyare fast replacing all other types of credit and debt
cards. Unlike most ATM or credit cards used in the US, smart cards not only deposit information
but also record and store datathat is, they build and hold their own
records. In the UK, the Boots Pharmacy Advantage Card has more than 10 million users. The Netherlands, Belgium, and France are awash in smart cards, and 70 million
Germans carry them for health insurance identification purposes.7 And if we are to credit Moores Law, which
holds that computer processing capacity doubles every eighteenth
months, the power of smart cards could grow exponentially. What does this mean? According to
one journalist: Experts predict that, over the next decade, consumers will carry two
or three smart cards: a work card with access to the companys canteen,
computer network and car park; a leisure card with gym club membership
and lunch money; a banking card with details about your mortgage
payments and social security status.... The small plastic card in your
wallet will probably know a lot more about you and your particular habits
than youd tell your best friend, from the last purchase you made to what
you got in your final exams.8 Add to this the next generation of wireless
telecommunications gearsouped- up cell phones, web-enabled Palm
Pilots, onboard navigation and GPS gear for automobiles. Then imagine
their interface with the countless rules, dictums, and prohibitions of
overbearing state and corporate governance and one begins to see the
contours of something rather unpleasant, a world that is nominally free
but actually subject to a soft tyranny of omniscient and interlocking
regimes of control: work rules overlapping with the criminal law;
overlapping with official moralism; overlapping with the concerns of the
security-conscious home; overlapping with notions of correct political
policies; and then all of this overlapping with problematic assumptions
about who is dangerous and who deserves privilege.
In many ways,
Surveillance BadLegalism Ineffective

Legal approaches dont work- especially in cases of sexual
objectification
Conaghan and Russell 14 (Joanne, Professor of law at the University of Bristol, specializing in
law and gender, Yvette, lecturer in law at the University of Bristol, Rape Myths, Law, and Feminist Research: Myths
About Myths?, 3/8/2014, http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/160/art%253A10.1007%252Fs10691-014-9259z.pdf?originUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Farticle%2F10.1007%2Fs10691-014-9259z&token2=exp=1437753320~acl=%2Fstatic%2Fpdf%2F160%2Fart%25253A10.1007%25252Fs10691-014-9259z.pdf%3ForiginUrl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Flink.springer.com%252Farticle%252F10.1007%252Fs10691-0149259-z*~hmac=b1132cea1f897f0e885e2ef1d13cb862d3bc99889c957d22a8fef89f706ef0a4)
Indeed, one of the most crucial insights brought to light by such a gender
inflected analysis is the way in which designations of criminality in cases
of rape are highly contingent upon shifting and unstable cultural norms.
What makes rape distinguishable from many other serious crimes is its
constitutive reliance upon ideas of normal sexuality in which the line
between criminal and non-criminal behaviour emerges as critical and yet
far from easy to draw (Gavey 2005; MacKinnon 1983). That the contours of this line are historically, culturally and temporally variable is compounded by
its contingence upon a particular hegemonic construction of womans sexuality, the boundaries of which are largely
defined and negotiated through the medium of rape myths . Decades of
feminist research on rape has attested to this particular difficulty with a
view to exposing both how and why a womans real experience of sexual
violation can be reconstituted as just sex by police, lawyers, judges, and
juries. Gavey shows how this constituting process takes hold, tracing the ways in which discourses of heterosex are produced, how they set up the boundaries of womens
passive, acquiescing (a)sexuality, and mens forthright, urgent pursuit of sexual release, which in turn provide the frame or scaffolding for a rape culture (Gavey 2005, 3). Within this
process, rape myths function less as consciously-held views of cognitively deliberative subjects and more as culturally prevalent tropes and images upon which people, including those
involved in criminal justice operations, tend to drawoften unconsciouslywhile exercising judgment or engaging in decision-making. Rape myths are an integral part of the scaffolding
law has relied upon and

sustained this scaffolding, contributing to the continual blurring between
the boundaries of rape and possessive sexuality as erotic love (Naffine 1994).
Within this framing of heterosexual love, men act as possessors and
women as possessed (ibid); male sexuality emerges as originary and
agentic with female consent com[ing] into view only as a male
achievement (Bowers 2011, 9). The virtual erasure of female subjectivity allows the law to excuse or even reward the strong male seducer for his absorption in his
own sexuality, for example, through mens rea requirements constructed solely around masculine desire (Naffine 1994, 27). This male-centred
paradigm comes to inform sexual scripts which show the permeability and overlap between rape
and seduction in which codes for sexual interaction continue to ascribe to
men the role of sexual initiator and pursuer while women play the part of
sexual gatekeepers (Frith 2009). In this way, womens responsibility for sexual interactions is repeatedly foregrounded while their desire is excised from
our perceptions of what normal (hetero)sex looks like . Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to
consent in which the legal concern is not with whether a woman did or did
not consent to sex but with the perpetrators perceptions thereof. Thus
indifference to female desire is apparent not only in the discursive
application of legal rules but is enshrined within the rules themselves
which continue to locate rape within a conceptual framework which
presumes the universal masculine subject and requires that women speak
the harm of rape within a symbolic they have had no role in crafting (Russell 2013).
which supports a rape culture not because they are true or false but because they are normatively infused. Moreover,
We cannot operate within a legalist frameworkit inevitably
excludes the feminine and re-entrenches the impacts of the

aff.
Hunter 13 (Rosemary Hunter,
professor law and legal studies at the University of Queen Mary in London,
Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism, 2013,
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/35679/1/Ashgate%20Companion%20Hunter%20chapter.pdf)
Despite the appearance of neutrality and genderlessness, however,

feminist critiques of the liberal legal person have noted its inherent
masculinity. This argument is sometimes historical and empirical, and sometimes symbolic and normative. In the first account, privileged white
men have populated law, shaped it in their own image, and instated their
experience and view of the world as the legal norm, which has then come
to be seen as universal, neutral, objective, inevitable and complete (Finley 1989: 892,
Davies 1996: 72). The second, symbolic, account draws attention to the systematic
associations within the Western imaginary between the characteristics of
the legal person rationality, autonomy, self-interest, objectivity,
assertiveness, self-sufficiency, self-possession and masculinity (see, for example, Naffine
2002: 81). We can see this masculine norm in the reasonable man of tort law and
self-defence doctrine; the rational, self-interested actor of contract law;
the responsible person of criminal law; the unencumbered worker of
labour law; the rightsbearing individual of human rights; and the standard
comparator of equality law (Finley 1989: 893, 896). These legal persons operate
autonomously in the public sphere it is difficult to imagine them, for example,
changing nappies, cuddling children or breastfeeding (Naffine 2009: 158). A significant
consequence of the masculinity of the legal person is that women struggle
to attain legal subjectivity. Again, this point may be understood both empirically and symbolically. Empirically, to the extent that law is
built around an ideal type to which they do not conform , it creates problems for women and fails to
take into account their lived reality and experiences. As Ngaire Naffine has pointed out, for example, womens bodies [are] not
susceptible to the sort of self-mastery required of a self-proprietor (1998: 203), and
indeed for centuries womens bodies were seen as mens property (Naffine 1998: 204, 208211). Even today, liberal legalisms autonomous,
responsible subject is never pregnant and is not a wife (Naffine 2003: 365). And to the extent that they
are excluded from legal subjectivity, women are also diminished, since liberal legal theory treats
persons not fitting the normal model of autonomous, competent
individual as marginal, inferior and different (Minow 1990: 910). On a symbolic level, the
construction of the masculine as rational, objective and universal is
premised on a binary construction of the feminine as its opposite as
irrational, subjective and particular. Thus, the legal person exists in a
symbiotic hierarchy with the devalued feminine his existence and power
depend upon the negation and exclusion of the feminine (Naffine 2002: 81, 87). And again, as
Margaret Thornton has noted, liberal legalisms essentialist representation of woman as less than rational has been disabling for embodied women attempting to exercise legal
subjectivity (1996: 3031). One response to this observation has been Luce Irigarays call for a legal regime that recognizes two, differentiated sexes rather than only one, universal (that
is, male) sex (Irigaray 1993, 1994, 1996)
Legalism creates a male-female binary with no way for women

to interact within the system
Hunter 13 (Rosemary Hunter, professor of law and legal studies at the University of Queen Mary in London,
Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism, https://kar.kent.ac.uk/35679/1/Ashgate
%20Companion%20Hunter%20chapter.pdf)
postmodern feminists have critiqued the way in which liberal legalisms

account of the legal person does not merely function as a representation
of reality, but actively contributes to the construction of gender as a
binary system, and of limited meanings and characteristics for masculine
and feminine subjects and subjectivity (see, for example, Ahmed 1995: 58, Davies 1996: 4, Hunter 1996: 160, Naffine
2004). Mary Joe Frug, for example, notes that law produces differences and hierarchies between the
sexes, and moreover produces these essentialized sexual differences and
hierarchies as natural (and hence as unquestionable) (1992: 128). Through an analysis of employment discrimination law, family law, and laws
relating to sexual assault and prostitution, Frug (1992: 1518, 3233, 129134) demonstrates how law produces the female body as
terrorized (a body that has learned to scurry, to cringe and to submit),
maternalized (a body that is for maternity) and sexualized (a body that is for sex with men, that is, both desirable and rapable) (1992: 129130). This
construction of the female body in turn affects how we dress, have sex,
and regard ourselves and others (1992: 132). Similarly, Carol Smart argues that law operates as a
technology of gender, a process of producing fixed gender identities,
rather than merely applying to already gendered subjects (1992: 34). According to Smart, law
brings into being both gendered subject positions as well as
subjectivities or identities to which the individual becomes tied or
associated; thus Woman is a gendered subject position which legal
discourse brings into being (1992: 34). Smart, too, charts the rise of compulsory motherhood, showing how successive legislative
provisions have constructed motherhood as natural and unavoidable for
heterosexually active women (1992: 3739). Continuing this theme, Sara Ahmed illustrates the way in which child support
legislation constructs women as dependent on men and normalizes the
heterosexual family, rendering women who have chosen to parent alone or
in a lesbian relationship invisible and illegitimate (1995: 6667). Ratna Kapur shows how the Indian courts
Finally,
interpretations of sexual harassment prohibitions have reintroduced notions of sexual morality, chastity, and the cultural idealization of pure, modest Indian womanhood, with women
claimants not conforming to these norms being denied protection (2005: 3940). Sally Sheldon (1999) analyses laws gendered constructions of masculine and feminine reproductivity,
demonstrating how UK foetal protection legislation, judicial endorsement of foetal protection policies, and legislation providing different degrees of civil liability of women and men for
construct the female reproductive body as weak,

penetrable, volatile and uncontrollable, by contrast with the masculine
heterosexual reproductive body which is constructed as strong,
impermeable, stable and invulnerable. Within this legal discourse, too,
men are constructed as breadwinners and women as primary carers. Thus,
for instance, it is seen as acceptable for women to be excluded from
workplaces involving high levels of exposure to environmental toxins,
since the porous female body constitutes a potential danger to the foetus
and thus requires control, surveillance and management, and since
women are always potentially pregnant and their primary role is to
nurture and care for children. The idealized, heterosexual male body, on
the other hand, is not excluded from such workplaces, because it is
considered strong and impermeable, and because of mens primary
breadwinning role, even though mens sperm are equally if not more
vulnerable to mutation as a result of environmental toxicity (Sheldon 1999: 133134). Sheldon
pre-natal injuries caused to children,
also contrasts the legal construction of the heterosexual male body with that of the gay male body which, in its obvious susceptibility to invasion and its consequent dangerousness to
other bodies in the context of HIV/AIDS becomes feminized (1999: 140), and notes also the differential racial and class constructions of potentially dangerous mothers.
Surveillance BadNeoliberalism
Surveillance is rooted in neoliberalism empirical data proves.
Fussey and Coaffee 12(Pete & Jon, Dr Fussey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex.
The neo-liberal
relaxation of planning laws and expansion of out-of-town shopping had
stimulated a decline in traditional town centre spaces of consumption.
Crucial to this process was the role of the state in providing funding and
limiting regulation. Thus whilst camera networks were expanding they were
also normalized as an expected feature of public space. Other specific legislative and policy climates
also drove the dissemination of urban surveillance cameras, particularly in relation to residential spaces. In the UK, amid the exorbitant amount
of crime and disorder-related legislation introduced during the former
Labour governments last term in office (19972010), one has arguably
had greatest influence on the expansion of surveillance cameras in
England and Wales: Section 17 of the Crime and Disorder Act, 1998. This
provision placed a statutory duty on local government agencies in England
and Wales to foreground crime and disorder issues as part of their daily
operations. The effect of this Act was to require all local government
agencies to incorporate security concerns into their core business
wherever possible. The impact was felt particularly strongly amongst local
authority housing agencies. In such times of uncertainty, old orthodoxies
prevailed. When confronted with new and daunting tasks, planners appeared to find succor in long-standing (yet highly contested) staples of administrative
The penetration of surveillance cameras into British towns and cities was not entirely due to the fear of crime or terrorism.
criminologyrational choice-informed models that sought to reduce the opportunities for offending and increase capable guardianship or the observation of a specific geography as a
Unsurprisingly, surveillance cameras (and their assumed

deterrence capabilities) became a central theme of this approach.
Globally, the role of these more localized policy environments is crucial to
the spread of urban surveillance and provides a caveat to many of the
macro-based coercive or interest-based explanations of surveillance
cameras. For example, in their study of surveillance camera diffusion in
Australia, Sutton and Wilson (2004) identify resistance amongst those
from welfarist working cultures within local crime control practitioner
networks which, ultimately, prevented surveillance camera
implementation in many areas.
means of deterrence.
Pro-surveillance discourse in policymaking is driven by a

perspective that identifies criminals and disorder
From an
administrative practice-oriented perspective, surveillance cameras are
portrayed as a rational evidence-based response to crime and disorder
problems. By contrast, critical sociological conceptualizations present a
wider range of explanations. These include: theorizations of surveillance
cameras as a coercive tool of a malign state, commercial or other
interests; as an exemplar of embedded disciplinary technologies; as part
of a wider shift towards societies of control; and as a component of a
converging surveillant assemblage; and notions of technological
perfection and hypercontrol. Although these accounts have much to say about the functionality of surveillance cameras once
Whilst there is broad consensus that rapid expansion of camera surveillance occurred around this time, there is less agreement over why this took place.
operational, less attention has been placed on the way those interests may be mediated and transmitted through the processes of installing cameras in the first instance. Among those
on the dissemination of cameras across urban spaces a central argument has

been that specific configurations of crime and disorder policy environments
have proved crucial in propelling the expansion of surveillance camera
networks (Fussey 2007). Indeed, in the UK, as the then Conservative
governments flagship tough law and order agenda of the 1980s and
early 1990s was matched by spiraling crime rates, seemingly novel
technological responses to crime became more desirable. From the 1990s
onwards in the UK, surveillance cameras held privileged status amongst
the assortment of Home Office crime prevention strategies. Public
articulations of their effectiveness, belief in rising crime, high rates of the
fear of crime and the coalescence of video surveillance into existing
dominant administrative discourses of crime control influenced its
popularity in policy circles. Despite the contemporaneous popularity of
Orwellian, Foucauldian or malign interest-based explanations of
surveillance camera deployment across the UK, the rapid development of
this strategy can be seen as a product of eight years of government
largess in the form of unparalleled statutory funding for camera
installation. These initiatives alongside the preceding policy context can
be viewed as the principle reasons why Britains urban spaces were more
closely observed by surveillance cameras than those of other countries.
studies that have centered
2ACBiometrics Bad
Biometrics BadGeneral
Biometrics are historically racializedtheyre used to justify
surveillance of the Other
Nakamura 09 (Lisa, Professor in the Department of American Cultures and the Department of Screen
Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I co-facilitate the FemTechNet Project, a network of
educators, activists, librarians, and researchers interested in digital feminist pedagogy, and am Coordinator of
Digital Studies at the University of Michigan., Interfaces of Identity: Oriental Traitors and Telematic Profiling in 24,
Duke University Press/Camera Obscura 70, Volume 24, Number 1, NA/NA/2009)
Biometric imaging technologies here are posed as the new solution to

the problems of a changing world. Fears of the enemy within are not
new in the American media; however, this commercial links terrorism,
cyberwar, and new technologies of digital detection imaging, and it
posits that one is the solution to the other . That is, in its glorification of
networked digital visual technologies, it reprises hopes that science
might solve the problem of foreign infiltrators who look, act, and can pass
as loyalthat scientific techniques can provide accurate and neutral
means by which to see into differently colored hearts, minds, and skins
and correctly recognize and avert crime. Yet as the biometrics historian
Simon Cole reminds us, technologies such as fingerprinting, which seemed
to offer this very solution, instead reified the very crude racial categories
that helped produce it.2 When fingerprinting was first adopted as a
technology by the New York Police Department in 1922, its use gave rise
to practices of racial categorization that hewed closely to traditional
styles of skin colorbased racismfingerprint records were put into
black, white, and yellow files. Rather than discouraging racial
classification, fingerprinting recirculated it. Likewise, extremely advanced
biometric technologies of recognition such as facial recognition systems
(FRSs) benefit both from their novelty or wow factor and from their
scientific origins. Playing on these factors, technophilic television
programs like 24, which create pleasure out of paranoia and drama out of
identification, employ digital special effects sequences like FRSs to
demonstrate the power of both cinema and science to reveal hidden
identities. These identities are often racialized as Asian or Asian American
in this program (though not exclusively so), partly because the concept of
the Asian as the permanent foreigner has such power in US politics. The term terror
television has at least three different meanings. John Kenneth Muirs 2001 Terror Television: American Series, 19701999 first uses the word to describe the entertainment form of horror
television programs. With quite another emphasis, focusing more on media politics than pleasures, an American group called Accu- racy in Media produced a DVD titled Terror Television:
The Rise of Al-Jazeera and the Hate America Media in 2006 that criticizes Islamic Interfaces of Identity 111 pro-terror video.3 Yet however divergent these two understandings
popular narrative television

programs like Showtimes Emmy-nominated Sleeper Cell (20056) and Foxs Emmy- and Golden Globe winning 24 invoke both dramatic
and documentary traditionsand, as I will elaborate, both the horrific and the sublimein their narratives of
detection of Islamic terrorists and counterterrorists in America.
Furthermore, these narratives both rely on and revel in media
technologies for their production of politics, pleasures, and even
populations. That is, in these programs the horror of witnessing torture
perpetrated both by and on American bodies, as well as the destruction of
urban infrastructures in the US, is paired with the spectacle of the digital
of terror television may seem, the third meaning is intimately related to both of these earlier two:
sublime in the form of advanced telecommunication technologies that

perform the work of remote sensing and the identification of bodies and
especially of faces. The relation between these modes of televisual horror
violence against people and objects, bodies and buildings, US citizens
and their built environments and the digital sublime works as follows.
The problem of correctly identifying the true and loyal American, as
opposed to the concealed Islamic fanatic, can only be solved by the
deployment of highly advanced, spectacular surveillance and identification
technologies, such as aerial and satel- lite photography, FRSs, biometrics,
frame enhancement technology, infrared visioning systems, and extensive
databases, and traces of informational network traffic. The program on which I focus
here, 24, demonstrates these imbrications between terrorism and
informationalized late capitalism, driven in large part by the technological revolution in digital communications.4 Both torture and
information communication technologies (ICTs) are spectacular in the
sense that they compel a fascinated gaze. 24s technologiza- tion of
torture and its narrative precursordigital identification technologies
foreground the ways in which the terrorist body is informationalized as a
digital signal, a graphic file that can be decoded and recoded using the
right kind of software-based tools. After all, the need for information is
tortures ultimate justification, on this television program as elsewhere,
and the use of the 112 Camera Obscura informational mode of image extraction and analysis indexes this obsession.
Biometrics is rampantly increasing leads to a firm gaze on the

other.
ANPR cameras, once the cutting edge of

surveillance camera technology, have since become a routine part of
traffic surveillance across the UK, particularly within densely populated
urban municipalities. Of course, ANPR is just one of a growing suite of video-analytic approaches, designed to augment and overcome human fallibilities in
interpreting video feeds from the cameras. In the UK three major urban sites have been repeatedly
selected for such experimentation: Belfast (particularly prior to the 1998
Good Friday Agreement), East London and, to a lesser extent,
Birmingham. Among these, during the 1990s, the East London borough of
Newham was one of the first public spaces in the world to apply Face
Recognition cameras, and the area has continued the tradition of
deploying novel technological forms of control. Subsequent initiatives
include Intelligent Passenger Surveillance, deployed to automatically alert
surveillance camera operators to unattended luggage or lingering
In London, such initiatives have crept into new territories and new roles.
passengers in London Underground stations, private sector microphoneequipped cameras in Shoreditch (Hackney) and the development of
behaviour analytics. Most recently, the UK has also become an importer of urban surveillance strategies. Among other notable examples is the
recent application of gunshot sensor technology (essentially microphones attenuated to the specific frequency ranges of gunshot sounds and linked to GPS technologies in order to help
now Birmingham, UK.

Although this chapter draws heavily on the UK and London models of
urban surveillance, extreme versions of these approaches are now
emerging globally. In the global powerhouse of consumer goods
production, the Chinese city of Shenzhenlabeled Police state 2.0the
latest tracking technologies are reported to be watching the 12.4 million
inhabitants with a massive network of surveillance cameras which will,
over a short time, rise to 2 million in number, rendering it the most
camera-surveiled city on the planet (Klein 2008). Aside from headline-catching discussion on the scale and
sophistication of surveillance technologies, another major area of debate has centered on the type of order imposed by such
measures. UK Research, in particular, has highlighted how new policies on
anti-social behavior use surveillance cameras to gaze selectively on the
conduct of specific groups of people to keep city centers free of visible,
less affluent and/or non-desirable users. Indeed, surveillance cameras
increasingly became a key part of a wider narrative of urban renaissance
and of systematically and routinely embedded within city centre
regeneration schemes (see Coleman 2004). Some have referred to this as
a broader strategy of new forms of governmentality where responsibility
for safety and security is decentralized to co-opted institutions to embed
risk management features into everyday life.
establish the location of firearms discharges), currently deployed to tackle gang violence across numerous US cities, and
Biometrics are used as tools to uphold systematic oppression

benefiting the universal subject
Dubrofsky and Magnet 15 (Rachel, Associate Professor in the Departments of Humanities &
In examining state attempts--with an orientalist and imperial gazeto render terrorist bodies"
both pathological and animalisticHall illustrates that biotechnologies are deployed to
turn these bodies inside out and make them transparent in ways that
intensify systemic forms of violence already inflicted on marginalized
communities. In her discussion of full-body scanners in U.S. airports, Hall looks at the centering of the
notion that white, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual passengers
should not have their bodily privacy invaded by TSA officials. Race issues
are indeed often at the forefront in the marketing of the technologies--for
instance, companies aiming to get state institutions to invest in
identification technologies claim biometrics will circumvent persistent
forms of racial profiling. Biometric technologies render the body in binary code, and industry manufacturers of these technologies claim this code
reveals nothing about race, gender, class, or sexuality, instead representing bodies as anesthetized strands of ones and zeroes. However, it is increasingly
clear that biometric technologies are in fact a high-tech form of racial and
gender profiling that efficiently and quickly sorts people using criteria that
often explicitly include race and gender. For example, in order to verify the identity of a particular individual, it
would be faster to scan the individual against a smaller group of people
with like characteristics, rather than against an entire database . For many biometric
technologies, "like characteristics" include race and gender identities . Reifying race
and gender in this way through their biometric categorization only serves
to intensify existing forms of biological racialism and sexism, in which race
and gender are imagined as stable biological properties that can be
reliably read off the body.
Biometrics categorize people into factions that are treated

differently. This covert, biopolitical racism allows society to
practice neo-eugenics on deviant bodies.
Bell 13 (CD Bell, Canadian Journal of Sociology, Grey's Anatomy goes South: Global Racism and Suspect
Identities in the Colonial Present, 2013, Print. Pg. 468)
biometric[s] technologies categorize people, distinguishing between

deserving/undeserving, safe/threat, high risk/low risk and so on . One important
prerequisite for the success of this kind of categorization is the enrollment of as many identities as possible. Hence, a good starting point for
making sense of these dividing practices is Zygmunt Baumans (1989)
argument that a distinguishing feature of racism is the quest to produce and institutionalize a
stringent social order. Racism follows the patterns of medicine and
gardening in which the objective is always to separate and set apart the
useful elements designed to live and thrive, from harmful and morbid ones
which ought to be exterminated (1989:70). In other words, racism involves the
extermination of undesirables alongside the incorporation of those lives
which are desirable. This relation resonates with a biopolitical
understanding of racism as the break between what must live and what
must die (Foucault 2003b:25455). Such a break requires separating out groups within a population and casting war in biological terms in which the death of the other
corresponds death. By this regime of power, everyone is categorized, no one is exempt. Focused
around identification and verification, for the purposes of authorization
and exclusion, biometric technology is a means of institutionalizing a
discriminatory ethic. Its expansion into war zones enhances not only the exclusionary, but also exterminatory, potential of racism.
By design,
Categorization of people into institutional orders allows for

structural violence
Jenkins 12 (Richard Jenkins, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Sheffield, Sorting out whos who, 2012,
Print Pg 286)
Thus categorization of a person or group from outside, by others, is

integral to the process of identification, and to knowing whos who and
whats what in the human world. However, identification and therefore
categorizationinvolves more than just knowing. Knowing is never
neutral or disinterested. Categorizing others necessarily contributes to
how we treat them. On a broader canvas, classification the allocation of individuals to
collective categoriesis fundamental to social sorting (Lyon 2007: 94117), the
identification and ordering of individuals in order to put them in their
place within local, national and global institutional orders (Jenkins 2008: 4345). Practices
of social sorting are ubiquitous and far-reaching in modern societies, having gradually come to occupy a role at the heart of modern bureaucratiic governance that is all the more potent
Social sorting is central to

the formation and shaping of actors as particular kinds of people, with
particular life chances, subject to particular constraints and permitted
access to particular opportunities, and to the historical emergence of
institutional and demographic macro- patterns. In other words,
categorization, classification and social sorting have consequences (Bowker and Starr
because their taken-for-grantedness renders them almost invisible, part of the furniture of the state and business.
2000), in particular
through the allocation of rewards or punishments . Punishments
are perhaps more visible and better documented. For example, in ethnic
profiling by the police, street-level law enforcement is informed by
presumptions about the individual likelihood of guilt according to visible
ethnicity or race; this has been called categorical suspicion (Marx 1988). Immigration rules, although there is considerable scope
in their operation for individual discretion, are more formal, definin[es]g who must be interrogated at the
border, and who is forbidden to enter under any circumstances. Medicine
is also in the business of classifying and categorizing: the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, for example, is a
compendium of classifications (diagnoses) and their rewards and penalties, which range from
treatments that may transform upset and disordered lives for the better,
to involuntary institutional confinement and intrusive interventions .
Policing practices and immigration rules also involve rewards, for those
who are lightly policed or ignored, or who may be admitted as of right .
Penalties and benefits are, in fact, inseparable in practical processes of
categorization and classification; they may also encourage the
internalization of external categorization, as argued by the labelling or social reaction perspective in the sociology of
deviance (Jenkins 2008: 9599).
Surveillance data is flawed and relies on racist and xenophobic

prior assumptions. The data taken from biometrics inculcates
police brutality and is a prior issue.
Jenkins 12 (Richard Jenkins, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Sheffield, Sorting out whos who, 2012,
Print Pg 287)
, it is not surprising that the other thing that watchers can do in order
to compensate for the qualitative information deficit that is endemic to
surveillancedespite, or perhaps even because of, the quantitative
information glut generated by IT-based surveillance is to index and
interpret what little they have in the light of other , apparently objective,
factual sources of information. Some of this information is a product of
modern communication systems: computers sending e-mails can be
identified, phone calls can be traced, passports are now electronically
registered, and vehicle registrations are readable by CCTV. In addition, modern states have
Even this
sponsored and developed an array of techniques for fixing the fluidity of identification and registering it within the archives and projects of government (Caplan and Torpey 2001).
Passports, identity cards, driving licenses, central personal registers,

criminal records, fingerprints, DNA analysis and iris-recognition are some
of the contemporary options. All of these information sources offer some
scope for correlating the fuzzy data derived from personal surveillance
with hard facts, and may be brought into play to resolve the problem of appearances. They do not, however,
necessarily solve that problem. Prior knowledge is still important, because unless there is already some pre-existing idea of whos who and whats what intelligence in policing
the task is either a search for a needle in a haystack or a version of

the run crosstabs approach to statistical analysis, which produces lots
of patterns but cannot tell you which are meaningful. There are particular
problems with intelligence: it may be inaccurate, it tends to be historical
rather than forward looking, individuals may over-invest in it to the
exclusion of all else, and the bad guys can manipulate it. To sum up, the
watchers capacity to interpret surveillance data is likely to be
compromised because they: (a) lack one of the most important sources of
information that we routinely use to identify people , i.e. language and,
specifically, conversational inquiry; (b) rely on their individual and cultural
prior knowledge, with all of its inadequacies, not least its stereotypical
nature, to interpret appearances; and (c) also depend on a different kind
of prior knowledge, intelligence, with all of its shortcomings . As a result, their capacity to know
whos who, and consequently whats what is likely to be problematic, at best. This means that the watched have a problem, as
well as the watchers: the validity of surveillance data is, in fact, a worry
for everyone. Generic surveillance, in particular, is a controversial civil
liberties and human rights issue, not least with respect to its implications
for legal presumptions of innocence. There are privacy issues that are not easily resolvable. Finally,
surveillance is also problematic if, for example, it involves the diversion of
resources from other, more interactive, kinds of policing and further
exacerbates that gulf which separates the police from many of the
communities that they are supposed to serve.
parlance
Biometrics BadBlackness
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: Fanons 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
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 ones identity (or identities)
despite the subjects 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
is that
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. (2002: 367, emphasis mine). Could these systems be calibrated to allow for cutaneous
facial scan technology may produce 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 .
gender detection? Further, Nanavati et al. note that
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 spectrums 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 slavecatching 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,
Everybodys 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 Jacks 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 LAbondance with Silvia, a woman described in The Book of Negroes as a 30-year-old
Though the Treaty of Paris stipulated

that the British were not to 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 holders 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
stout wench and Sam, a tall and stout fellow recorded as 22 years old, as his property.
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 Carletons 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.
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=iyT3wYeFrSq
B3bDvjpJuMRHaSAI#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 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
of favor, depending on each subsequent decennial enumeration.
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 personal dataabstracted
informationare 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:
). This 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.
674
Biometrics BadEurocentrism/Securitization
Biometrics are justified through securitization and racism
they reflect Western values
Kajevic 06 (Belhira, Support to Sudanese counterpart on provision of essential services to refugees in
regard to education, healthcare and livelihood opportunities -Focal point for child protection; established BID Panel
and served as its coordinator -Developed basic steering documents on unit level and supervised all case
management within the unit -indentified training need and organised trainings and workshops, Biometrics: A New
Mean of Surveillance and Migration Control, Malmo University, June/02/2006)
The European Union is at the crossroads with territorial and population surveillance. The grouping of people, how are the real Europeans, the real tourists, the real consumers is a way of
The social structures that are developing currently

are distinguishable and unsettling for all of those who think that there
should be certain rules that limit the state power. With the intensification
of already extensive surveillance systems that is stretching beyond the
national borders, our societies should be more uncomforted and
concerned of these technological enhancements and surveillance systems.
63 The main concern, as the paper has shown that the effects of the biometric systems will not be able
to render terrorist acts. Instead, under the banner of national security,
states are on their way of establishing systems of mass surveillance,
which will have to do more with political and social control than fighting
terrorism. The deployment of biometrics in the field of migration
management will reflect the current views and policies that the western
states have on immigration and the threat it poses. It will reinforce its
Islamophobia, it economical interests and its social preferences. I have highlighted few of
the systems that have been installed in the EU to ensure that its current policies will be followed. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 have
had great influence on the public and its willingness to put up with more
intrusions, interceptions, delays and questions than before.157 The threats
the biometrics technology poses on our right to privacy are many and
extensive. Considering the permanent state of emergency that we have in
the USA, the impediment on and violations of the right to privacy will also
be permanent. In the introduction I mentioned that the use of technology is not neutral. That is not to claim that it is a deterministic force that acts on the society.
The point is that technology is defended by its social and political context and
through its implementation. These elements make the technology embody
the values of its creator, and its design is inherently political.158 The
biometrics is a government-sponsored technology, and is usually
perceived as a phenomenon that belongs to the post September 11
context. Therefore, the values that are associated to the biometrics are
similar to the values and politics of the West, are brought to use in order
to put in force the current political views that these countries have. The
biometric techniques are put in place to solve a security problem, a
problem based on the threat posed by migration. Is the biometrics a technical solution to a real or a perceived
setting and defining norms of contemporary Europe.
problem? A real problem what we are unable to deal with in another way?
2ACIslamophobia
IslamophobiaGeneral
Anti-Arab discourse dominates the public spherechallenging
it is key
Salaita 06 (Steven George Salaita, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blackburg, Beyond
Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride, The New Centennial
Review, Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 2006)
anti-Arab racism finds mainstream expression in

nearly all print and visual media. This is not to make the foolish argument
that racism against other ethnic minorities is muted or exists only outside
the mainstream of the United States, but to identify a distinction among
anti-Arab racism and its various counterparts by highlighting issues of access and accountability. AntiArab racistsincluding, one could argue, a great many elected politicianshave access to vital forums in the
public sphere, where they frequently air derogatory opinions about Arabs
with little, if any, public outcry. In fact, I would argue that airing derogatory opinions
about Arabs has actually enhanced the appeal of numerous public figures ,
among them George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, Daniel Pipes, Ann Coulter, Steve Emerson, Stanley Kurtz, and Bill OReilly. This lack of accountability ,
more evident in discourse about Arabs than any other ethnic group with perhaps the exception of Natives, strengthens what Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor calls
manifest manners. Vizenor writes, Manifest manners court the destinies of
monotheism, cultural determinism, objectivism, and the structural
conceits of savagism and civilization (1994, vii). The structural conceits Vizenor critiques have
long consigned Arabs to biologically determined fantasies of Eastern
barbarism;
Unlike other forms of racism in the United States,
Complicity in racism isnt limited to one political ideology

anti-Arab racism is not confined to the political right also is worth analysis.
Racism, as writers from Elizabeth Cook-Lynn to bell hooks have illustrated, is never limited to particular social or
discursive movements, nor is it ever rooted in consistent sites of cultural
or linguistic production. Any comprehensive survey of popular opinion in
the United States over the past decade (a time frame that purposely straddles 9/11) will demonstrate
that the blatant anti-Arab racism of the political right is, using a vocabulary appropriate to specific
political agendas, reinscribed continually in the discourse , or at least the ethos, of mainstream and
progressive media. For instance, leftist liberal publications such as Dissent, Tikkun, and MoveOn.org have
been guilty of expressing racist attitudes either in the form of support for
Palestinian dispossession or by totalizing all Arabs and Muslims as
potential terrorists; or the racism arrives subtly by precluding Arabs from
speaking on their own behalf. A similar guilt is shared by mainstream
(supposedly liberal) publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, and Slate.com, which, given their corporate
My second observation that
obligations, cannot realistically be expected to attack anti-Arab racism when it is so fundamental to the interests of American capitalism (and to the survival of the publications). Of major
we cannot seriously
interrogate racism by attributing it solely to one political ideology without
analyzing how the racism is interpolated through a multitude of
discourses at the benefit of various ideologies.
concern to this essay is the recognition that, in keeping with the seminal work of Louis Althusser and Terry Eagleton,
This violence isnt a randomits a globalized reality

Based on the complexities at play in the first two sections, we might note here that
syncretism is a
definiteor, more accurately, indefinite
feature
of anti-Arab racism. We can best understand that syncretism by examining it in the context of some theoretical propositions about racism and the recent
globalization of American society. According to the tenets of contemporary literary theoryor, critical theory, depending on ones tastes various sorts of
fragmentation paradoxically define an increasingly globalized community:
cultural, geopolitical, intellectual, religious, and so forth . That is to say, analysis cannot be so easily
compartmentalized into universalistic paradigms because the globalized marketplace has precluded
isolationist worldviews even while it nurtures a wide range of economic
and political inequality. Racism , itself continually in transit, needs to be
contemplated in the framework of this reality. To examine the societal
underpinnings of anti-Arab racism, then, is to acknowledge immediately that
we have decompartmentalized a seemingly concrete institution. (The terms attitude or
mentality might work in place of institution, but I prefer institution because it demands the recognition of discursive and originary factors.)
Anti-Arab racism is an inherent part of the US

does this racism function morally, the major question I have thus far ignored? Kwame Anthony Appiah
offers some insight into this question by highlighting what he considers
racisms two primary moral types, extrinsic and intrinsic racism. Extrinsic
racists, Appiah writes, make moral distinctions between members of different races
because they believe that the racial essence entails certain morally
relevant qualities (1992, 13). Extrinsic racists believe that people of different
backgrounds acquire certain inborn characteristics that warrant appropriate treatment (or mistreatment)
Arabs, for instance, are born terroristic and therefore need to be treated
accordingly, with either wariness or force. Intrinsic racists, on the other hand, differentiate
morally between members of different races, because they believe that
each race has a different moral status, quite independent of the moral
characteristics entailed by its racial essence (14). Intrinsic racists, then, are similar to pluralists
as they are defined by David Hollinger; they approach various interactions based on the moral status
they assign their own group in opposition to those they imagine of others.
Appiahs categories, first of all, are neither mutually exclusive nor
comprehensive. They do, however, permit us to identify some of the moral
underpinnings of anti-Arab racism, which in many ways is similar to a range of better known racialist dogmas spanning nineteenthcentury cultural anthropology to twentieth-century colonial discourse. We can say, perhaps too obviously, that anti-Arab racism is both
extrinsic and intrinsic, an acknowledgment that helps us to disengage it a bit from contemporary notions of patriotic duty or national destiny. Anti-Arab
But how, we might ask,
racism often is extrinsic, as evidenced by the inexcusable popularity of the late Rafael Patais The Arab Mind, a positivistic analysis of Arab behavior not unlike Charles Murray and
Richard Herrnsteins infamous The Bell Curve, or even Ales Hrdlickas field work in Indian Country. Intrinsic racism, however, is no less a factor, as evidenced by the moral valuations
employed by American Messianists who have invented a hierarchized moral taxonomy, with the Arab as evildoer and the Jew positioned strangely as the hero who, nevertheless, must
anti-Arab racism in the United States is indivisible

from both historical influence and sociocultural values. In fact, anti-Arab
racism is a key element of cultural production in the United States. We
cannot conceptualize it solely as a byproduct of geopolitics or as
xenophobic delusion, although both of those factors certainly account to some degree for its existence. If we are to understand anti-Arab racism well
ultimately succumb to a preconfigured truth. Morally, then,
enough to actually work effectively to dismantle it, we need first never to apologize for it and next to comprehend it in its totality, extrinsically and intrinsically.
Discussions arent happening in the SQcomplete rejection is

key
Numerous expressions of national pride

exist, of course, but the predominant expression, symbiotic with the prevailing
version of patriotism, has rendered both imperialism and Messianism
synonymous with American identity. This version of patriotism is preceded
by anti-Arab racism and would, therefore, be unfeasible without anti-Arab racism,
This essay has been framed by analysis of national pride in the United States.
the unnamed but essential purveyor of the national interest. Anti-Arab racism is itself preceded by historical episodes too great to reduce to pithy interethnic dialectics. Years ago,
Amilcar Cabral noted that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be
dominated (1994, 54). Cabrals conflation of political desire and cultural manifestation is no less true today, even across space and time, which indicates that a moral paradigm of
enlightenment indeed creates the reality of American domination of the Arab World, and, to a lesser degree, its marginalization of Arab Americans. For this reason, if no other,
if we are to contextualize Orientalism and

Islamophobia within a more dynamic methodology, then racism must
become part of our vocabulary. Even if the word is not part of the discourse in the United States vis--vis Arabs, it is, tacitly but
pervasively, part of the culture of discursive authority in the U nited States vis-- vis both
Arabs and those who are otherwise oppressed as a result of legislation
rationalized by the fear of terrorism (a phenomenon now exclusive to the Arab World in corporate American media). In sum, then,
anti-Arab racism in the United States is simultaneously overused and
underdiscussed. It is extrinsic, intrinsic, and, most importantly, ubiquitous. In order to challenge it with any
success, we are compelled to analyze notions of patriotism and national
pride, which inevitably give anti-Arab racism meaning . Conversely, anti-Arab racism mystifies patriotism
Orientalism and Islamophobia matter and demand continued interrogation. But
and national pride. It is in this spirit that I announce openly that I am unpatriotic, a sentiment that should not in any way be confused with disdain. Rather, it speaks to my rejection of
anti-Arab racism. I similarly reject the various origins of anti-Arab racism and, in so doing, reject the American metanarrative of manifest manners. I do so with a sad but necessary
Ridding the United States of anti-Arab racism requires nothing less

than a rejection of all that is now considered fundamentally American.
acknowledgment:
IslamophobiaDetachment Link
Detachment worsens racism
that feigning objectivity in any critique of antiArab racism merely

strengthens the racism. If cultural criticism throughout the twentieth century has illustrated anything of value, it is that racism and
its modes of exploitation are interconnected with a host of ancillary
concernscapitalist voracity, religious discourse, sexual anxiety, historical
competitionthat both consume and substantiate the racism. Those ancillary
concerns have created in the United States a national pride predicated on the convergence of patriotism
and a Messianic foreign policy akin to the nineteenth-century European quest for
Empirea national pride, then, that invariably is committed to the
proliferation of anti-Arab racism because without that racism, its
existence has no justification (and its practitioners no ideological
certainty). We can invoke what may by now be a truism to substantiate this argument: racism is inscribed profoundly in
the very idea of foreign settlement and plays out gruesomely where it
actually occurs. Given this truism, American economic and philosophical support for Israels settlement of the Occupied Territories calls into question the United
States commitment to human rights and further implicates it for never having adequately confronted its own history of settlement and dispossession. Anti-Arab
racism, therefore, is anything but marginal in the United States; rather, it supplies the
United States with a moral validation of manifest manners, and, in turn,
converges with numerous phenomena many Americans would consider neutral and mundane (e.g., foreign
policy, ethnic profiling, neoliberalism, end times theories ).
Indeed, I would argue
IslamophobiaIslamophobia Indict
Islamophobia precludes a localized analysiswe should
conceptualize racism and imperialism as an American
phenomenon
Islamophobia, on the other hand, has ambiguities that limit its clarity. Not all victims
of Islamophobia are Muslim, and while fear of Muslims, as the words suffix implies,
certainly inspires hatred of them in some cases, we must take much more
into account historically in order to accurately delineate a context for the
hatred. Islamophobia, while a useful descriptor for specific phenomena such as the dispensationalist (Christian Zionist) demonization of Islam as a faith,
is necessarily a transnational utterance and precludes, albeit unintentionally, a localized
analysis of discrete interethnic encounters. For instance, while Indonesians and Palestinians are both largely Sunni
Muslim communities, their geopolitical and interpersonal encounters with the United States and other Western powers are remarkably dissimilar; insofar as those encounters contributed
in describing that stereotyping as

Islamophobia we reduce the encounters to a homogenized framework that
might well ignore the fact that a transatlantic Holy Land mania induced a
fascination among Americans with the restoration of Palestine to Gods
chosen people. This Holy Land mania seems to me a more productive way
to determine how racism is created and disseminated than eking out in
limited intellectual space a theory of misrepresentation based solely on
imperialistic desire. While imperialistic desire often is at play in both
stereotyping and racism, localized particularities usually determine how
the imperialistic desire will evolve. And when we conceptualize this desire
as an American phenomenon, we are compelled to assess racism as an
institution in North America and then to assess how immigration,
Messianism, imperialism, capitalism, dispensationalism, and foreign policy
affect the development not of an encounter, but of a tradition.
to the stereotyping of Muslims (and it is impossible to see how they have not),
IslamophobiaKhwaly Indict
Khwalys methodology is bad
Carol Khawly (2004) of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee [ADC] writes, The
horrific terrorist attacks of September 11 have had a severe impact on our
nations traditional openness to immigrants and non-immigrants.
Immediately after the attacks, the Arab-American community and those
immigrants from the Arab or Muslim worlds experienced an
unprecedented backlash in the form of hate crimes, discrimination and various civil liberties violations. . . . The [American]
government also instituted a series of discriminatory policies and
administrative measures, which targeted specific immigrant communities
in the United States, mainly the ArabAmerican and South Asian communities. (Khawly 2004, 42) Khawlys report is
useful materially, but poorly conceived methodologically. While acts of
discrimination against Arabs and South Asians (among others)
undoubtedly increased after 9/11, we fail to identify the scope of the
problem by employing public relations gambits that assess discrimination
solely in the context of the event that induced it. A better approach will
question the nations traditional openness to immigrants and nonimmigrants and the purportedly unprecedented backlash Khawly condemns.
About the effects of 9/11 on Arab Americans,
IslamophobiaOrientalism Indict
Orientalism cant describe the lived experiences of Arab
Americans
In examining a multivalent bigotry toward Arabs and the role of Arab Americans in the proliferation of that bigotry, my wariness about the term Orientalism is pragmatic whereas my
Orientalism has been remarkably useful as a

descriptive critique of phenomena ranging from misconceptions about
Arabs to foolhardy foreign policy, and has seen its use (quite justifiably) increase among Arab Americans in the post-9/11 United States.
The term, however, is weighted with considerable theoretical and
historical baggage, rendering it, at least in some intellectual circles,
oblique or ambivalent. Given its layered connotations and the controversies over its
denotation, we can sense in its usage the potential for slippage or a
rhetorical imprecision borne of a correspondingly ambivalent or oblique
authorial/oratorical intention. Most important, though, Orientalism isnt entirely
appropriate when we consider the effects of stereotype and bigotry on
Arab Americans, who, in a much different way than their brethren in the Arab World, need to be located in a
particular tradition of which they have been a partial inheritor. That
tradition, uniquely American, includes the internment of Japanese Americans during
World War II, institutionalized anti-Semitism until the 1960s, and a
peculiarly durable xenophobia spanning decades, with, at times,
acculturated immigrant groups directing it at newer arrivals. This tradition, of course, has as its
wariness about the term Islamophobia is philosophical.
partial inspiration a corresponding tradition, that of garrison settlement, slavery, and Messianic fervor, a tradition that has evolved into detectable features of modern Americana that,
unlike immigrant histories, do in some way affect Middle Eastern Arabs. This corresponding tradition has inspired the premillennialist overtones so evident in American foreign policy.
IslamophobiaOtherization
America has always demonized the Otheritll be used to
justify bad foreign policies
The vigilantly
synthetic American consciousness would, in its present form, be impossible without the
by now tired strategy of demonizing the Otherin this case Arabs, all of
whom, according to the totalized pronoun usage common in the United States,
are terrorists. On the other hand, the painstakingly manufactured images of an
innately terroristic Arab world would be impossible without the
dialogically opposed images of all-American communities, which
increasingly are being defined according to attitude and behavior rather than simply by
ethnicity (although the whiteness underlying this imagery has, by no means,
dissipated). Where, then, do Arab Americans fit in this transglobal dialectic?
Simply stated, nowhere. For this reason, Arab Americans are the exemplars of globalized disaggregation. Arab American disaggregation facilitates
anti-Arab racism, for politicians invoke Arab Americans to justify draconian legislation
intended to curtail civil liberties, but simultaneously to extol the American
values that mystify imperialism in the Arab world. If we trace anti-Arab racism to the settlement of the New
World, however, we are confronted with more than disaggregation and unstable dialectics. We are in the presence of tradition.
This particular tradition has survived over 500 years and regenerates
itself despite repeated predictions of its extinction because racism has
always been fundamental to the survival of the American polity. The
United States has advanced to the stage at which anti-Arab racism most
expediently facilitates the invention and fulfillment of a corporatized
national interest. It bears mention that George W. Bush would not have won reelection
in 2004 without the existence of anti-Arab racism, and that his opponent, John Kerry, attempted vigorously to
The Arab American community fits into these complicated equations with more immediacy than foreign Arabs and non-Arab Americans.
compete by manufacturing his own version of anti-Arab racism vis--vis the issues of civil liberties, foreign policy, and Israels settlement of the occupied territories. That Bushs
anti-Arab racism rarely was mentioned and Kerrys virtually unseen underscores the fact that it is prevalent to the degree
of normalcy today in American society. Indeed, the interests of United States corporations in the Arab world contribute
significantly to the globalized economic models that render most sectors of the American left and right complicit in the dissemination of anti-Arab racism
The racist underpinnings of society lead to the demonization of

The Arabrace-based analysis is key
Since 9/11, patriotism in the United States has been defined in the public
sphere as acquiescence to geopolitical interests masquerading as moral
imperatives. In turn, most Americans who would consider themselves patriotic
formulate the mores of their national identification in opposition to the
sanctified mirage of Arab barbarity. The Arab is an ethnic icon
manufactured painstakingly in the United States since the nineteenth century, an icon that was
expedited into political eminence after 9/11. The Arab thus exists both
consciously and unconsciously in the philosophical contradictions evident
in notions of American exceptionalism and its exclusionary reality . Likewise,

Arabs in the United States have inherited a peculiar history of exclusionary selfimaging developed during hundreds of years of dispossession and ethnic
cleansing in North America that gathered further momentum from within
the institutions of slavery, segregation, and an especially resilient antiimmigration mentality. In theorizing anti-Arab racism as something of a corrective to, or even a replacement for, Orientalism and Islamophobia, I am
tasked with examining potential weaknesses or inadequacies of those terms, in many ways a monumental task outside the purview of my methodology. Yet I would be remiss not to focus
in some way on the philosophical spaces Arabs either inhabit or are imagined to inhabit in order to locate a context for the justification of a revised terminology in contemplating the
interaction of Arabism and Americanaor, to be more precise, the essentialization or frequent misrepresentation of Arabism by Americana. This focus speaks to the title I have chosen
the media
treatment of Arabs in the United States has gone beyond Orientalism and
Islamophobia, and we preclude ourselves from understanding that
treatment sufficiently unless we examine how racism alternately informs
and inspires it. (Beyond also expresses a hope that American society will supersede its negative mentalities, no matter what we name them.) Such an approach
intends to name a longstanding phenomenon, anti-Arab racism, and situate it in analyzable frameworks that traverse disciplinary constraints . I am not arguing,
then, for the elimination of Orientalism or Islamophobia, but for their
subsumation into discussions that consciously explore how racism, with its
multiple sociohistorical connotations, influences Arab America and the
development of an Arab American critical apparatus. Because of my methodology and rather narrow focus, I
for this essay, because to some degree the preposition beyond, which can be read forthrightly as advocating replacement, is both descriptive and accusative:
will forego polemical assertions as well as systematic presentation of the unfortunate wealth of examples of anti-Arab racism in various American media. I will assume that the scholarly,
multiethnic audience I am addressing is aware of the attitude I call anti-Arab racism and is able to detect it regularly without my guidance. Instead, I would like to give analysis to this
racism and explore what it tells us about the United States, why it is so easily reinvented and marketed as responsible, and, most important, how we might effectively name it. I privilege
anti-Arab racism for the simple reason that it is so infrequently named in both
academic discourse and popular culture. And, despite the obvious existence of a bigotry against Arabs in the United States
the naming of
based on historical circumstance and geopolitical necessity, it is not as easy as it appears to apply the term anti-Arab racism to the phenomenon because of other historical
circumstances: the inscription of the term Orientalism into scholarly and activist vocabularies and the popularity of Islamophobia as a descriptor for bigotry against Arabs and Muslims in
Britain and the United States. Orientalism is used to describe the study in the West of the Orient, particularly the Arab World, a field whose most famous scholar, Bernard Lewis, still
argues that the term should be considered descriptive of intellectual pursuit rather than prejudicial. The late Edward Said, of course, interrogated the term in his book of the same name
a plethora of Orientalists had created a stereotyped image of the

East in order to better manage it, thus provoking a connotative
transformation in which Orientalism came to be synonymous with
stereotype, misrepresentation, and essentialism. Islamophobia , on the other hand, is a less
historically loaded word, having achieved some popularity after 9/11, particularly in Britain, where it has become part of colloquial
parlance. Roughly speaking, Islamophobia is to Muslims what anti-Semitism is to Jews, an irrational dislike of individuals or communities based on their religious origin; or, if
and illustrated how
this definition is deemed too positivistic, we can define Islamophobia as the systematic marginalization by non-Muslims of Muslim individuals or communities based on Islamic practices,
We might also identify hate crimes, profiling (at

airports and elsewhere), and institutionalized discrimination as elements of
Islamophobia.
Muslim identities, or ethnic features deemed synonymous with religious observance.
Arab Americans were always already being otherizedtheyre

used to justify imperialist policies
Anti-Arab racism, for example, is fundamental to American race relations. Seven years before
9/11, Ronald Stockton surveyed archetypes of the Arab image in cartoons and other examples of popular culture and concluded that an exceptional
proportion of all hostile or derogatory images targeted at Arabs are
derived from or are parallel to classical images of Blacks and Jews,
modified to fit contemporary circumstances (1994, 121). Based on Stocktons argument that anti-Arab racism is
derivative, it would be foolish to conceptualize anti-Arab racism as a byproduct
of 9/11. A more responsible conceptualization will locate anti-Arab racism
within a heterogeneous and multitemporal complex of historical factors,
although it is clear that 9/11 stratified preexisting attitudes about Arabs (both
positive and negative), thereby transforming Arab Americans into discursive tropes invoked
to justify various political agendas. For leftist liberals and multiculturalists, 9/11 provided an opportunity to refer to violence against
Arabs (and those identified mistakenly as Arab) in order to argue for inclusiveness and tolerance and later to argue for the less admirable cause of electing Democratic presidential
conservatives, particularly neoconservatives, invoked 9/11 as

evidence of Arab perfidy and later as evidence of the need to retain
George W. Bush to protect us from themgiven the context, them
is a chilling pronoun spoken inevitably without nuance or modification,
acting as the epistemic Other employed to define the White, Christian
us. We would be foolish to construe as newfangled this sort of xenophobic hysteria denoting a supposedly vanquished racism. Nor is it particularly wise to attribute it to a rightwing lunatic fringe. Democrats during the 2004 elections also pandered to Americans fear of Arabs. The attacks on 9/11 provided an
ostensibly empirical pretext to legitimize antiArab racism, but in no way
did 9/11 actually create anti-Arab racism; 9/11 merely validated it.
candidate John Kerry, himself a purveyor of anti-Arab racism. On the other hand,
Arab Americans are identified as the irrational Other

In Wisconsin, a so-called battleground state inundated with campaign ads, the most
egregious case of anti-Arab racism arose in a television spot for
Republican Senate candidate Tim Michels (who subsequently lost to the anti-racist Russ Feingold). The
commercial depicted a generic Arab, with the requisite snarl topped by a
mustache, standing on a hill in a wooded area, fishing a rocket propeller
from a duffel bag and aiming it at some sort of nuclear plant. Meanwhile,
the ominous voiceover warns viewers about the dangers of terrorism and
the threat they will pose if we do not strengthen the provisions of the
PATRIOT Act that allow for unwarranted searches, intensive surveillance,
and indefinite detention. I mention this commercial not simply because of its blatant (albeit cartoonish) anti-Arab racism, but because in it
Michels focused specifically on Arab Americans, not overseas Arabs, by
invoking the PATRIOT Act and depicting what is supposed to be an Arab
American attacking, for no discernible reason, an apparently important
facility. The Arab American, in other words, will endanger real Americans because his congenital
barbarity compels him to irrational violence. Furthermore, the totalized pronoun
they is exclusionary and imbues American-ness with assumed criteria of
whiteness and Christianity for which Arabs do not qualify, even if they are
residents or citizens of the United States (the stock terrorist in the ad obviously is a resident or citizen of the United States, because if he is
One particular example illuminates my first observation.
not, Michelss support of the controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act would be meaningless). The commercial also involves a physical performance that is worth analysis. It would be
devoid of both moral and rhetorical force without the audiences recognition that the protagonist is Arab; the recognition is even more persuasive if the protagonist is identified as Arab
the means by
which a nonspecific audience recognizes the generic protagonist as Arab is
particularly noteworthy, for it flirts, to some degree, with biological
determinism, if not advocating it directly. Certain physical characteristics are associated
iconically with an invented Arab ethnicity and its constituents innate
behavioral pathology (in this case, terrorism). The generic terrorist can
thus be identified as Arab without being named.
American, an ethnic positioning that reinforces an inside but alien binary essential to the dissemination of contemporary anti-Arab racism. Yet
IslamophobiaPatriotism Link
Patriotism is used as a mask for Anti-Arab violence
Anti-Arab racism now is symbiotic with geopolitics. The mythos of national

pride generated by American politicians and marketed as a peculiarly
violent patriotism would lose its rhetorical power without the
manufacturing of a fear of the irrationally hostile Arab. Although
geopolitics has always played a crucial role in both the creation and
justification of various forms of American racism, it is more explicitly at
play in the legitimization of anti-Arab racism after 9/11. In fact, antiArab racism
gained a moral validation the moment the American capitalist system
came into contact with the resources of the Arab world, just as that racism grew out of a longstanding
xenophobia the moment the first Arab arrived in North America. Anouar Majid points out how this economic
activity often manifests itself philosophically , writing, The well-meaning
journalists and scholars who think that capitalism is the solution to
extremism are in fact prescribing the wrong medication. Capitalism, or its
dominant euphemism, globalization, is what produces extremism (2004, 15758). He
further illustrates that globalized paradigms for transcultural interchange fail if we do
not challenge the very assumptions on which those paradigms generate
their authority: Yet not to challenge globalization is to nourish the
conditions for more violence and terror, not simply along the fault lines of
cultures and religions, but across the entire globe and within all nations
(2004, 158). This argument, increasingly common in analyses of American racism, attempts to be a corrective to what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls the imperial imagination (1999, 22).
Smith notes that the development of a

majoritarian identity can only occur through the marginalization of
minorities, an opportunity that Arabs have endowed white Americans in the United States historically and that Arab Americans endow patriotic Americans today;11
Drawing from Frantz Fanons notion of the mutual construction of identity,
Anti-Arab discourse reproduces itself through patriotic

rhetoric
Leitchs argument, convincing on its own, adopts an interesting element when we render it mobile, as we are able to do when contemplating the origin and evolution of anti-Arab racism.
anti-Arab racism has pervaded the very discourse of national

fulfillment in the United States; as such, it has become a disaggregated
institution, or a series of institutions, at play sometimes subtly but often explicitlyin a host of
purportedly tangible certainties, such as patriotism, religious devotion,
and the national interest. Since I believe that anti-Arab racism is indispensable to
those who disseminate it (on both the right and left), it would be unwise to homogenize its
indispensability by attributing it solely to, say, Christian Zionists, when all
available evidence suggests that it tacitly recreates itself in countless
discourses focused in some way on patriotic obligation . In this sense, the
disaggregation underlying anti-Arab racism bespeaks a remarkable
I would argue that
versatility. At the very least, anti-Arab racism is common, and in its commonplaces we
are faced with the totality of all that is fundamentally American.
IslamophobiaStereotypes Bad
Stereotyping hurts Arabs
Anti-Arab racism sometimes has the ability to reduce Arabs to tropes that
are invoked to rationalize or mystify various political agendas. In todays globalized
marketplace (of both finances and ideas), Arabs often hold an irresistible appeal to those wishing
to disguise their own interests as pragmatism or construe them as
universally beneficial. This situation has produced contradictory narratives that
cannot be comprehended without simultaneously considering the scope
and function of anti-Arab racism. If, for instance, a company stands to profit from
the occupation of Iraq, that company likely will support the occupation
and rationalize the support as commonsensical or altruistic. In so doing, it will either
directly or obliquely foster anti-Arab racism. If the same company, however, stands to
profit from normalized American relations with the dictatorial Saudi royal
family (which is the case with Boeing, Halliburton, Bechtel, ExxonMobil,
and numerous other corporations), then that company likely will
romanticize or favorably stereotype Arabs and correspondingly rationalize
such portrayals as commonsensical or altruistic. This favorable
stereotyping also fosters anti-Arab racism either directly or obliquely
IslamophobiaTravel Narratives Link

Travel narratives are bad stereotyping
Anti-Arab racism, like all sociopolitical phenomena, is also unique, having developed its
discrete qualities based on what Hilton Obenzinger (1999) calls a Holy Land mania in the nineteenth century,
inspired by the travelogues of Protestant missionaries and writers such as Mark Twain, John Lloyd Stephens, William M. Thompson, and George Sandys. Travel
narratives to the Arab world have long been tainted by stereotypes
inscribed methodologically into supposedly neutral anecdotes of
discovery, methodologies still apparent in travel narratives by Geraldine
Brooks, Judith Miller, David Pryce-Jones, Jean Sasson, and , infamously, Norma
Khouri, the con artist whose tale of an honor killing in Jordan enthralled Western readers until journalist Rana Husseini discovered that Khouris bestselling Honor Lost was a
hoax. These stereotypes, in the nineteenth century and today, merely fulfill the stereotyped expectations
of American readers, indicating that the audiences role in the travel
narrative is as crucial as the foreign topographies transmitted to the
audience by a mythically curious adventurer. Historically, this adventurer writes
his audiences expectations onto the places he is discovering on the
audiences behalf. As Steve Clark notes, Travel reference is to do with worldcoherence: the book projects a world,
and it is the ethics of inhabiting that alternative domain that are primarily
at stake (1999, 2);
IslamophobiaUniversalism Bad
Universalist ethics are bad
Despite their
belief in the social grounding of ideas, many intellectuals are not willing to
abandon the notion of a human subject capable of knowing, acting upon
and changing reality. But innocence and objectivity do not necessarily
have to be our enabling fictions. The more we work with an awareness of
our embeddedness in historical processes, the more possible it becomes
to take carefully reasoned oppositional positions . . . (1998, 66). In a slightly different framework, Satya P.
Mohanty suggests that we need to be wary of those overly abstract universalist visions
of morality or social justice which focus on only the most general features
that the various social groups (or individuals) have in common and
exclude consideration of relevant particularities, relevant contextual
information (1997, 235). Loomba and Mohanty both theorize the possibility of meaningful social
critique despite the deterritorialization of meaning wrought by Western
postmodernism and poststructuralism, a possibility both authors believe to be viable if
advocates of meaningful social critique engage the totality of historical
movements rather than enabling notions of disinterestedness or
objectivity.
Ania Loomba has made some useful comments on the probity of comprehensive historical analysis. In Colonialism/Postcolonialism, she writes,
2ACQueerness
QueernessSurveillance
The queer body is particularly susceptible to surveillance
Conrad 09 (Kathryn Conrad, Nothing to Hide Nothing to Fear: Discriminatory Surveillance and Queer
and Michael ORourke. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009.)
The significance of surveillance resonates with the history and politics of queer people,
queer theory, and queer methodologies, since surveillance is part of a
system of power that, among other things, shapes subjectivity , as Michel Foucault (1979)
has argued, and normalises, as Michael Warner (2000) has argued . Surveillance
has been engaged, for instance, to monitor people with HIV and AIDS, to
police the spaces in which dissident sexual behaviour occurs, and to
expose the non-normative private sexual practices of those who have fought publicly against gay marriage.
Surveillance also intersects with visibility/exposure, simultaneously a goal
of the minority-rights activism that has included queer sexualities as well
as a fear of many who find themselves outside of the sexual mainstream."
"
Surveillance normalizes deviant bodies and imposes selfregulation

surveillance technologies seem to have become a commonplace for

many who are regularly subjected to them, fading into the background
and out of the consciousness of most people unless they are confronted with them directly (as when and if, for
instance, they are arrested). But the Foucauldian thesis, as I will suggest, may be more
applicable to those for whom the notion of visibility is already charged:
that is, those who fall outside the realm of the normative and who are
thus more likely to be sensitive to the possibility of exposure . The practice of
surveillance, as I will suggest, normalises visibility, which in turn helps to
shape and reinforce the very narratives of normality and the spaces in
which normative and non-normative behaviour is allowed; and
participating in those narratives of normality can be, as Warner suggests
in The Trouble with Normal (2000), particularly attractive to the alreadymarginalised in this case, both queer and Northern Irish subjects more generally. Predictably, surveillance impacts the
already-marginalised more heavily, as we will see; but I will also suggest that the self-regulation
that emerges from surveillance, the pressure toward normalisation,
creates a kind of cultural inertia that facilitates the shrinkage of the space
"Indeed,
both literal and figurative for challenges to surveillance practices. "
Non normative behavior pushes against the unidirectional

moral imperatives that surveillance reinforces
it is almost as though operators construct a map

of moral progress through the streets which is unidirectional. People of
"Perhaps the most striking analysis is their observation that
good moral character know where they are going and proceeded to their
destination without signs of deviation (1999, 144). This phrasing resonates with
the notion of queer, particularly insofar as queer invokes a path that is not straight, in several senses of the word. When seeking to engage in queer
sexual behaviour, a person may not follow a straight path in the most literal sense as well, inviting surveillance regardless of the legality of the behaviour as s/he attempts to cruise,
Non-normative behaviour, however

legal, is more visible than normative behaviour, and precipitates
surveillance. Once begun, surveillance piques interest and fills the human need for story and, like all of us, operators like to know the end of the story even if it has
make eye contact and engage in other codes, often unspoken, that will enable a connection.
a happy ending (1999, 132). But the storys beginning the impetus for surveillance is shaped by previous stories, and the necessarily incomplete nature of surveillance encourages
the surveillers to draw on previous experiences and assumptions to complete the story. The comments Norris and Armstrong make about narrative highlight the fact that those who
surveil and act on surveillance must fill in the epistemological gaps provided by surveillance, which only provides, often quite literally, part of the picture"
Surveillance is targeted towards gay menbeing hyper-visible

leads to violence against the queer body
Activism is, of course, a way to bring visibility to a group or issue, a way of entering the public sphere of civil society. Visibility, however, is a double-edged sword. From the late 1970s
until well into the new century and the rise of new, more inclusive policing initiatives, there was an increase in police activity against popular gay cruising and cottaging spots in
Belfast gay newsletters like Gay Star and Upstart regularly ran
articles warning men who had sex with men about police surveillance
activities and informing them of their rights when arrested. Decriminalisation was, in other
words, not the end to the problems facing men who had sex with men: according to an Autumn 1996 article in Upstart, t here was a significant
increase in murders of gay men, even if they participate in it: the push toward privatisation
has been the norm (2000, 167-8). A celebration of the normality of gay citizens has meant
the marginalisation of any public discussion of a public sexual culture ; from
approximately one per year in the 1970s and 80s to a startling four per year in the 1990s. Police surveillance was focused on
men who had sex with men, in other words, not on violent gay-bashing.
For this reason, surveillance is a potentially charged issue in the gay
community. Violence remains a risk as the gay community becomes even
more visible, both through sanctioned channels (e.g., Pride parades, which garner enthusiastic onlookers and some protest in Northern Ireland; the recent legalisation
Northern Ireland. 9
of civil partnerships for lesbians and gays; and the recent legalisation of adoption by lesbian and gay couples) and illicit channels (e.g., public sex and the subsequent publicity of
arrests). The out gay community in particular has a vexed relationship with the illicit practice of cottaging: although some out gay men participate in cottaging and other public sexual
activity, it is also the site wherein men who might not be part of the gay community have sex with other men men who often have access to less information and fewer resources
about sex, and who may either chose to identify themselves sexually in ways that do not fit the normal heterosexual/homosexual binary, or who engage in such activities through lack
of access to more socially-acceptable channels. These men are a group whose practices we might aptly term queer: sexually dissident and, intentionally or not, challenging the
unspoken assumptions on which the current sexual culture is based. As Michael Warner notes, the gay community in the United States, particularly in New York, has not been eager to
articulate and support a public sexual culture instead, it has been abandoned, along with those who participate in it. Visibility, it seems, comes at a price"
QueernessWalter Jenkins
The internalization of the US public reaction to Walter Jenkins
arrest is indicative of a larger problem with modern
relationships between the queer community and surveillance
by the state
absences in surveillance studies are themselves instructive . They

suggest the challenges inherent in analysing a discourse that relies as
much on containment and secrecy (e.g., military surveillance, informers, secret footage) as it does on
visible signs (the surveillance camera, the CCTV warning sign) for its effectiveness. But one often under-analysed aspect of surveillance is
the media itself. As Lee Edelman notes in his analysis of the U.S. public reactions to the
arrest of Walter Jenkins, President Lyndon Johnson's chief of staff, in a
YMCA bathroom and the subsequent charges of indecent gestures, the
media itself foster[s] an internalisation of the repressive supervisory
mechanisms of the State (1994, 156); in other words, the media is a
technology of surveillance and, I would suggest, a technology that extends beyond the state, which, as many surveillance studies critics have
noted, is by no means the only user of surveillance technologies. The significance of the media in surveillance is
further supported by Bell, who notes that the media not only helps to
create the fear of crime, terrorism, and moral panic in this sense, I might
suggest that the media as surveillance technology helps to perpetuate the
conditions that justify its use, creating a kind of feedback loop or circuit of
both desire and fear that embeds surveillance more completely into our
culture"
"These
2ACGender
GenderGeneral
Surveillance and space is gendered
Koskela 00 (Hille, professor of human geography and surveillance studies, The gaze without eyes: videosurveillance and the changing nature of urban space, sage journals,
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/24/2/243.full.pdf, mew)
the places where surveillance most often occurs are, as mentioned above,
the shopping malls and the shopping areas of city centres and, likewise, areas of public
transport (such as underground stations, railway stations and busy bus stops). The people who usually negotiate
and decide upon surveillance are the management: managers of shopping malls, leading politicians, city
mayors, etc. Furthermore, the people who maintain surveillance are the police and private
guards. From this it is possible to draw some conclusions about the gender
structure of surveillance. Women spend more time shopping than men, and
everyday purchases are mostly bought by women (Reeves, 1996: 138). The majority of
the users of public transport are women (Hill, 1996; Kaartokallio, 1997). Thus women quite often
occupy the typical places of surveillance. By contrast, those in charge of
deciding on surveillance are usually men. More importantly, those who maintain
surveillance (the police and guards) are also mostly men. Thus, at the simplest level,
surveillance is, indeed, gendered: most of the people behind the cameras
are men and most of the people under surveillance are women. However, there are other,
In public and semi-public space,
more complicated features, of this gender structure. In the world of surveillance the masculine culture of technology (Wajcman, 1991) is reproduced in the masculine interiors of
monitoring rooms as well as in the recruitment of guards for their physical strength and for their tall, muscular appearance rather than suitable schooling or their ability to cope with
women do not rely on those behind the

cameras because the guards and the police responsible for the daily
routine of surveillance reproduce patriarchal forms of power. Surveillance
is interpreted as part of male policing in the boardest sense (Brown, 1998: 217). To
people. The cop culture (e.g., Fyfe, 1995) is producing mistrust of surveillance:
understand the ways in which the power-space of surveillance is gendered, we need to specify the dimensions of the visual of the gaze
Surveillance perpetuates violence, ethical responsibility to

vote aff
space as a container can be disorientating and

alienating. First, what causes most mistrust about the technical ability of a camera is that a camera mainly operates backwards: it is designed to solve crime rather than
to prevent it. However, the benefits of surveillance should lie in its ability to respond to
a crime (Oc and Tiesdell, 1997: 138) but, for a victim of violence, the help proffered by a
camera may come too late. In the case of an attack, it might be possible to
use the videotape to catch the offender(s), and to use the tape as
evidence in court, but this response would not erase the actual experience
of violence. This is a particularly serious drawback in relation to sexual violence. The prevention of sexual assault is
of much greater importance than any reaction to it, and women have
clearly indicated that this inability is a crucial reason for their mistrust of
videosurveillance (Koskela, 2000). Secondly, even if the camera seems to look down from above, the camera itself has no eyes. Its lens is blind unless
For several reasons, for people under surveillance, I would argue,
someone is looking through it. Similarly, a cameras location gives no indication of where the people behind the camera are situated. There is no personal contact between the security
personnel and the public. One does not know whether anyone is looking and, if so, who that person is or how far away he or she is. One does not even know whether that person is
above or below. Surveillance cameras have been considered as being literally above (Fyfe and Bannister, 1998): they survey from above the crowd, from up there. But quite often this
is not the case. The camera seems to be looking at people from above but the monitoring room may be, for example, in the basement of a shopping mall where premises are cheaper
(Koskela, 1995).
This makes it very difficult to ask for help through the agency of the
camera the camera leaves its object entirely as an object: passive,

without any ability to influence the situation.2
Surveillance is gendered
Koskela, 02 (Hille, professor of human geography and surveillance studies Video Surveillance, Gender,
and the Safety of Public Urban Space: "Peeping Tom" Goes High Tech?, Urban Geography,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2747/0272-3638.23.3.257, mew)
However, there are also other more complicated features of gender

structures. Beyond the positions that women and men occupy are
gendered social practices. Women are constantly reminded that an
invisible observer is a threat. In crime prevention advice, for example, women are recommended to
keep their curtains tightly closed whenever it might be possible for
someone outside could see inside (Gardner, 1995). This potential observer is
presented as male. In addition, video surveillance is sometimes
interpreted as a part of male policing in the broadest sense (Brown, 1998, p. 217).
The masculine culture of those who are in control is causing mistrust
toward surveillance: women do not rely on those behind the camera
because of the reproduction of patriarchal power by the guards and the
police who are responsible for the daily routine of surveillance (e.g., Wajcman, 1991; Fyfe,
1995; Herbert, 1996). Furthermore, surveillance in practice is insensitive to issues that would
be of particular importance to women. Video is unable to identify situations where a sensitive interpretation of a social situation is
needed. Namely, the overseers responsible for surveillance easily remark on clearly seen but otherwise minor offenses, such as someone smoking a cigarette in a metro station, while
Most cameras are unable

to interpret threatening situations, which are not visually recognizable,
and cases of harassment are therefore left without notice. In some cases
video surveillance is used as a replacement for personal policing. By using
a surveillance camera sexual harassment is more difficult to identify and
to interrupt than by the police or guards patrolling by foot . Alcohol related disturbances are also
ignoring more serious situations which they regard as ambivalentsuch as verbal sexual harassment (Koskela, 2000a).
often not considered to be serious enough to be interrupted by the overseers. Hence, as Sheila Brown (1998, p. 218) writes, CCTV cannot change the general intimidation, verbal
harassment, staring, and drunken rowdiness amongst groups of men which constrains womens movement most strongly.
GenderMale Gaze
The gaze genders the nature of surveillance because of the
power relationships between the surveiller and the surveilled,
leading to sexual objectification and harassment
since video-surveillance usually reduces everything to the

visual, it is unable to identify situations where more sensitive
interpretation is needed. For example, surveillance overseers can easily observe
clearly visible but otherwise minor offences while ignoring situations they
might regard as ambivalent, such as (verbal) sexual harassment (Koskela, 2000). Most
cameras are unable to interpret threatening situations that are not visually recognizable, and therefore cases of harassment often go unnoticed. Sexual
harassment is more difficult to identify, and to interrupt, by surveillance
camera than by the police/guards patrolling on foot. This insensitivity of
the cameras i.e., restriction within the field of vision is an important reason for doubt and
disorientation. The gaze becomes gendered.7 This failure could be understood as a passive relationship between
surveillance and harassment, but there is more to surveillance than this. There is a dimension that could be
understood as an active relationship between surveillance and
harassment. By this I mean it is possible to use surveillance cameras as a
means of harassment. There is some voyeuristic fascination in looking, in
being able to see. And scrutiny is a common and effective form of
harassment (Gardner, 1995). In urban space women are the ones likely to be looked
at the objects of the gaze (Massey, 1994: 234).8 Furthermore, one of the very reasons
for womens insecurity is their exaggerated visibility (Brown, 1998: 218). Paradoxically, women are
marginalized by being at the centre (of the looks) (cf. Rose, 1993). As used by an abuser, a look can be as
effective a weapon as physical violence: [p]ower and the gaze are always
linked in the mind of the intimidated (MacCannell and MacCannell, 1993: 215). Looking connotates
power, and being looked at powerlessness. Harassment makes the gaze
reproduce the embodiment and sexualization of women. Video-surveillance and the changing nature
As has already been argued,
of urban space Although there is not a great deal of published research on the gendered aspects of surveillance, the points made here can be supported by empirical evidence. It has
been shown that there is public concern about the potential Peeping Tom element (Honess and Charman, 1992: 9), that women are worried about possible voyeurism (Trench, 1997:
In addition, there is
anecdotal evidence of the camera abuse. Hillier (1996: 99100) describes the case of Burswood Casino in Australia, where
the security camera operators had videotaped women in toilets and artists
changing rooms, zooming in on the exposed parts of their bodies and
editing the video sequences on to one tape that was shown at local house
parties. In like manner, in the summer of 1997 it was discovered that Swedish conscript
solders had been entertaining themselves by monitoring topless women
on a beach near their navy base, taping the women and printing pictures
of them to hang on the barrack walls (Helsingin Sanomat, 17 December 1997). The cameras used were of extremely high quality
and, hence, the pictures were quite explicit. These cases (the latter now being investigated as a crime) are glaring examples of the
possibility of the masculinization and militarization of space, of the
gendering of surveillance and of the abuse of control. Furthermore,
surveillance does not replace or erase other forms of embodiment: women
still encounter sexual harassment and objectifying attitudes in their face149; Brown, 1998: 218), and that cameras positioned in places of an intimate nature irritate women (Koskela, 2000).
to-face contacts in urban space. Surveillance might be a way of

reproducing and reinforcing male power. It is opening up new possibilities
for harassment (Ainley, 1998: 92). Surveillance can be understood as the reembodiment of women, as an extension of male gaze . It has been suggested that more knowledge is
needed about how disciplinary power operates in connection with other tools of class and gender oppression (Hannah, 1997a: 179). Arguably, the practice of
surveillance could contribute to perpetuating the existing imbalance in
gender relations, rather than challenging it. The powerspace is gendered.
Surveillance is inherently tied to the male gazewe should

take an approach that accounts for sexuality and gender
Dubrofsky and Magnet 15 (Rachel, Associate Professor in the Departments of Humanities &
A feminist approach to surveillance studies highlights the ways that surveillance is integral to many of our foundational structural systems, ones that breed disenfranchisement, and that
In an extension of Bell Hooks's notion of "white supremacist

capitalist patriarchy" (hooks 1997), we suggest the (clumsy, but illustrative) term white
supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal surveillance": the use of
surveillance practices and technologies to normalize and maintain
whiteness, able-bodiedness, capitalism, and heterosexuality, practices
integral to the foundation of the modern state. Smith's contribution to this collection reminds that while
the modern bureaucratic state is often the focus of surveillance studies,
the surveillance of native peoples is a key foundational strategy of
colonialism: technologies of surveillance were integral to settler
colonialism. Smith calls for the centering of an anticolonial feminist analysis within the field of surveillance studies, as she recounts how the violence
of surveillance through organized settler colonial practices transformed
First Peoples into racialized communities, thus facilitating the
bureaucratically managed rape of indigenous people, making them
"rapeable." State surveillance practices, which we might simply call state practices (since surveillance is so seamlessly
embedded), are processes that are simultaneously about seeing and not-seeing-that is, some bodies are made invisible, while others are made
hypervisible (see Smith, Moore, Jiwani, and Hall, this volume). The underlying structures of domination
that created the conditions for violence in communities of colorsuch as
the incarceration of indigenous peoples in residential schools or the
institutionalized rape that accompanied slavery are made invisible, while
the cycle of violence that residential schools or that slavery created in
terms of ongoing violence in communities of color are hypervisibilized,
surveilled, and then subject to violent state intervention . As Yasmin Jiwani notes in her essay in this
volume, which looks at how the commercial Canadian media covered the Shafia murders (four Afghan women murdered by family members in Canada), when
violence happens in communities of color, it is understood as ordinary and
expected--people from these communities are configured as always already criminals--whereas violence in white communities is imagined to be exceptional. This
racist imagining of violence as key to communities of color justifies new
forms of surveillance by the state in ways that facilitate the
disproportionate criminalization of communities of color . As Hall notes in her essay on body scanners
continue to be institutionalized.
whiteness is transparent--a racialization that does not require

monitoringwhereas racialized bodies are opaque and therefore suspect .
in airports,
Similarly, Moore's contribution to this volume examines the increasing reliance on a genre of institutional photographyphotographs of battered women--by police in cases involving
battery, under a system of white supremacy. Moore shows that women of color (particularly dark-skinned women) are not revealed through the mechanism of photography, especially
subjecting
female bodies to observation has long been a practice in the United States .
their injuries, in the same way as white women. Laura Hyun Yi Kang's piece in this volume, about the history of anti-trafficking, highlights how
She examines the surveillance of the "differentially stratified mobilities" of women across borders, noting that the surveillance and scrutiny of women immigrating to the United States
bespeaks founding imperialist racialist narratives in the United States. Focusing on trafficking in the League of Nations, Kang asserts that women were simultaneously hailed as objects
and subjects of surveillance. The women were, on one one hand, seen as involved in the policing of other women, but on the other hand, at the borders of the nation where they were
imagined to be trafficked, they were placed under greater surveillance which resulted in racialized sexist scrutiny. As Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Curcah (this volume) show in their
gender and sexuality are inextricably bound to surveillant

practices of documentation. Beginning with the binary system of gender
imposed on babies born on U.S. soil, each of whom must be categorized
and documented as a boy or a girl, living in the modem bureaucratic state
is about the policing of gendered identities . Of course, as Moore and Currah demonstrate, the process
of documenting citizens via birth certificate is not a simple recording of
bodily identities, but a process of surveillance that produces gendered
identities in ways that do both epistemological and ontological violence to
bodies that do not fit the male-female binary. In fact, statistics (including tracking and gathering information about
analysis of the birth certificate,
gender) is intimately tied to the rise of statehood, as states gain the power to govern in part by collecting knowledge about their citizenry (Bowker and Star 1999, 110). Thus, in the
words of the communication theorist Armand Mattelart, "measurement, computing, and recording have been the recurrent traits of the long process of construction of the modem mode
). A feminist approach to surveillance

studies demonstrates how the production of knowledge, when it comes to
vulnerable bodies, is always already bound up with gendered and
sexualized ways of seeing. The essays in part. 1 make clear .that
surveillance practices are actually part of the founding mechanisms of
many nation- states, as well as of the practices used to keep track of the
citizens of these nation-states.
of communication, starting with the first manifestations of 'statistical reason (1996, xvi
2ACIntersectionality
IntersectionalityGeneral
Traditional identity politics fail to note the differences in
groups, which renders women of color invisible
Crenshaw 91 (Kimberle, Professor of civil rights and critical race theory at UCLA, 7/1991, Mapping the
Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1229039.pdf, mew)
The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend

difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite-that it
frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In the context of
violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is
problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women
experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as
race and class. Moreover, ignoring difference within groups contributes to
tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that bears on
efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize
experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of
people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and
experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains.
Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people,
they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the
practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or
proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that
resists telling.
Intersectionality is key to reconcile tensions between

oppressed groups
Crenshaw 91 (Kimberle, Professor of civil rights and critical race theory at UCLA, 7/1991, Mapping the
Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1229039.pdf, mew)
The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of

color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently
pursue conflicting political agendas. The need to split one's political
energies between two sometimes opposing groups is a dimension of
intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women
seldom confront. Indeed, their specific raced and gendered experiences,
although intersectional, often define as well as confine the interests of the
entire group. For example, racism as experienced by people of color who
are of a particular gender-male-tends to determine the parameters of
antiracist strategies, just as sexism as experienced by women who are of
a particular race-white-tends to ground the women's movement. The
problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of color by not
acknowledging the "additional" issue of race or of patriarchy but that the
discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks of articulating
the full dimensions of racism and sexism. Because women of color
experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by
men of color and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of

white women, antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own
terms. Among the most troubling political consequences of the failure of
antiracist and feminist discourses to address the intersections of race and
gender is the fact that, to the extent they can forward the interest of
"people of color" and "women," respectively, one analysis often implicitly
denies the validity of the other. The failure of feminism to interrogate race
means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and
reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism
to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce
the subordination of women. These mutual elisions present a particularly
difficult political dilemma for women of color. Adopting either analysis
constitutes a denial of a fundamental dimension of our subordination and
precludes the development of a political discourse that more fully
empowers women of color.
IntersectionalityBlackness/Gender
The aff cant solve for women of colorit only includes them in
established structures; re-centering structures around the
issue of intersectionality is key
Crenshaw 91 (Kimberle, Professor of civil rights and critical race theory at UCLA, 1991, Demarginalizing
the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics, http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
handle=hein.journals/uchclf1989&div=10&g_sent=1&collection=journals, mew)
This focus on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who
are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as
resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that
this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted
analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race
and sex become grounded in experience that actually represent only a
subset of a much more complex phenomenon. After examining the
doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it
contributes to the marginalization of Black women in feminist theory and
in antiracist politics I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded
from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are
predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately
reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion
cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already
established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is
greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not
take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the
particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for
feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences
and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as
a basis for translating "women's experience" or "the Black experience"
into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast.
Historically, black women have been hypersexualized and

surveilled
Mowat et al 13 (Rasul A., Associate Professor of tourism studies at the University of Indiana
Bloomington, Bryana A. French, Assistant Professor of psychology at the University of St. Thomas, Dominique A.
Malebranche chair at the, Doctorate in counseling psychology, 2013, Black/Female/Body Hypervisibility and
Invisibility: A Black Feminist Augmentation of Feminist Leisure Research, Proquest)
Black female bodies have historically been considered grotesque,

animalistic and unnatural (Carroll, 2000; Gilman, 1985). This is evident in the horrific lived
reality of Sara Baartman a South African woman who lived in the 1800s. While enslaved,
a British doctor described her body shape, including a large buttocks,
genitalia, and breasts, as amusing, inferior, and oversexed (Young 1997). Sara
Baartman was placed on display for paying customers to view her naked
body and became known as the "Hottentot Venus" throughout London and Paris, and her body parts were preserved and
inhumanely kept on public display until 1974. She was finally returned to South Africa in 2002, after Nelson Mandelas
This historical context has had long-standing impacts

on understanding Black women's bodies as hyper sexualized spectacles
for consumption. (e.g., Durham 2012; Harris-Perry 2011)
protests, for a final burial (e.g., Qureshi, 2004).
Biometrics racialize surveillance

Browne 12 (Simone, 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
Current biometric technology converts measurements of the human body

into digitized code, making for unique templates that computers can sort by relying on a
searchable database (on-line or one-to-many identification), or use to verify the identity of the bearer of a
document, like a passport, within which the unique biometric is encoded. The
latter use is termed one-to-one or off-line authentification. Popular biometric surveillance technologies
include iris and retinal scans, facial and vascular patterns, and fingerprint
data. One feature that this technology shares with earlier biometric
technologies like craniometry is that in some instances it is inscribed in
classificatory schemes that see particular biometric systems privileging
whiteness, or tightness, in how certain bodies are lit and measured in the
enrollment process. Some racial groupings have higher fail to enroll (FTE) rates than others. For finger-scan technologies these groups that often FTE are the
elderly, workers who come in contact with caustic chemicals and heavy hand-washing like hospital workers, and those referred to as of Pacific Rim/Asian decent. On this point. Joseph
Pugliese writes, "the Social Darwinian resonances on 'lower quality'

fingerprints must not be ignored, as they paradigmatically situate Asian
bodies on a lower position on that racial hierarchy, constituted,
respectively, by Caucasian, Mongoloid (Asians), and Negroid races " (2005: 8). It is
rarely acknowledged that this notion that certain racialized bodies "fail to
enroll only makes sense when whiteness provides the unspoken standard
against which such groups are compared. Hence, a logic of prototypical
whiteness informs such research, development and practice, digitally
segregating racialized populations. A 2009 publication on "Face Gender Classification on Consumer Images in a Multiethnic
Environment," basically a study that examined how face detection technology could be employed, for example, in shopping mall settings or for digital photosharing applications, makes
the study found that when programmed generically for

"all ethnicities" the gender classifier "is inclined to classify Africans as
males and Mongloids as females" (Gao and Ali 2009: 175). The idea of feminized Asian
males and masculinized African females has its roots in the same
classificatory schemes introduced by proponents of polygenism and
craniometry.
me of archaic racial terminology. In the end,
2ACHuman Rights
Human RightsDiscourse/Epistemology Indict

Liberal human rights movements failanalyses of social
suffering are key
Farmer 04 (Paul Farmer, Anthropologist and Physician, Pathologies of power: Health, human rights, and
the new war on the poor, 2004, Pg. 142)
Liberation theologians are among the few who have dared to under- line,
from the left, the deficiencies of the liberal human rights movement. The
most glaring of these deficiencies emerges from intimate acquaintance
with the suffering of the poor in countries that are signatory to all modern
human rights agreements. When children living in poverty die of measles,
gastroenteritis, and malnutrition, and yet no party is judged guilty of a
human rights violation, liberation theology finds fault with the entire
notion of human rights as defined within liberal democracies . Thus, even before judgment is
rendered, the "observe" part of the formula reveals atrocious conditions as atrocious. The "judge" part of the equation is nonetheless important even if it is, in a Sense, pre-judged. We
something is terribly wrong. They are targets of

structural violence. (Some of the bishops termed this "structural sin.) 12 This is, granted, a priori judgmentbut it is seldom incorrect,
for analysis of social suffering invariably reveals its social origins . It is not primarily
look at the lives of the poor and are Sure, just as they are, that
cataclysms of nature that wreak havoc in the lives Of the Latin American poor:
Human rights discourse is used to justify atrocitiesempirics

prove
Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 06 (Emilie M. HafnerBurton and Kiyoteru Tsutsui 05, Sociology
professor at University of California and Sociology Professor at University of Michigan, Human Rights in a
Globalizing World: The Paradox of Empty Promises, 2005, Print Pg. 3)
This rising gap between states propensity to join the international human
rights regime and to bring their human rights practice into compliance
with that regime challenges the efficacy of international law and questions
the authenticity of states legal commitments to protect the lives of their
citizens. There are many examples. Guatemala ratified its first global human rights treaty
protecting women against discrimination in 1982, a period in which the
government was reported to practice extensive political imprisonment,
execution, and political murder and detention for political views . By 1992, the
government had ratified all six of the most important human right s
treaties
(reviewed in table 1), extending its commitments to protect all citizens from violations of civil, political, economic,
cultural rights
; to insure freedom from torture and protection for racial minorities and children.
social
and
Human rights practices
remained unchanged , as violations reached an extreme in 1994 and 1995.

Iraq is another germane example. When the government ratified its first global
treaty in 1970, committing to the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, human rights violations were
common
. By 1994,
the government had ratified five of the six core treaties
protecting human rights. In that same year, Amnesty International reported that repression had become
extreme, systematic, and populationwide (Amnesty International 1994).3 What good are international human rights
treaties if they do not improve human rights practices?
2ACT
AT TSurveillance
We meet- Categorization is part of surveillance
Jenkins 12 (Richard Jenkins, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Sheffield, Print Pg 284Sorting out whos
who, 2012)
surveillance, the systematic watching of peoplea means to an end ,

one-sided, increasingly impersonal, intrusive and yet distant, routine and
banalhas come to frame individual and collective identification in the
modern human world. Whos who? is increasingly a question that, individually, is answered, even must be answered, in terms of the formalities of
passports, identity cards and social security numbers. The management of public spaces is increasingly a
matter of the visual categorization of the public by invisible watchers . Travel is
governed by a combination of both of these. Categorization may be on its way to achieving dominance in
identification; in which case there will be, eventually, a new sociology of identity to be written.
In the process,
2ACK
AT KFoucault
Panopticism cannot accurately describe the current political
systeminstead, we must analyze the way that simulation has
evolved and overtaken panopticism
Bogard 09 (William Bogard, Whitman College, Simulation and Post-Panopticism, Routledge Handbook of
Surveillance Studies, 2012)
Simulation is a technology of truth and reality. In this respect it does not

differ from panoptic control. According to Baudrillard (1994: 1), it is the reproduction of the real
according to its model. Simulations do not represent real events so
much as manufacture hypothetical ones for specific control contexts, for
example, the digital games that train soldiers in combat scenarios.
Simulation, Baudrillard claims, shortcircuits the normative relations of truth that
hold between real events and their representation. In their idealized form,
simulations are self-verifying, i.e. they are true and real in themselves. Baudrillard often describes
simulations hyperbolically, as truer-than-true or hyperreal, to draw
attention to their nonrepresentational status, as well as to the
implications this has for the display and exercise of social power. We shall return to this
below. Panopticism, in contrast, is tied to a strategy of representation .
According to Foucault (1979: 200202), the goals of panoptic power are visibility and
non-verifiability. Power must appear present to compel obedience , even if
it is absent in fact. In Benthams ideal prison, the architecture itself represents the reality and truth of power, irrespective of the presence of a human
observer in the central guard tower. No observer is required for the machine to function, but
this truth is masked. Visible and unverifiable, power is freed to expose and
verify every movement within the enclosed and segmented space over
which it rules. This, Foucault says, is a coercive strategy of truthit aims to
establish what is true and eliminate everything false (or abnormal, or merely apparent) and to
accomplish this in populations confined in space and time and deceived as
to the presence of power. Baudrillard (1994: 6) sometimes characterizes
simulation as a truth that masks an absence of truth. The panopticon,
from that point of view, already functions as a complex assemblage of
simulation, to the extent that power disguises itself by disappearing into
its architecture. This assemblage fails, however, a failure tied to the limits
of that architecture, specifically, to its model of enclosure. We must be
careful, Foucault says, not to confuse enclosure with confinement (cf.
Deleuze 1992: 4). Enclosure, as a general control strategy, facilitates the accumulation of power and
knowledge. It regulates flows between the inside and outside of the
enclosure, for example, flows of bodies, information or contraband. But enclosure does not require material
constraint. The physical interior of the panopticon may be a gentler
enclosure than the dungeon, but confinement remains its technology. That
technology offers an imperfect solution at best for a system that aims for
the automatic function of power. Walls are permeable, they have
openings, access points and exits of various sorts that are difficult to
surveil. They are rigid and create hidden zones where resistance can
fester. They concentrate populations and increase opportunities for
collusions and intrigues. Finally, confinement cannot satisfy the expanding
needs of capital for greater mobility of labor, speed of communication and

risk management. All these failures have combined to produce a general
crisis of panopticism. Simulation does not confine processes to verify
them. In fact, confinement becomes redundant for it , as in our example of soldiers who can be trained in
virtual combat anywhere. In its ideal form, simulation reproduces truth in advance of its
verification (Bogard 1996). This same ideal inspires the most mundane simulations
to the most science fictional, from industrial process control to cloning
to control a process in advance by verifying it first in its model. This ideal
or imaginary informs the development of all simulation technologies in
use today. What follows is a brief history of simulation from the period around the Second World War, seen as part of a more general movement from disciplinary to
control societies. This is not to suggest that simulation, as a strategy of power, is recent. Its usesto mask an absence, to verify an event in advance extend
back to the origins of military strategy. Sun Tzu, in the sixth century BC, for instance, wrote on the advantages of disguise in
war, on the use of spies as simulators, whose secret lines of information could preempt battles and defeat enemies without a fight. Simulation entered
philosophical discourse early. Both Platonic and non-Platonic traditions analyzed it, either as a false and dangerous imitation of truth, or as a
mask that concealed truth (or its absence). It is not my purpose here to go into this long history, but to focus on the recent technical evolution of simulation that develops in response to
the failure of panoptic control, a failure rooted in what has been called the crisis of the disciplines.
The disciplinary machine breaks down the individual and

results in reinforced behavior
For Foucault, disciplinary society was in crisis by the beginning of the

twentieth century (Deleuze 1992: 3). In fact, the origins of the crisis were much
earlier. They were present from the beginning of the disciplinary project
that emerged in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
disciplinary machine, Foucault writes, works like any machine, namely, by breaking
down, by failing to produce its ideal outcomespecifically, a docile
body, an individual that is trained, improved and made useful to the
system (1979: 136). This failure is in fact manifest in the assemblage from the
start, and serves a self-corrective function. In overcoming its failures by
constantly reforming itself, the disciplinary apparatus expands its control
over the body and the general population. Failure, in this sense, is not a negative
outcome, but a productive function of the disciplines . Deleuze (1992: 3) credits Foucault for recognizing the
transience of disciplinary societies, that they succeeded the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were quite
different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life). But in turn, they were to be succeeded by
the societies of control, the new monster in our immediate future. The
disciplinary model of enclosure ultimately proved too inflexible, unable to
adapt itself to the demands of a changing economy for modulated controls
over production. The result was a generalized crisis in relation to all the
environments of enclosureprison, hospital, factory, school, family.
These environments, Deleuze writes, are interiors, fixed containers subjected to
panoptic control. Interiors, however, cannot be sites of a mode of
production that today demands decentralized, dispersed and mobile
administration. This requires a new model of enclosure . Deleuze (1992: 3) has summarized the ideal
project of control that Foucault laid out in his histories of disciplinary institutions, to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the
Confinement best facilitated these

ends during the nineteenth century, when technologies for tracking
individuals and population movements were limited by todays standards . In
dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces.
control is a force that channels flows and if or how they cross the
systems boundaries. Panoptic architecture, Benthams famous design, represented a
genuine advance in the efficiency of flow-control technologies over earlier
ages. The elaborate system of walls and passages insured that
populations of confined individuals would move in precise and predictable
ways. But this system could not last, given the rapid exteriorization of productive forces in the twentieth century and its
acceleration after the Second World War by advances in computerization, networks and methods of statistical modeling. The technical logic that
organizes control societies, according to Deleuze, is modulation. Interiors are like
molds, rigid containers that shape their objects into a fixed and final
formin the case of discipline, this form is the modern individual . Modulation, in
the abstract,
contrast, does not work this way. In scientific terms, modulation is variable control over the characteristics of a wave. It is not applied to individuals but to oscillations, specifically, to
trends or tendential movements that have defined statistical properties (we shall return to this). One form that modulation can take is statistical control, which adjusts production
frequencies and amplitudes on the basis of small samples and standard deviations. This form of control does not depend on interiors, yet nonetheless operates as a form of enclosure.
New techniques of statistical tracking (e.g. data mining), combined with remote
control technologies, allow certain production processes to be regulated
without concentrating them behind walls or allocating them to specific
institutional spaces. Such is the case, for example, with work involving quality control, inventory, risk assessment and coordination of complex component
assembly lines. What is true for space is also true for time. In disciplinary societies,
interiorization is accompanied by rigid temporal controls. Linear time , Deleuze
(1992: 45) writes, structures production both inside disciplinary institutions for
example, the work line of the factoryand between them. When one is at
work, one is not at school, or the barracks, or at home, always being
transported from one rigid container to the next. Linear sequencing of production, in which each phase follows
its immediately preceding one, may mark an advance in control technology at the beginning of the industrial age, but it becomes a fetter in network society, which demands phasing of
A mold cannot alter its form, and the

object it produces is fixed. Modulation control adapts to the
deterritorialization of productive forces that marks the shift from
industrial to network organization in contemporary society. Rather than generate a fixed object,
multiple temporal sequences simultaneously, often in non-linear ways (multi-tasking).
the individual, an enclosure that modulates can vary its structure and the product it produces in response to changing contingencies of production, for example, those generated by the
speed and complexity of modern communications, or the rapid flux of global markets. All these changes culminate in a crisis of panoptic control grounded in its inability to regulate
Panopticism was a limited program designed to keep watch

over confined populations, not organize the mobile labor forces and
financial flows of complex information economies. Simulation is a flexible
response to these problems, a tendential control technology that replaces rigid controls on visibility in enclosed interiors (and their associated
modern productive forces.
temporal controls) with modulated control by models, codes and new methods of social sorting. What follows traces historical developments in simulation and their connection to postpanopticism in the sociology of Jean Baudrillard, who views these developments in terms of a shift in the representational function of sign systems in the twentieth century.
Panoptic surveillance is based on deterrence, but simulation

passes judgment before the verdict.
Simulations are types of signs, and their philosophical study draws on

semiotic and post-semiotic theory. Much of Baudrillards work contributes to this general literature, but adds some distinctive twists.
His most well known analysis in Simulacra and Simulations (1994) relates simulation to post-panoptic control. This work has been
criticized for its eclectic blend of social theory, philosophy, history, fact
and fiction. But its analysis of emerging control technologies was astute
for its time, and it remains the most original and cogent work we have to
date on the socio-political implications of simulation control. Typically,
simulations are defined as false or deceptive signs, but Baudrillard
radicalizes this view. He asserts that, as simulation ascends to a dominant position
in postmodern societies, the signs traditional function of representation , i.e.

its power to mirror reality and separate it from false appearances, comes to an end, along with its role in the
organization of society. In part, this is a consequence of technological
change, in part a function of the internal logic of signs themselves , i.e. to break free
from their signifieds. Panoptic space, Baudrillard argues, in contrast is representational, a field of
relatively fixed significations, and also perspectival, an orientational space
that organizes the way objects are displayed. Simulation replaces both.
What we witness with current simulation technology is, from the point of
view of sign systems, a new semiotic of control, one founded not on truth
relations between a sign and the reality it purports to represent, but on
the radical indeterminacy of those relations. The utopian goal of
simulation, according to Baudrillard, is not to reflect reality, but to reproduce it as artifice;
to liquidate all referentials and replace them with signs of the real . The truth of the sign henceforth is self-referential and no
longer needs the measure of an independent reality for its verification. Sign systems constitute their own reality, or as
Baudrillard says, they become hyperreal. Simulacra and Simulation was originally published in 1981, when the digital assemblages we take for
granted today were just emergingsocial networks, GPS, virtual and augmented reality. In one section, it uses a now dated example of the vrit experience of reality television to
illustrate the demise of panopticism. In 1971, an American documentary placed the private and unscripted daily lives of a real family (the Louds) on display for seven months for all
to observe. Baudrillard notes, however, that the truth and reality of the family were simulations. The Louds went about their life as if the cameras watching them were not there.
And the viewing public watched as if it was secretly spying on something private. Both were complicit in the illusion. It was an illusion that nonetheless produced real effects. The
constant presence of the cameras provoked family conflicts during the filming, even though those conflicts could not be attributed to that presence without sacrificing the illusion.
Baudrillard notes that, along with principles of truth and reality, the simulation also upset clear lines and common attributions of social causality. In the final analysis, he declares, it was
indeterminate whether the broadcast images of the Louds represented the real causal dynamics of the family, or merely the perverse effects of television. Baudrillard multiplies such
examples, but, for him, all point to the close of the panoptic era, which still presupposes an objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of the despotic gaze (1994:
the panoptic
model of enclosure and its disciplinary logic are historically finished. The
discipline enforced by panoptic surveillance evolves into a general
system of deterrence, in which submission to a centralized gaze
becomes a general codification of experience that allows no room for
deviation from its model. In post-panoptic society, subjectivity is not
produced by surveillance in the conventional sense of hierarchical
observation, but by codes intended to reproduce the subject in advance . It is
29). Although critical of Foucaults analysis of panoptic space, which he insists reifies the concept of power, Baudrillard shares Foucaults sense that
no coincidence that Baudrillard often draws on examples of genetic engineering and cloning to illustrate the logical, technical and human horizons of simulation control. Baudrillard does
simulation entails the end of the panoptic model . At the same time, his
conception of simulation as hyperreality allows for the interpretation
that panoptic control has not disappeared altogether in the new
information order, but in fact has shifted into a higher register . Baudrillard, for example,
asserts that measures that organized the prior order of signs are reduplicated in simulation in the present order. Thus, representation does not
exactly disappear as a force in control societies, but rather becomes
simulated representation (virtual reality can be conceived in this way); power does not vanish, but
becomes simulated power, no longer instantiated and invested in the real,
but rather reproduced in codes and models. Extending this logic, the visible spaces
organized by the panopticon become the data mines and information
clouds of postdisciplinary societies, accessed not by doors, locks and keys,
but by passwords, pin numbers and decryption tools. The forces of
verification, far from succumbing to the general crisis of truth that marks the failure of the panoptic
machine, now operate more comprehensively, antecedent rather than subsequent to events. It is in this spirit of reading Baudrillard that has led Bogard (1996) to describe
postmodern control as simulated surveillance, or surveillance as modeling. If and when simulation control becomes able to
model the full range of contingencies for a predesignated range of events
and control for them, surveillance will have achieved its most
comprehensive expression. Every unfolding process that occurs within a
defined set of parameters will be pre-screened and accounted for in
assert that
advance. Such are the dreams of control society engineers who design
virtual training systems, or who develop cloning technologies and artificial
intelligence systems. It is the reality principle that is at stake in these changes, not reality itself. In control societies,
surveillance is not governed solely by the imperative to represent reality,
but to assist in the construction and application of models . What is monitored first of all is
information on the performance of the model, and not the event it models. The panopticon is a medium for
channeling flows of information and bodies. It is a concrete assemblage
consisting of lighted passageways, walls, entries and exits, and an
apparatus for recording all that passes in and out of the assemblage . It is the
dematerialization of this medium that Baudrillard claims is a hallmark of post-panoptic society. Hardt and Negri (2004) have theorized the dematerialization and growing abstraction of
A parallel
way of thinking about this development is through the language of
surveillance assemblages (cf. Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Assemblages, in Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) formulation,
are multiplicities of interconnected machines, some of which are concrete
(e.g. surveillance hardware, bioware technology), others abstract and immaterial (codes, models, statistical formulae, data). As it has
evolved in control societies, the surveillance assemblage increasingly operates as a system
of deterrence that manages the immaterial functions of networks . Of course, the
material technology of surveillance remains important networks are still
composed of interconnected computers, communication lines and
information storage devices. Currently, however, developments in network
technologies point to the progressive elimination of physical media, as
communications become wireless, as data storage becomes the function
of information clouds and as tracking of individual and population
movements no longer demands their visibility but continuous global
positioning and statistical estimation. Eventually, so the science fiction scenario goes, the external medium of surveillance will
dematerialize entirely with advances in genetic coding and engineering. Finally, Baudrillard claims that the collapse of the reality
principle in simulation reverses the causality of panoptic control, indeed
the whole causal logic of discipline insofar as it constitutes a machinery of
judgment. In the disciplinary machine, verification precedes judgment . Although it
aims to produce automatic obedience, panoptic surveillance nonetheless reacts to events it
notices, identifies and categorizes them before passing this information
on to authorities that determine its ultimate significance. In control
societies, however, judgment is far more proactive. The simulation model
structures the events production and meaning, and passes judgment in
advance. Surveillance is relegated to a secondary function and is only
there to monitor the performance of the model. It is as if the whole causal sequence of social judgment had been
media of control in post-panoptic societies, as the information network rather than industrial production becomes the dominant model for organizing society.
reversed to mirror the Queens demands for justice in Alice in Wonderland: Let the jury consider their verdict, the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. No, no! said the
Queen. Sentence first verdict afterwards. Stuff and nonsense! said Alice loudly. The idea of having the sentence first! Hold your tongue! said the Queen, turning purple. I wont!
said Alice. Off with her head! the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. Who cares for you? said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) Youre nothing but
If surveillance still performs a juridical function in social control

today, it is more likely to be located on the side of the execution of the
sentence, which ideally comes prior to the announcement of the verdict .
a pack of cards!
No
verification procedure is necessary to render a verdict for a judgment already made. Verification, so to speak, is complete. Reality checks that would interrupt this sequence are
surveillance functions to serve the

application of the simulation model, to insure the models initial
conditions are correctly specified and that its run unfolds according to
plan. It is not asked to extend beyond the parameters of the simulation. Thus,
as it develops as a means of control in postpanoptic society, surveillance is severed from the very reality
principle it was originally set up to enforce.
performed in advance and any problems are deterred in advance. Henceforth,
Predictions of trends for technology dont work

Baudrillards hypotheses about simulation control are deliberatively

hyperbolic and speculative. The future trajectory of any technical
assemblage is always uncertain. The technologies we imagine on the
horizon rarely resemble or function like the ones that actually emerge. This is
undoubtedly true of simulation technology in a post-panoptic world. Nonetheless, we might glean some trends from present
developments. One thread in the evolution of simulation technology is
convergence. Historically, different uses of simulation have developed in
relatively independent ways. The demand for applications that serve more than one audience and/or more than a single function has led to the
merger of once distinct simulation approaches. One example of interest to the military, where many ideas for control technologies originate, is the convergence of live, virtual and
this has come to include forms of augmented

reality. Gaming, of course, is one area of intensive development, one that also has benefitted from military applications. Computer-based games combine simulation and
constructive (LVC) simulation for training purposes. Increasingly
entertainment. They have been commercially profitable and led to the production of lower-cost information delivery platforms that have high performance computing and graphics.
Trends point to the insertion of more instructional tools into game simulations, following the military example above.
Simulation aims at the
replication of experience. From flight simulators to retinal laser technologies that produce images directly on the eye, the substitution of virtual for
real experience has been a project of simulation research and development. Haptic control is perhaps one of the more fantastic applications of simulation technology. It is a means of
flexible enclosure, in contrast to confinement, to return to the theme that began this chapter. Haptic simulation involves not just the simulation of touch, as its name might imply. Rather,
it is a technical and social program for the replication of sensibility as a whole, including the bodys proprioceptive awareness, the internal sense of its own position and movement
relative to the external world. Part of this program does involve the development of technologies that reproduce or simulate the sensation of touch, but the full project of haptics is
simulation control of the whole continuum of affective experience. The term haptics comes from the Greek for the ability to make contact with. Unlike information control that requires
a confined population, or a dispersed population under passive surveillance (such as CCTV), haptic technologies respond to the active body and supply it with tactile feedback. The
program of haptics is straightforward: simulate the bodys sense of acting in the real world. Haptic interfaces simulate the feel of objects, their texture, surface resistance, bulk, edges
and gaps. Datagloves that react with vibratory stimuli to users handling of simulated objects, for instance, are a classic example of a haptic technology. Current applications include
locomotion devices for navigating virtual worlds (updated treadmills), orthopedic equipment, touch-screen technologies, tele-operators (remotely controlled robots), diagnostic tools for
measuring or producing pressure and resistance, density, heat and other intensive parameters, and, of course, computer games that provide gamers with various kinds of vibrational or
positional feedback. In all these developments of simulation control, we have moved far beyond what the panoptic model of surveillance developed in the classical age was capable of
explaining.
***NEG***
Case
Biometrics GoodBlackness
Biometrics can be strategically used to challenge racialized
surveillance
Browne 12 (Simone, 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
it must be noted that biometric technology can

also be used in ways that challenge racializing surveillance. This is
apparent in the complicated 2009 case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, which I will
Although these reports are troubling,
briefly present here as it hints at both the limitations, and liberatory potential of biometrics. On 21 May 2009,
Canadian citizen Suaad Hagi Mohamud attempted to board a KLM

Royal Dutch Airlines flight out of Jomo, Kenyna International Airport in
Nairobi to return home to Toronto, after a three-week visit to Kenya. Upon inspecting her
passport, airline authorities claimed that her lips looked different than those
observed in her four-year-old passport photo. They branded her an
imposter and not the rightful holder of the passport that she presented
and detained her overnight in the airport. Two Canadian High Commission
officials met with her the following morning, told her "you are not Suaad"
and confiscated her passport. Mohamud was held in the airport for four days until she was
released on a bond, tasked with proving her identity within two weeks . To prove her
identity to officials at the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, Mohamud bared the contents of
her wallet, showing them her Canadian citizenship card, driver's license,
health card and other identity documents. The officials did not accept
Mohamud's ID cards and she was charged with using a false passport,
impersonating a Canadian and with being in Kenya illegally. Canadian authorities
turned over her passport to Kenyan officials to aid in their charges against her. She was subsequently
jailed by Kenyan authorities, and faced possible deportation to Somalia.
Somali-born
While Mohamud was in limbo in Kenya, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon was quoted of
saying. "there is no tangible proof' that Mohamud is Canadian and that "all Canadians who hold passports generally
have a picture that is identical in their passport to what they claim to be. Cannon made this statement after
Mohamud submitted her fingerprints to Canadian officials in Kenya, and after an officer from the Canadian Border
Services Agency visited her place of employment in Toronto so that her co-workers could identify a photo of her. It
was later revealed that there were no fingerprints on file with the Canadian government with which to make a
In yet another attempt to establish her

identity Mohamud requested to be DNA tested, it was not until 10 August
that a DNA test conducted on Mohamud in comparison to a test conducted
on her Canadian-born son confirmed Mohamud's identity, with a
probability of 99.99%. Charges against her were dropped, she was issued
an emergency passport and she boarded a plane to Amsterdam to make
her way home to Toronto arriving on 15 August. This DNA verification not
only proved who she said she was, but apparently determined her
citizenship status as well.
comparison to those taken from Mohamud in Kenya.
Biometric systems arent perfect, but no technology isits the

best option we have
Woodward 05
(John D. Woodward, Jr., former CIA operations officer and senior policy analyst at RAND,
Biometrics: Facing Up To Terrorism, RAND Arroyo Center, 2005,
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005/IP218.pdf) *edited for g-lang
Controlling access to sensitive facilities, as well as preventing immigration

fraud and identity theft, can be accomplished with a variety of biometric
systems. Such systems can accommodate users and are relatively easy to
incorporate into current security systems (i.e., adding a digitally signed, encrypted biometric bar code to existing travel
documents or badges). Moreover, the technology is readily available. Identifying known
or suspected terrorists presents a greater challenge. While fingerprint and
other biometric systems could be used to identify these individuals,
government authorities might find it difficult to collect the fingerprints or
iris scans of suspected terrorists in order to build the database against
which to compare an unknown individual. Facial recognition biometric
systems, however, offer a way around this problem. Specifically, facial recognition
systems will allow the identification of a suspected or known terrorist
even if the only identifying information we have is a photograph . But the technology is not
perfect, and it has yet to be fully vetted in real-world, operational settings.3 Facial recognition systems received much public attention in January 2001 when authorities in Tampa, Florida
deployed one at Super Bowl XXXV in an attempt to identify threats to public safety. At Raymond James Stadium, surveillance cameras scanned the crowd and captured images of
spectators attending the Super Bowl. Authorities reported that the system made nineteen computer matches. Based on this limited experience, it is difficult to discern how well the
system worked. The police did not make any arrests based on the computer matches, and it is therefore not known whether any of these matches were false matches, also known as
false positives, i.e., false alarms because the individual was not in fact the person the system thought he was. In other words, although the computer may indicate a match, this
information is not confirmed until the police arrive on the scene and scrutinize the suspect. Dr. James L. Wayman of San Jose State University, a leading biometrics expert, has explained
that although human beings generally can perform facial recognition processes with relatively high fidelity and at long distances, these activities are still very challenging for
technological systems. At the most basic level, even detecting whether a face is present in a given electronic photograph is a difficult technical problem. Dr. Wayman has noted that
unless the photograph is captured under very controlled conditions, ideally with each subject looking directly into the camera and filling the area of the photo completely, the system
may have difficulty identifying the individual or even detecting his their face in the photograph. Recent technical analyses of facial recognition systems indicate that while the technology
shows promise, it is not yet advanced enough to be considered fully mature. The Facial Recognition Vendor Test 2000 study makes clear that the technology is not yet perfected.4 This
comprehensive study of current facial recognition technologies, sponsored by the Department of Defense (DoD) Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Institute of Justice, showed that environmental factors such as differences in camera angle, direction of lighting, facial
expression, and other parameters can have significant effects on the ability of systems to recognize individuals. Recent tests of these technologies indicate that the current capabilities
of facial recognition systems are limited. For example, Professor Takeo Kanade of Carnegie-Mellon University is skeptical of the systems reliability in a typical airport situation. Dr.
there is a great deal of room for improvement in both the

algorithms used to match sampled faces and in databases of file images.
The moderate level of success that current systems have displayed must
be placed in the appropriate context, however; while human beings can
often readily recognize faces at long distances, the efficiency of such
recognition falls precipitously when posted human guards are asked to
scrutinize large crowds in search of small numbers of potentially
threatening individuals. As a result, for these tasks, the current technical capabilities may
still exceed more traditional approaches, and combinations of automated
and human-based recognition could be advantageous. To assist in this determination, there is definite
Wayman has stressed that
need for independent organizations to test, assess, and validate the various biometric technologies. It is of critical importance that the capabilities of systems and potential ways of
applying those capabilities are appropriately matched to security and surveillance needs so that individuals expect neither too much nor too little from these emerging technological
Although facial recognition is not a perfect technology, we should not

let the perfect become the enemy of the good. The overall challenge is to
make it better. Fortunately, gifted scientists and engineers are working on
this challenge, and in light of the September 11th attacks, the
government is likely to make additional resources available to encourage
research, development, testing, and evaluation. In the meantime, we can use facial
recognition operationally in a way that minimizes its weaknesses. The
system works best when environmental factors such as camera angle,
lighting, and facial expression are controlled to the maximum extent
tools.
possible. We must apply this lesson to our operational framework. If a person (including a terrorist) is coming to the United States from overseas, he they must pass through
an immigration checkpoint at the port of entry. At this checkpoint, the INS official scrutinizes the person, asks questions, and inspects the persons travel documents. The official then
This immigration checkpoint is one of

the nations vital first lines of defense against terrorist entry. From the perspective of
counterterrorism, this checkpoint is a chokepoint where the would-be terrorist is at
his most vulnerable. This is the first and probably only place in the United
States where he will be closely scrutinized by trained federal officials.
Here is how FaceCheck can make the checkpoint a more formidable
bastion. An individual processing through an immigration checkpoint at a
port of entry should be subject to a FaceCheck whereby he they would be
required as part of immigration processing to pose for a photograph under
completely controlled conditions. This way we minimize facial
recognitions technological imperfections, which derive in large measure
from attempting to use the system to find a face in a crowd. The
photograph would then be processed by the facial recognition system and
run against a watchlist database of suspect terrorists. If the system
indicates a match, this result would be confirmed by visual inspection by
the authorities, and the person could be taken to a secondary interview
for heightened scrutiny. Facial recognition systems do not necessarily have to be implemented to process every individual seeking to enter the United
States. Rather, the authorities should use FaceCheck in a more strategic way. This
would include using it randomly; in targeted ways; and in conjunction with
other information. For example, FaceCheck could be run on every so many
people from a given flight. It could be used at different ports of entry at
different times and for different flights. Similarly, FaceCheck teams could
deploy to specific ports of entry at specific times to target a specific flight
in light of threat information. Testers human guinea pigs whose images have been entered into the watchlist databaseshould be included
makes a decision as to whether the person gets into the box, i.e., enters the United States.
in the immigration processing to rigorously evaluate the system: How well did FaceCheck do in identifying suspects?5 Moreover, while we do not have to use the system on all
we should consider setting up FaceCheck stations at ports

of entry and have passengers pose for photographs as though the system
were in continuous use. In this way, we keep terrorists guessing as to
where the systems are actually deployed or in use. We should also experiment with FaceCheck systems using
passengers entering the United States,
closed-circuit surveillance cameras to capture images clandestinely at certain ports of entry. In this way, we can learn how well such systems work in realistic operational environments
we do not need to inform passengers as to

where such systems are actually deployed. We also need to consider using
FaceCheck for visa processing at our embassies and consulates overseas.
We could easily require a visa applicant to submit to a photograph taken
under controlled conditions. We could then run a search against the
watchlist database. Similarly, we do not need to inform visa applicants
overseas whether we are actually running FaceCheck.6 Dedicated, highly
trained terrorists may be able to defeat facial recognition systems. One
technique may be for a terrorist to undergo cosmetic surgery to alter his
facial features. As a result, he they will not match his their database
photograph. Similarly, terrorists may try to enter the United States illegally by crossing the relatively porous borders with Canada and Mexico. But although facial
recognition systems might be defeated by a surgeons skill or an illegal border crossing, at least we force terrorists to take
additional steps that drain their resources and keep them on the
defensive.
and gain information to improve their technical capabilities. Again,
Facial recognition systems are good and legal

Woodward 05
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005/IP218.pdf)
Though these facial recognition systems are not technically perfected,

they are improving. There is little reason to doubt that as the technology
improves, it will eventually be able to identify faces in a crowd as
effectively as it currently identifies a face scanned under controlled
circumstances. And while civil libertarians might decry the use of this
technology as an invasion of privacy, the key lies in balancing the need for
security with the need to protect civil liberties.8 In this regard, three brief points need to be made. First,
we do not have a constitutional right to privacy in the face we show in
public. The United States Supreme Court has determined that government
action constitutes a search when it invades a persons reasonable
expectation of privacy. But the Court has found that a person does not
have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those physical characteristics
that are constantly exposed to the public, such as ones facial features,
voice, and handwriting. Therefore, although the Fourth Amendment
requires that a search conducted by government actors be reasonable,
which generally means that the individual is under suspicion, the use of
facial recognition does not constitute a search. As a result, the
government is not constrained, on Fourth Amendment grounds, from
employing facial recognition systems in public spaces. Although the use of facial recognition may
generate discussion of the desirability of enacting new regulations for the use of the technology, such use is allowed under our current legal framework. Secondly, current
legal standards recognize that we are all subject to heightened scrutiny at
our borders and ports of entry. The border exception to the Fourth Amendment recognizes the the longstanding right of the sovereign to
protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country.9 Accordingly, such searches are reasonable and do
not require a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. When we transit our borders , therefore, the
authorities can closely scrutinize our person and property in ways that
they could not do in another setting. Even within our own borders, the law
requires airport facilities to conduct security screening of passengers
persons and personal effects, and it is unlawful even to make jokes about
threats on airport property. Finally, it is worth noting that facial recognition systems are not
relied upon to make final determinations of a persons identity. Rather, the
system alerts the authorities so that additional screening and
investigation can take place. And though the system will make false
matches that will subject innocent passengers to additional questioning
and scrutiny, the current system routinely does the same.
Multiple benefitsdistinction of civilian vs. insurgent,

detection, and protection
Gray 08
(Dr. Myra Gray, Terrorism and New Biometric Technologies, Security Magazine, November 2008,
http://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/79463-terrorism-and-new-biometrics-technologies-1)
Implementing biometrics-based technologies has increased in recent years

and is helping to protect the nation and multi-national enterprises by
keeping people and assets more secure. New, lightweight, multimodal
devices help make distinguishing between an insurgent and a civilian in a
war environment easier. Two such technologies, a laptop-based system deployed as the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT), and the Handheld
Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE), capture fingerprint, iris and facial data. The BAT collects this biometric data and stores it on a central server in a secure network.
Currently, there are over 1,000 active BATs in Iraq. The HIIDE, similar in size to a large camera, connects directly to the BAT and matches inputs against a biometric watch list of up to
Able to capture fingerprint, iris and

facial images, almost 7,000 of these devices have been deployed in Iraq
and Afghanistan thus far. Interagency communication and compatibility
greatly increase the capabilities of biometrics in the fight against
terrorism. In 2004, the Department of Defense (DoD) created a centralized
biometric database called the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS). This collection and storage
system is compatible with the system used by the FBI so that matches
may be made between the two databases. Known enemy biometric
matches are flagged for further action and analysis. Biometrics standards
conformance testing of these tactical devices is conducted by the
Biometrics Task Force (BTF). The BTFs mission is to lead DoD activities to program, integrate and synchronize biometric technologies and capabilities.
10,000 individuals. The HIIDE is a shock-resistant collection and identification device.
The BTF also operates and maintains the DoDs authoritative biometric database to support the National Security Strategy. A 2004 bombing in Mosul, Iraq, resulted in a need for a
system to more securely monitor and grant access to only authorized individuals. The Biometric Identification System for Access (BISA) was developed and has since been used by
analysts to issue more than 220,000 military base access cards and permanently bar more than 800 individuals from having access. This smartcard-based system has increased base
By creating and sustaining a

biometric database, DoD not only has records of some known threats, but
can help identify those threats in active operations. Biometric
technologies, especially those that can easily be used on the battlefield, are making a difference in the current
fight against terrorism by protecting both the warfighter and the
homeland. Ongoing assessment and evaluation of biometric equipment will help enhance effectiveness and efficiency of those technologies.
and checkpoint security with the use of biometrics-enabled badges and employee screening.
Biometrics GoodTerrorism
Security systems that rely on badges and tokens are easily
compromisedbiometric technologies are a better option
Woodward 05
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005/IP218.pdf) *edited for g-lang
Sensitive areas of the nations ports of entry, particularly airport facilities,

need to be safeguarded so that only authorized personnel can gain access
to them. Accordingly, individuals who have authorized access to sensitive areas of
airport facilities must be identified and distinguished, accurately and efficiently, from
those who do not. Currently, badges and tokens such as keys or passcards
are used to identify authorized personnel and to control access to these areas. For example, display of a photograph identification badge may be all that is needed to gain
access to some employee-only areas of an airport. Similarly, individuals with authorized access to a particular
area in an airport may use a magnetic strip badge or card which, when swiped through a reader,
allows access to baggage loading areas, runways, and aircraft. Such access control measures, based on items in
an individuals physical possession, are not particularly secure. The
system assumes that whoever possesses the badge or the passcard is the
person who should be granted access, when in reality, badges and tokens are easily
forged, stolen, or misplaced. Combining something a person must
physically possess with something a person must know, such as a
password or personal identification number (PIN), improves security. For example, a system similar to an automated teller machine (ATM), which
requires both a magnetic strip card and a PIN, can reduce the threat to security from lost or stolen cards. The system is still easily
compromised, however: given the profusion of PINs and passwords and
our difficulty in remembering them, their owners often write them on the
card itself or on a piece of paper stored nearby. Access control to sensitive
facilities can be improved by using biometric-based identifiers . In other words, instead of
identifying an individual based on something he has (a badge), or something he knows (a password or a PIN), that person will be identified based on something he is. For
example, instead of flashing a badge, an airline worker with a need to
access sensitive areas of airports could be required to present a
biometric, say his their iris, to a sensor. From a foot away and in a matter of seconds, this device captures the persons iris image,
converts it to a template, or computer-readable representation, and searches a database containing the templates of authorized personnel for a match. A match
confirms that the person seeking access to a particular area is in fact
authorized to do so. This scenario is not science fiction. Such a system has been used at CharlotteDouglas International Airport in North Carolina. While not
foolproof, such a biometric system is much harder to compromise than systems
using a badge or badge plus PIN. As such, a biometric system to authenticate
the identity of individuals seeking access to sensitive areas within airports
or similar facilities represents a significant increase in security. And to the extent that
terrorist acts can be thwarted by the ability to keep unauthorized individuals out of these sensitive areas, this improvement in physical
security could contribute directly to a decrease in the terrorist threat.
Outdated security measures allow for terrorists to hijack

planes or fly anywherebiometrics are vital
Kephart 14 (Janice Kephart, Biometric Passports and Borders Essential to Saving Lives, Preventing Terrorist
Activity, Biometric Update, June 2014, http://www.biometricupdate.com/201406/biometric-passports-and-bordersessential-to-saving-lives-preventing-terrorist-activity)
Since the early 1970s numerous terrorist organizations have provided

their operatives with a wide variety of spurious documents. After showing
their spurious passports and papers at border control, these terrorist
operatives have proceeded to hijack airplanes, plant bombs, and carry out
assassination. These terrorist acts, however, can be stopped If we all screen travelers and
check their passports, as past experience proves, terrorists will lose their ability to travel undetected, and international terrorism will come one step closer to being stopped! -The CIAs
Redbook (1992), as reported in the 9/11 Commissions staff monograph, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel (August 2004) Janice Kephart / Secure Identity & Biometrics Association
Australias announcement last month that they are investing $700 million
to upgrade their biometric border clearance system takes on increased
significance after news surfaced this past week that a known terrorist was
able to slip out of Australia undetected. According to BiometricUpdate.com, the new system will include criminal watchlist
checks, biometric e-gate exit system, inspection officer scheduling and identity management to mimic their SmartGate entry. The news is more noteworthy both (1) in contrast to
the United States has suffered inertia in either improving

border security at arrival, or deploying a 16 year requirement for a
biometric exit system, since biometric borders were deployed at US
arrivals ten years ago, and (2) in light of growing concern in southeast Asia after the loss of MH370 knowing that at least two individuals boarded on
stolen passports, and now the news out of Australia that once more, another passport was used fraudulently, this
time for known terrorist purposes. In March SIBA issued a press release explaining why fraudulent passports should never have been
part of the concern over the loss of MH370, clarifying that biometric borders would have flagged the two
Iranians as not legitimate holders of the Austrian and Italian stolen
passports each successfully used to board that fated flight . However, the news out of Australia
earlier this week bears repeating as a prime example of why biometric exit controls are equally as important
as biometric entry controls, especially in a world growing more unstable
and interdependent daily. In 2009, Khaled Sharrouf pled guilty to the
Australian Supreme Court to possessing goods in preparation for a
terrorist act and was jailed for almost four years. Australias Foreign
Minister, Julie Bishop, confirmed that upon release from prison Sharrouf
left Australia on his brothers [Australian] passport and initially traveled
to Syria before joining in massacres of Iraqi civilians. The sad news is, Sharrouf could have been stopped.
Fully biometric passports and readers can prevent stolen passport holders
from bypassing immigration authorities. Moreover, biometric borders are
now cost-effective, extremely fast, and are currently enabling countries
across the globe such as New Zealand, Latvia, Colombia and Qatar to
incorporate airline check-in with immigration check-out, building seamless
convenience for the traveler, prevention from identity theft, safer skies
and a safer world. Not all these systems incorporate checks with real time watchlists like Indonesia does, but it is not hard to do; the
US does it on entry now, and via its Secure Flight system at airline check-in. As the CIA stated in its travel document manual The Redbook in 1992, screening all
travelers and their passports helps stop international terrorism . The Redbook provided
Australias swift, decisive response,
detailed examples of five types of travel document fraud known to be committed by terrorists, including genuine, unaltered passports such as used by Sharouff in leaving Australia on
his brothers passport. By 1992, the book boasted it had already identified 200 people carrying forged passports provided by terrorist groups before they engage[d] in terrorist acts.
The 9/11 Commission recommended

biometric borders when it was determined that al Qaeda relied heavily on
counterfeit and stolen passports for clandestine travel. The 9/11 Commission border team concluded
That was long before todays cyber capabilities, passport standards and biometric technologies.
that the 9/11 terrorists had engaged in a specific terrorist travel operation. In other words, not only did the four nearly simultaneous hijackings of four commercial airplanes constitute a
Terrorists must
travel clandestinely to meet, train, plan, case targets, and gain access to
attack. To them, international travel presents great danger, because they
must surface to pass through regulated channels, present themselves to
border security officials, or attempt to circumvent inspection points. In
their travels, terrorists use evasive methods, such as altered and
counterfeit passports and visas, and immigration and identity fraud.
These can sometimes be detected. See 9/11 Commission Final Report at p. 384. Today identity
assumption remains possible where passports do not meet the
international standards requiring inclusion of a biometric, or a country
fails to implement processes to read biometrics or passports . That is
certainly not the case with Australia or the United States in regard to
passport issuance, or biometric capabilities at entry. Yet where these
same countries fail to embed biometric or passport readers into border
processes at exit, the likelihood of success for a stolen passport to be
used for purchase, check-in and departure of an international flight
increases substantially. That is what appears to have occurred in Australia. The fact that Australia is working to fix the problem swiftly, is
coordinated operation, but so did the hijackers travel. This coordinated operation was dubbed terrorist travel. The Commission stated:
commendable. Sharrouf certainly understood that clandestine travel was imperative to his success, and what the consequences of detection would be. As the atrocities of the ruthless
terrorist group ISIS invading Iraq is pushing news of genocide and civil unrest in nations such as the Ukraine, Syria, and Pakistan to the back burner, one thing remains clear: stopping the
. In an increasingly
dependent world, all nations bear some responsibility for not just knowing
who is entering any particular nation, but who is leaving as well, and
whether such travel is being conducted by terrorists . They also want to
protect themselves from these terrorists returning home unnoticed to
commit more atrocities. Governments have no excuses where todays
technologies are proven effective in highly demanding environments
already. Biometric exit is one relatively simple procedure that assures
against at least some terrorist travel, and unnecessary loss of life, in an
increasingly unstable world. The CIA had it right in 1992. Is the US going to get biometric exit done in 2014?
influx of foreign terrorists by controlling borders before these terrorists reach war-torn countries such as Iraq is essential
Biometric technologies help prevent terrorism

Woodward 05
As the nation recovers from the attacks of September 11, 2001, we must
rededicate our efforts to prevent any such terrorist acts in the future .
Although terrorism can never be completely eliminated, we, as a nation,
can take additional steps to counter it. We must explore many options in this endeavor. Among them, we should examine the
use of emerging biometric technologies that can help improve public safety . While there is no easy,
foolproof technical fix to counter terrorism, the use of biometric technologies might help make
America a safer place. Biometrics refers to the use of a persons
physical characteristics or personal traits to identify, or verify the claimed
identity of, that individual. Fingerprints, faces, voices, and handwritten signatures are all examples of characteristics that have been used to
identify us in this way. Biometric-based systems provide automatic, nearly
instantaneous identification of a person by converting the biometric a fingerprint,
for exampleinto digital form and then comparing it against a computerized
database. In this way, fingerprints, faces, voices, iris and retinal images of the eye, hand geometry, and signature dynamics can now be used to identify us, or to
MIT
Technology Review named biometrics as one of the top ten emerging
technologies that will change the world. And after September 11th,
biometric technologies may prove to be one of the emerging technologies
that will help safeguard the nation. This issue paper does not advance the argument that biometrics would have prevented the
September 11th attacks. Nor does it present biometrics as a complete solution to the terrorist problem. Rather, it offers recommendations as to how biometric
technologies can be used to improve security and thereby help safeguard our communities against future
terrorist attacks. Specifically, this issue paper discusses how biometric technologies could be used to impede
terrorism in three critical areas: 1. Controlling access to sensitive facilities
at airports, 2. Preventing identity theft and fraud in the use of travel
documents, and 3. Identifying known or suspected terrorists . It further offers a proposed
authenticate our claimed identity, quickly and accurately. These biometric technologies may seem exotic, but their use is becoming increasingly common. In January 2000,
counterterrorist application that uses a type of biometric known as facial recognition to identify terrorists.
Inadequate security systems leads to terrorist attacks

biometrics are key to solve
Woodward 05
failures to accurately identify individuals as

they cross through our borders can also contribute to a terrorist attack. It is
important to ensure that necessary travel documents are used only by the person to whom they were issued. Like badges and tokens,
passports, visas, and boarding passes can be forged, misplaced, or stolen .
While anti-fraud measures are built into the issuance of such documents, there is room for improvement. A biometric template of, for example,
ones fingerprint (or other biometric) could be attached to the document on a bar code,
chip, or magnetic strip, making it more difficult for someone to adopt a
false identity or forge a travel document. To ensure security, the biometric should be
encrypted and inserted into the document by a digital signature process
using a trusted agent, such as a U.S. embassys visa section. In addition to helping prevent
fraud or identity theft, we can use biometrics to make it easier for certain qualified
travelers to identify themselves. For example, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) currently uses biometrics in the Immigration and Naturalization Service Passenger Accelerated Service System (INSPASS).
Under INSPASS, over 45,000 international travelers, whose identities and travel
papers have been vetted, have voluntarily enrolled in a system that
verifies their identity at ports of entry using the biometric of hand
geometry. By allowing these frequent travelers to pass through
immigration quickly, INSPASS enables INS officers to devote more time and
attention to problem cases.1
In addition to failures to authenticate the identity of airport employees,
Terrorist take advantage of bad security systemsbiometric

facial recognition solves
Woodward 05
As the criminal investigation of the September 11th attacks appears to

demonstrate, some of the terrorists were able to enter the United States
using valid travel documents under their true identities, passing with little
difficulty through immigration procedures at U.S. ports of entry . Once in the country, they
patiently continued their planning, preparation, training, and related operational work for months and in some cases years until that fateful day. Once inside the United States, the
terrorists cleverly took advantage of American freedoms to help carry out
their attacks. According to media reports, however, at least three of the suicide attackers were
known to U.S. authorities as suspected terrorists. In late August 2001, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) passed information to the INS to be on the lookout for two
men suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. The CIA apparently obtained
videotape showing the men, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, talking to people implicated in the U.S.S. Cole bombing. The videotape was
taken in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. It is not clear when the CIA received it. When the INS checked its database, it
found that a Almihdhar and Alhazmi had successfully passed through INS
procedures and had already entered the United States. The CIA asked the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to find them. But with both men already in the United
States, the FBI was looking for two needles in a haystack. The FBI was still
seeking the two when the hijackers struck. Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi are believed to have been hijackers on
American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. As the above details illustrate, we need a better way to identify
individuals whom we know or suspect to be terrorists when they attempt
to enter the United States. The use of biometric facial recognition is one
way to make such identifications, particularly when U.S. authorities
already have a photograph of the suspected terrorist whom they seek.
Biometrics can thwart acts of terrorism

Woodward 05
Biometric facial recognition systems could be immediately deployed to

help thwart future terrorist acts. Such a FaceCheck system, the term I use for the specific
counterterrorism application discussed in this paper, can be done in a way that uses public safety
resources effectively and efficiently and minimizes inconvenience and
intrusiveness for the average traveler. In general, facial recognition systems use
a camera to capture an image of a persons face as a digital photograph. In
the most common form of facial recognition, this image is manipulated and reduced to a series of
numbers that represent the image in relation to the average face. These
numbers are often referred to as a template, which is then instantly
searched against a watchlist, or computerized database of suspected terrorists templates. This search seeks to answer the question, Is
this person in the watchlist database? A computer-generated match or hit alerts the
authorities to the presence of a potential threat. The value of such a
system in helping to prevent individuals such as Khalid Almihdhar and
Nawaf Alhazmi from entering the country is clear. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, a
government committee appointed by Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta to review airport security measures will
recommend that facial recognition systems be deployed in specified
airports to improve security.2
Focus on fighting terrorism through biometrics is key

Woodward 05
The U.S. government has taken positive steps to encourage the use of
biometrics. It is time to do more. The newly established Office of Homeland Security (OHS) is a logical place to coordinate these efforts.
Specifically, OHS can focus part of its efforts on using biometrics to counter
terrorism. As a first step, OHS, working with other concerned agencies like the
Department of Justice, INS, FBI, CIA, Department of State, and Department
of Transportation, should draft guidelines to explain how biometric
technologies, particularly the FaceCheck system, should be used and
implemented. This OHS coordination effort is essential for any biometrics
that would be used in conjunction with travel documents where
interoperability and technical standards are of critical importance. These
guidelines should also address a crucial aspect of any FaceCheck system
the data that are included in the watchlist database. In this regard, the
guidelines must include rigorous technical and procedural controls on the
information that goes into the watchlist database. The nations focus now
is on the war against terrorism; the focus of the watchlist database should similarly be on locating known or suspected terrorists and
deterring unknown terrorists from entering the United States. Depending on resources and constraints, the watchlist might also include certain individuals for whom there are felony
arrest warrants outstanding. Accordingly, OHS should immediately task the law enforcement and intelligence communities to provide photographs of known and suspected terrorists for
the watchlist database. The security and intelligence services of foreign states could also contribute to this effort. It would also seem advisable to expand FaceCheck so that it can be
used among other nations at their ports of entry to help identify terrorists around the globe. With an eye toward the future, OHS should work closely with the BC, INS, and DoDs ongoing
biometric initiatives to encourage the U.S. governments biometric development efforts. Priority should be placed on rigorous independent vetting and testing of biometric technologies.
Biometrics solves terrorism

Woodward 05
There is no high-tech silver bullet to solve the problem of terrorism. And it

is doubtful that facial recognition or other biometric technologies could
have prevented the terrorist attacks on September 11th. But to the extent
we can improve access control at sensitive facilities such as airports,
reduce identity theft and immigration fraud, and identify known or
suspected terrorists, then we make terrorism more difficult in the future.
Biometrics is one technology that can help us achieve the goal of a safer
America.
Biometrics solveempirics prove

Gorman 11
(Christine Gorman, How Biometrics Helped to Identify the Master Terrorist, Scientific
American, May 2011, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-biometrics-helped-to-identify-master-terrorist/)
When the U.S. military attacked Iraq in March 2003, it brought to bear the
most advanced technology then available for identifying potential
terrorists by their physical features. The equipment measured all sorts of physical featuresfrom fingerprints to images of the iris
but it was not particularly easy to use. The apparatus weighed a hefty 50 pounds and consisted of a hardened laptop hooked up to a camera, an iris scanner and a fingerprint device.
the toolkit used to identify Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani

hideout was probably a lot like one of the handheld devices that are now
routinely used by thousands of U.S. soldiers throughout the world to
compare people's faces against the images of many known or suspected
terrorists. Dubbed the HIIDE, for Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, the instrument looks like an overgrown camera and weighs between 2 and 3
pounds. In addition, soldiers took tissue samples for use in DNA analysis that later confirmed the master terrorist's identity with nearly 100 percent accuracy. The use of
biometricsstandardized measurement of various physical and behavioral
featureshas come a long way in the intervening years. There have been
two driving forces behind the breakthroughs: The first was the realization
that seven of the 19 September 11 hijackers were known to authorities
and had used false identity papers to gain entry to the U.S. "If we had had
biometrics on them and we had known they were using someone else's
identity, we could have stopped them," Lt. Colonel Kathy Debolt (retired) told an identity research conference in 2008. Debolt
Eight years later,
led the development of the identity assessment tool that the military started using in Iraq. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the U.S. Defense Department and the National Institute of
The second impetus to change was

the incredible boost in computer processing power of the 1990s: increased
speed allowed the devices to access the databases that lie at the heart of
biometric identification systems and compare thousands of features in
fractions of a second, providing useful answers just after an individual has
been detained or while a person is still in custody . Even some of the centuries-old standards have benefited
Standards and Technology poured millions of dollars into various biometrics research programs.
from the enhanced computer processing power. Fingerprinting was first proposed as a crime-fighting measure in the late 1800s and Paul Revere used dental records to identify the body
of a Revolutionary War hero killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. By the late 1990s, the FBI had computerized the process of matching fingerprints, allowing results in a matter of hours. The
law enforcement agency is now in the process of adopting a new system that can return results in minutes, according to Peter Higgins, who helped the FBI automate its fingerprinting
The newer methods of identification rely

heavily on both probability theory and precise measurement. It is not
enough just to measure accurately the distance between someone's eyes,
for example; the biometric calculation also must take into account how
common the result is in a given population. By combining the results of
multiple measurements (iris scans, length of nose, distance from top to
bottom of lip), users can come up with highly credible matches. Iris scans
have been widely used in Afghanistan to streamline the entry of
construction workers and other laborers into military bases. Iris scans can
also return usable images from corpses for up to 12 hours after death , Higgins
says, depending on the condition of the body. But Osama bin Laden is unlikely to have sat still for an iris scan while he was alive in order to provide a comparison image. As for
civilian use, iris scans are reliable enough that they have been used in
some European airports for a couple of years now to automate passport
control for frequent fliers who are willing to register a grayscale image of
the front of their eyes with authorities.* Several British airports are now going one step further and testing facial recognition
software that allows travelers to skip the immigration lines and process themselves into the country. As facial recognition software
gets better and better, concerns over privacy for ordinary citizens have
mounted. The best results occur when the software can compare highdefinition images taken in standardized settingsnot a frequent locale for
a shadowy terrorist. But millions of people already have such images of
themselves on file in their driver's licenses. In 2009, the FBI used facial
recognition software to nab a suspect in a double -homicide who they
believed had fled from California to North Carolina. The authorities
compared a 1991 booking photo of the suspect against the 30 million
photos that the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles had on file.
Twenty-eight photos came up as possible matches. An FBI analyst then
process 15 years ago and is now a consultant in the biometrics industry.
whittled the number down to just one man, who was later arrested and
positively identified as the fugitive.
Biometric data can lead to the capture of terrorists

Gilmore 06 (Gerry G. Gilmore, Biometric Data Keeps Captured Terrorists Behind Bars, American Forces
Press Service, March 2006, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15191)
A high-tech Defense Department identification system has

linked some captured terrorists to previous crimes and prevented their
release from overseas detention facilities, senior defense officials said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing here
March 10. "I understand that the (defense) department is collecting biometric information
from individuals detained in Iraq and for forensic investigations of
(improvised explosive device) attacks," Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the SASC's emerging threats and capabilities
WASHINGTON, March 13, 2006
subcommittee, said to Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland security. "Consistent with applicable law, we are aggressively using biometrics for the purposes that you
DoD established standard procedures for collecting

biometrics information about a year and a half ago and provided that
system to overseas U.S. combatant commands, McHale said. Biometrics is defined as measurable physical or
behavioral characteristics that can be used to identify people. Terrorists in Iraq often employ IEDs , or roadside
bombs, against U.S., coalition, and Iraqi military forces and civilians. Cornyn also
described, Senator," McHale answered.
asked McHale if DoD was sharing its detainee biometrics information with the U.S. Departments of Justice, State or Homeland Security, so that detainees who might escape could be
DoD's detainee biometrics information

databank is collocated with the FBI and is also shared with the
Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. The biometrics
program used for identifying detainees "is an extraordinary success
story," McHale said. In many instances, he added, that biometric data has kept dangerous detainees
safely under lock and key. "We have linked that data to specific individuals
and in specific cases have kept them in custody under circumstances,
where but for that biometric data, they might have been released," McHale said.
Similar systems are being used to improve force protection at U.S. military
bases in Iraq. During a demonstration conducted in the Washington, D.C., area in May 2005, officials showed how biographical data,
facial photographs, fingerprints and iris scans can be employed to develop
ID cards that can't be counterfeited, ideal for use by Iraqis and other non-U.S. citizens who work on U.S. bases in Iraq. The
need for a better way to screen people coming onto U.S. bases in Iraq was
illustrated by the Dec. 21, 2004, bombing of a military dining facility in
Mosul. That blast killed 22 people, including 14 U.S. soldiers, and wounded
at least 50. It was first thought the dining hall had been hit by a rocket
attack. Further investigation of the Mosul bombing pointed to the
likelihood that a suicide bomber had infiltrated the base - one non-U.S.
person killed couldn't be identified - and set off the explosion
prevented from entering the United States to do mischief. McHale responded that
State GoodGender
Working within institutions is keyotherwise, the political is
ceded to privileged white males
Philips 09 (Anne, Associate professor at the London school of economics and policial science in gender
studies and government, Feminism and Politics, 2009,
https://books.google.com/booksid=2vjlSnVwT1YC&pg=PA208&lpg=PA208&dq=Such+accounts+overemphasized+t
he+effectiveness+with+which+the+welfare+state+reproduces+the+capitalist+mode+of+production+through+w
omen%27s+dependence+upon+men+within+the+family.
+And+they+were+unable+to+explain+convincingly+just+why+the+state+should+need+to+reinforce+masculin
e+dominance+and+privilege.
+Zillah+Eisenstein+attempted+to+solve+the+problem+by+treating+the+state+as+the+mediator+between+th
e+dual+systems+of+patriarchy+and+capitalism.
+This+raised+another+set+of+difficulties+in+establishing+where+these+systems+began+and+ended,
+and+produced+an+analysis+that+was+overly+functionalist.
+Most+tended+to+focus+on+the+oppressive+aspects+of+the+state.+The+
%27capitalist+state27+view+was+particularly+dominant+in+British+feminism,
+reflecting+the+importance+of+class+divisions+in+British+political+life+and&source=bl&ots=6kE85Ut1O4&sig
=orWS-AnvWFK_c_49O-_CX-nrbk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAGoVChMIp6yEkcj5xgIV2DKICh3CBwug#v=onepage&q&f=false, mew)
Such accounts over-emphasized the effectiveness with which the welfare

state reproduces the capitalist mode of production through women's
dependence upon men within the family. And they were unable to explain convincingly just why the state should need to
reinforce masculine dominance and privilege. Zillah Eisenstein attempted to solve the problem by treating the state as the mediator between the dual systems of patriarchy and
capitalism. This raised another set of difficulties in establishing where these systems began and ended, and produced an analysis that was overly functionalist. Most tended to focus on
The 'capitalist state' view was particularly dominant in

British feminism, reflecting the importance of class divisions in British
political life and the tendency of radicals to interpret inequality and
oppression in terms of class. Attempts to work within the state arenas were viewed with suspicion and likely to be dismissed as cooption.
The influential text In and Against the State treats the state as a form
of social relations, which acts in the interests of capital. Though it
discusses working within the institutions, it exhorts people to build a
culture of opposition. As a result of adopting such a position feminists
were ambivalent about working within state institutions, which retained
their masculinist and exclusionary culture of white male and class
privilege.
the oppressive aspects of the state.
Working within the state is possiblereforms prove

Knop 93 (Karen, Professor of Public and International Law at the University of Toronto, Re/Statements:
Feminism and State Sovereignty in International Law, 1993, http://www.law-lib.utoronto.ca/Diana/fulltext/knop.pdf,
mew)
Part II offers a series of examples drawn from recent international legal practice and theory that suggest a trend away from the rhetoric of statism toward some form of liberal agenda.
From the ashes of an ideologically divided system has emerged a new

willingness to condition the international status of the State on its respect
for human rights, in particular the political rights central to notions of
classical liberal democracy. If the accepted definition of statehood
revolves around effective government, the policies and scholarly
arguments outlined in Part II amount to a reinterpretation of this
requirement as democratic government. While no example goes as far as to alter the definition itself, they strike at the
actualization of statehood in the international sphere by making democratic government a criterion for recognition of the State, for protection of its territorial integrity, or for its full
Part II then indicates how

the trend might be used to ground arguments for women's increased
participation in relations between States. Having made the rather contentious case for a trend away from statism,
participation and representation in the law-making process , both domestic

and international. If the status of the State in international law rests on
its respect for the right of participation in democratic governance, then it
is open to women to insist, drawing on arguments developed in feminist
critiques of domestic law, that the right be interpreted in ways that truly
afford women equal representation in government.
Impacts/Framing
Bioterror
Smallpox biological weapons are still a threat
Block 01 (Steven M. Block, professor of biological sciences and applied physics at Stanford University, The
Growing Threat of Biological Weapons, American Scientist, Vol. 89, No. 1, Jan-Feb 2001, p. 28-37,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27857397?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
Smallpox is a frequently lethal, highly

contagious disease caused by the variola major virus. By the end of the
second millennium, it had killed, crippled incapacitated, blinded or disfigured
one-tenth of all humankind who ever lived. In one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, smallpox was finally
All of which brings us to smallpox, the bete noire of bioweapons.
eliminated after a decade-long, worldwide health campaign, which was launched in 1967 under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), under the direction of Donald A.
The last recorded case of

smallpox occurred in Somalia in 1977, and the disease was officially
declared eradicated in 1980. Although there is no cure for small pox, it can be prevented with a
Henderson (now the director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University).
vaccine derived from the vaccinia virus. The U.S. Public Health Service recommends re-vaccination every 10 years, but since routine vaccination of the U.S. population ended nearly 25
years ago, few Americans retain immunity today. The current stocks of the vaccine are negligible. Fortunately, there has been some recent action to correct this state of affairs. As of last
September, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have contracted for a 40-million-dose stockpile of the vaccine. The first batches of the vaccine are slated to be
In the event of a
simultaneous terrorist attack on several major cities, hundreds of millions
of doses might be required to prevent the disease from spreading . Whether terrorists
could get access to the smallpox virus is still an open question. At the end of the heroic WHO campaign frozen
stocks of the variola virus were maintained in trust by two organizations:
the CDC and Vector, the Russian State Research Center of Virology and
Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Novosibirsk, Russia. These stocks were originally scheduled to be
destroyed on December 31, 1993, but this date has been repeatedly
postponed as politicians and health officials debate the wisdom of
retaining or destroying the remaining virus, given the growing
bioweapons threat. For now, the decision has been deferred by the WHO until 2002. A concern shared by many is
whether the Russian stocks are securely held. Ken Alibek has reported
that Bio-preparat secretly prepared smallpox based bioweapons up until
at least 1992, leading one to wonder how much viable smallpox virus
might exist outside the official Koltsovo depository. If any weaponized
material or viral stocks found their way to terrorist organizations, the
consequences could be disastrous. Simply put, smallpox represents a direct threat
to the entire world.
ready by 2004. However, some public-health scientists have questioned whether such a "small" stockpile is adequate.
New biotechnology is constantly being developedtheir

evidence doesnt account for new viruses
Block 01 (Steven M. Block, professor of biological sciences and applied physics at Stanford University, The
Growing Threat of Biological Weapons, American Scientist, Vol. 89, No. 1, Jan-Feb 2001, p. 28-37,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27857397?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
Beyond the smallpox scenario, what has people worried is the impact of
modern biotechnology. For better or worse, the world is in the midst of a stunning
revolution in the life sciences. Scientists have already determined the
complete genomic sequences for more than 30 microbes and even more
viruses. The DNA code for the cholera pathogen (Vibrio cholerae) was recently
published, and the genomes of more than 100 other microorganisms are
now being sequencedincluding the bacteria that cause anthrax, plague,
dysentery and typhoid. Of course, the new information is critical for answering fundamental and practical questions in biology and medicine, and will be
put to direct, practical use in a myriad of health-related applications. But what about "black biology"? Could biotechnology be used to produce a new generation of biowarfare agents
with unprecedented power to destroy? Or is this just alarmist hype? No one can say for sure, but many molecular biologists familiar with the relevant technologies seem inclined to a
pessimistic view. A key reason for pessimism is the ease with which genetic manipulations are now accomplished. Back in the summer of 1997, JASON (a group of primarily academic
scientists, which consults on technical matters for the U.S. government and its agencies) addressed the problem of next-generation bioweapons threats. The JASON study explored a
wide range of future possibilities open to genetically engineered pathogens, including some that could be achieved with the current state of the art and others that arehappilystill
The prospects are sobering. Both bacteria and viruses may now be
engineered to be qualitatively different from conventional bioweapon
agents. In terms of bioweaponry, this includes imbuing them with such
"desirable" at tributes as safer handling, increased virulence, improved
ability to target the host, greater difficulty of detection and easier
distribution. Several broad classes of unconventional pathogens were identified by JASON. These include "binary" bioweapons, which, by analogy with chemical
some way off.
weapons, are two-component systems in which each part is relatively safe to handle, but which become deadly in combination, and "designer" variations on genes, viruses and complete
Once gene therapy becomes a medical reality,

the technology that allows the repair or replacement of defective genes
might be subverted to introduce pathogenic sequences. "Stealth" viruses
could be fashioned to infect the host but remain silent, until activated by
a trigger. New zoonotic agents (those transmissible from animals to people) might be developed
specifically for bioweapon purposes by modifying existing pathogens to
seek human hosts. Finally, detailed knowledge of biochemical signaling
pathways could conceivably be used to create "designer diseases ." Of course, some of
life forms, including chimeras that mingle existing components.
these exotic possibilities seem downright superfluous given the dangers posed by the current generation of bioweapon agents. Then again, fusion-based hydrogen bombs seem
For now, even the most rudimentary genetic

manipulations could be used to enhance a bioweapons threat , for example
by introducing antibiotic resistance into a weaponized bacterial strain.
superfluous, given the destructive power of fission-based weapons.
ExtinctionBostrom
Extinction is probableprefer our methodology because it
combines philosophy and mathematics
Anderson 12 (Ross Anderson, deputy director of Aeon Magazine, Were Underestimating the Risk of
Human Extinction, The Atlantic, March 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/wereunderestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/)
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be

wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according
to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves. Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of
Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood
and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential
risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are
obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of
existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency
over the next century. Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime
advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition,
and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long
run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with
great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom
uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability
theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe
passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and
centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.
Anthropogenic existential risks are probable and could destroy

the possibility of human development
In the short term you don't seem especially worried about existential risks that originate in nature like asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes and so forth. Instead you have argued that
the majority of future existential risks to humanity are anthropogenic, meaning

that they arise from human activity. Nuclear war springs to mind as an obvious example of this kind of risk, but that's been with us for some time now. What are some of the more
I think the biggest existential risks

relate to certain future technological capabilities that we might develop,
perhaps later this century. For example, machine intelligence or advanced molecular
nanotechnology could lead to the development of certain kinds of
weapons systems. You could also have risks associated with certain
advancements in synthetic biology. Of course there are also existential risks that
are not extinction risks. The concept of an existential risk certainly
includes extinction, but it also includes risks that could permanently
destroy our potential for desirable human development . One could imagine certain scenarios where
futuristic or counterintuitive ways that we might bring about our own extinction? Bostrom:
there might be a permanent global totalitarian dystopia. Once again that's related to the possibility of the development of technologies that could make it a lot easier for oppressive
regimes to weed out dissidents or to perform surveillance on their populations, so that you could have a permanently stable tyranny, rather than the ones we have seen throughout
history, which have eventually been overthrown.
New factors make extinction probable

we've survived
for over 100 thousand years, so it seems prima facie unlikely that any
natural existential risks would do us in here in the short term , in the next
hundred years for instance. Whereas, by contrast we are going to
introduce entirely new risk factors in this century through our
technological innovations and we don't have any track record of surviving
those. Now another way of arriving at this is to look at these particular risks from nature and to
notice that the probability of them occurring is small. For instance we can
estimate asteroid risks by looking at the distribution of craters that we
find on Earth or on the moon in order to give us an idea of how frequent
impacts of certain magnitudes are, and they seem to indicate that the risk
there is quite small. We can also study asteroids through telescopes and see if any are on a collision course with Earth, and so far we haven't found any
And why shouldn't we be as worried about natural existential risks in the short term? Bostrom: One way of making that argument is to say that
large asteroids on a collision course with Earth and we have looked at the majority of the big ones already.
Their authors underestimate existential risksobservation

selection effect and self-sampling assumption
we underrate existential risks because of a particular kind of bias

called observation selection effect. Can you explain a bit more about that? Bostrom: The idea of an observation selection effect is
maybe best explained by first considering the simpler concept of a selection effect. Let's say you're trying to estimate how
large the largest fish in a given pond is, and you use a net to catch a
hundred fish and the biggest fish you find is three inches long. You might
be tempted to infer that the biggest fish in this pond is not much bigger
than three inches, because you've caught a hundred of them and none of
them are bigger than three inches. But if it turns out that your net could
only catch fish up to a certain length, then the measuring instrument that
you used would introduce a selection effect: it would only select from a
subset of the domain you were trying to sample. Now that's a kind of
standard fact of statistics, and there are methods for trying to correct for it and you obviously have to take that into account when considering the
fish distribution in your pond. An observation selection effect is a selection effect introduced
not by limitations in our measurement instrument, but rather by the fact that all observations require the
existence of an observer. This becomes important, for instance, in evolutionary biology. For instance, we know that intelligent life evolved on Earth.
You have argued that
Naively, one might think that this piece of evidence suggests that life is likely to evolve on most Earth-like planets. But that would be to overlook an observation selection effect. For no
matter how small the proportion of all Earth-like planets that evolve intelligent life, we will find ourselves on a planet that did. Our data point-that intelligent life arose on our planet-is
predicted equally well by the hypothesis that intelligent life is very improbable even on Earth-like planets as by the hypothesis that intelligent life is highly probable on Earth-like planets.
Well,
one principle for how to reason when there are these observation
selection effects is called the self-sampling assumption, which says
roughly that you should think of yourself as if you were a randomly
selected observer of some larger reference class of observers. This
assumption has a particular application to thinking about the future
through the doomsday argument, which attempts to show that we have
systematically underestimated the probability that the human species will
perish relatively soon. The basic idea involves comparing two different hypotheses about how long the human species will last in terms of how many total
people have existed and will come to exist. You could for instance have two hypothesis: to pick an
easy example imagine that one hypothesis is that a total of 200 billion
humans will have ever existed at the end of time, and the other
When it comes to human extinction and existential risk, there are certain controversial ways that observation selection effects might be relevant. How so? Bostrom:
hypothesis is that 200 trillion humans will have ever existed. Let's say that
initially you think that each of these hypotheses is equally likely, you then
have to take into account the self-sampling assumption and your own
birth rank, your position in the sequence of people who have lived and
who will ever live. We estimate currently that there have, to date, been
100 billion humans. Taking that into account, you then get a probability
shift in favor of the smaller hypothesis, the hypothesis that only 200
billion humans will ever have existed. That's because you have to reason
that if you are a random sample of all the people who will ever have
existed, the chance that you will come up with a birth rank of 100 billion is
much larger if there are only 200 billion in total than if there are 200
trillion in total. If there are going to be 200 billion total human beings, then as the 100 billionth of those human beings, I am somewhere in the middle, which is not
so surprising. But if there are going to be 200 trillion people eventually, then you might think that it's sort of surprising that you're among the earliest 0.05% of the people who will ever
exist. So you can see how reasoning with an observation selection effect can have these surprising and counterintuitive results. Now I want to emphasize that I'm not at all sure this kind
of argument is valid; there are some deep methodological questions about this argument that haven't been resolved, questions that I have written a lot about.
New risks exist

See I had understood observation selection effects in this context to work somewhat differently. I had thought that it had more to do with trying to observe the kinds of events that might
cause extinction level events, things that by their nature would not be the sort of things that you could have observed before, because you'd cease to exist after the initial observation. Is
there a line of thinking to that effect? Bostrom: Well, there's another line of thinking that's very similar to what you're describing that speaks to how much weight we should give to our
Human beings have been around for roughly a hundred

thousand years on this planet, so how much should that count in
determining whether we're going to be around another hundred thousand
years? Now there are a number of different factors that come into that
discussion, the most important of which is whether there are going to be
new kinds of risks that haven't existed to this point in human history---in
particular risks of our own making, new technologies that we might
develop this century, those that might give us the means to create new
kinds of weapons or new kinds of accidents. The fact that we've been
around for a hundred thousand years wouldn't give us much confidence
with respect to those risks. But, to the extent that one were focusing on risks from nature, from asteroid attacks or risks from say vacuum decay
track record of survival.
in space itself, or something like that, one might ask what we can infer from this long track record of survival. And one might think that any species anywhere will think of themselves as
having survived up to the current time because of this observation selection effect. You don't observe yourself after you've gone extinct, and so that complicates the analysis for certain
kinds of risks. A few years ago I wrote a paper together with a physicist at MIT named Max Tegmark, where we looked at particular risks like vacuum decay, which is this hypothetical
phenomena where space decays into a lower energy state, which would then cause this bubble propagating at the speed of light that would destroy all structures in its path, and would
cause a catastrophe that no observer could ever see because it would come at you at the speed of light, without warning. We were noting that it's somewhat problematic to apply our
observations to develop a probability for something like that, given this observation selection effect. But we found an indirect way of looking at evidence having to do with the formation
date of our planet, and comparing it to the formation date of other earthlike planets and then using that as a kind of indirect way of putting a bound on that kind of risk. So that's another
way in which observation selection effects become important when you're trying to estimate the odds of humanity having a long future.
Existential risks arent referring to extinction

Human Extinction, The Atlantic, March 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/wereunderestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/) *edited for bad discourse
One possible strategic response to human-created risks is the slowing or halting of our technological evolution, but you have been a critic of that view, arguing that the permanent failure
the definition of an
existential risk goes beyond just extinction, in that it also includes the
permanent destruction of our potential for desirable future development.
Our permanent failure to develop the sort of technologies that would
fundamentally improve the quality of human life would count as an
existential catastrophe. I think there are vastly better ways of being than we
humans can currently reach and experience. We have fundamental
to develop advanced technology would itself constitute an existential risk. Why is that? Bostrom: Well, again I think
biological limitations, which limit the kinds of values that we can instantiate in our life---our lifespans are limited,
our cognitive abilities are limited, our emotional constitution is such that
even under very good conditions we might not be completely happy . And even at the
more mundane level, the world today contains a lot of avoidable misery and suffering and poverty and disease, and I think the world could be a lot better, both in the transhuman way,
The failure to ever realize those much better modes of

being would count as an existential risk if it were permanent . Another reason I haven't
emphasized or advocated the retardation delay of technological progress as a means of mitigating existential risk is that it's a very hard lever to pull. There are so
many strong forces pushing for scientific and technological progress in so
many different domains---there are economic pressures, there is curiosity,
there are all kinds of institutions and individuals that are invested in
technology, so shutting it down is a very hard thing to do.
but also in this more economic way.
Scientific developments make extinction more probable

various developments
in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are
gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and there are these
blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain--you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus
from the Internet. So far the ordinary person will only have a digital
representation of it on their computer screen, but we're also developing
better and better DNA synthesis machines, which are machines that can
take one of these digital blueprints as an input, and then print out the
actual RNA string or DNA string. Soon they will become powerful enough
that they can actually print out these kinds of viruses. So already there
you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying
these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional
frontier of danger that you can foresee. In the longer run, I think artificial
intelligence---once it gains human and then superhuman capabilities---will present us with a major risk area.
There are also different kinds of population control that worry me, things
What technology, or potential technology, worries you the most? Bostrom: Well, I can mention a few. In the nearer term I think
like surveillance and psychological manipulation pharmaceuticals.
New discoveries irreversibly create risks for extinction

In one of your papers on this topic you note that experts have estimated our total existential risk for this century to be somewhere around 10-20%. I know I can't be alone in thinking that
humans are developing these very potent

capabilities---we are doing unprecedented things, and there is a risk that
something could go wrong. Even with nuclear weapons, if you rewind the
tape you notice that it turned out that in order to make a nuclear weapon
you had to have these very rare raw materials like highly enriched
uranium or plutonium, which are very difficult to get. But suppose it had
turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you
to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or
is high. What's driving that? Bostrom: I think what's driving it is the sense that
something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that
discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed. Each time
we make one of these new discoveries we are putting our hand into a big
urn of balls and pulling up a new ball---so far we've pulled up white balls
and grey balls, but maybe next time we will pull out a black ball, a
discovery that spells disaster. At the moment we have no good way of
putting the ball back into the urn if we don't like it. Once a discovery has
been published there is no way of un-publishing it. Even with nuclear
weapons there were close calls. According to some people we came quite
close to all out nuclear war and that was only in the first few decades of
having discovered the new technology, and again it's a technology that
only a few large states had, and that requires a lot of resources to
control---individuals can't really have a nuclear arsenal.
Nuclear Terrorism
Nuclear terrorism is likely and causes extinctionsecurity
experts agree
Rhodes 09 (Richard, affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University, Former visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, and author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb which won
the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award, Reducing the nuclear
threat: The argument for public safety , December 2009, http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/reducingthe-nuclear-threat-the-argument-public-safety)
the United States and other nations will face

an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of
mass destruction." It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a
superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world
where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has
increased (and that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a
terrorist nuclear attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of
nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A
terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory
nuclear strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the
perpetrators. That response would surely initiate a new round of nuclear
armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how
much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to
prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact that we invaded and
occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the
name of sending a message.
"The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future,
Extinctionnuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. would cause

retaliation, especially during tensions with Russia
Ayson 10 (Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New
Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects. , July
2010, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 33, Issue 7. InformaWorld.)
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, todays and tomorrows 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
But these two nuclear worldsa non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchangeare not necessarily separable. It is just possible that
in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially
plausible 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 explosion, the
materials used and, most important some indication of where the nuclear material came from.41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and
American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally
countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if
at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out

if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of
existing tension in Washingtons 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
its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But
in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular,
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
Washingtons 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 countrys 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
pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack?
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 Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to
provide. There is also the 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, bothRussia 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
Pragmatism Good
Deliberation is key to effective political engagementour
model of debate allows for effective contestation that builds
better politics
Sanderson 09 (Ian Sanderson, director of research at Leeds University, Intelligent Policy Making for a
Complex World: Pragmatism, Evidence, and Learning, Political Studies, Volume 57, Issue 4, pages 699-719,
December 2009)
ideas from pragmatism and from the study of complex

dynamic systems provide us with a sound basis for a neo-modernist
affirmation of the role of intelligence in policy makin g. Faced with an increasing appreciation of the
complexity of social problems through work in non-linear dynamics, we need to reconcile the pressure for radical
and innovative policy solutions to such problems with the entreaty to be
cautious and modest in our expectations of policy action. This implies the
adoption of a trial-and-error approach involving experimentation and
learning, an approach that is consistent with the pragmatist emphasis on
testing our policy hypotheses through our efforts to change and improve
social conditions. Moreover, I argue that we must maintain our faith in the endeavour of social science as the route to a better understanding of the social
world and therefore seek to harness the best available social scientific evidence into the policy-making process, but nevertheless acknowledge its contingent and fallible nature, its
contestability in the context of making decisions about future policy
action, and therefore the importance of testing it out in the experience of
policy making and implementation.We must recognise the validity of other
forms of intelligence, notably the practice wisdom of practitioners and the
experiential wisdom embedded in informed public opinion and seek to
bring these to bear upon policy making alongside the social scientific
evidence, in a deliberative process. Finally, we must recognise that policy
making is not just a technical exercise of harnessing evidence and
expertise but a broader exercise in practical rationality, a communicative
or deliberative process within which ethical and moral concerns are
addressed and all legitimate voices can be heard in coming to reasonable
decisions (Toulmin, 2001). And as a practical, deliberative process, it is an arena of potential learning, a
potential which, however, is not capable of full realisation within the
confines of technical rationality. In the light of our analysis of the implications of complexity and pragmatism, it is this theme of learning
I have argued, therefore, that
that emerges as the key for the future development of policy making, as recognised by Majone (1989, p. 183), who argues that: learning is the dominant form in which rationality
exhibits itself in situations of great cognitive complexity. This suggests that the rationality of public policymaking depends more on improving the learning capacity of the various organs
The themes of policy making as an exercise

in practical rationality, as a deliberative process and as a learning process
take us a long way from the territory of technical, instrumental rationality
within which so much discussion of evidencebased policy making is
situated. Acknowledging the challenges posed by recognition of the increasing complexity of social and economic problems and of the dynamic processes behind them and
of public deliberation than on maximising achievement of particular goals.
accepting (as I suggest we do) the implications of pragmatism as a foundation for a normative model of policy making,we might reasonably adopt the Deweyan notion of intelligent
At the heart of intelligent policy making should

be the commitment to experimentation and learning. We should ensure
that all relevant intelligence is brought into the processes of deliberation
intelligence comprising our best available social scientific evidence, the
practice wisdom of those who are experienced in dealing with social
problems on the ground and the common sense of those who
policy making to encapsulate what we should be striving for.
experience such problems. We should treat our policies as hypotheses designed to provide appropriate solutions to complex social problems but
around which there are greater or lesser degrees of uncertainty. Therefore , they need to be tested out in experience,
with the nature of the test reflecting the degree of uncertainty. Where
there is greater uncertainty, we should introduce pilots or trials, evaluate
their success and move forward cautiously. Where there is less uncertainty we can be more decisive in implementation
but rigorous monitoring and evaluation should be undertaken to test the validity of the assumptions upon which the policy is based and to capture learning to feed into future policy
deliberations. As Jowell (2003, p. 34) argues, this will require a culture change in policy making, but there are some positive signs, as in the increased use of pilots discussed above. In a
broad sense devolution in the UK has to some degree released the potential for differentiated policy making and policy innovation and attention is focusing on policy divergence in
Scotland andWales (Adams and Schmuecker, 2005). The recent advent of the Scottish Nationalist administration in Scotland may strengthen this trend. A potentially positive sign is
provided by the recent report of the MinisterialTask Force on Health Inequalities (Scottish Government, 2008) which recommended a strengthening of the role of evaluation in policy
learning and the piloting of learning networks in a number of sites to encourage experimentation with new approaches. This report therefore provides some important signals towards
the development of a learning approach to policy making in Scotland. The importance of building our capacity for policy learning has been emphasised by Graham Leicester (2006), who
advocates reflection in action as a learning model for professionals and practitioners, drawing on reserves of experience, intuition, tacit knowledge and all the hidden skills and
There is a need, he argues, to make space for

more creative thinking, small-scale experimentation and action learning
projects, and for encouraging, supporting and legitimising the role of
boundary spanners people who can take the initiative to cross organisational, practice and knowledge boundaries, to join up and encourage learning
capacities that technical rationality has relegated to obscurity (Leicester, 2006, p. 12).
(Leicester, 2006, pp. 147). The Scottish health learning networks referred to above can be seen as consistent with this position, providing sites for action learning, drawing both on
robust evaluation and evidence of what works and on the wealth of experience and tacit knowledge of local practitioners in building knowledge to guide appropriate intervention. The
emphasis on boundary spanning and sharing knowledge and practice indicates the importance of the principles of openness and connectivity the need to maximise the number of
channels and links for communication and dialogue and to encourage conversation on both an intra- and interorganisational basis. As Leicester (2006, p. 8) argues, all learning starts
with conversation. This brings us back to Majones deliberative, communicative conception of policy making; and for Dewey, the ideal model for the resolution of social problems was
free and open communication, a position subsequently developed also by Jrgen Habermas (Rosenthal, 2002). This raises a wider issue for a government seeking to promote intelligent
For Dewey the answer lay

in fostering the development of a truly democratic society, the generation
of democratic communities and an articulate democratic public (Dewey, 1954, p. 217)
policy making viz. its role in creating the wider social and institutional conditions to support this model of policy learning.
informed through the free and open dissemination and communication of the results of social inquiry. Dewey was committed to democracy not just as the political and institutional
context for an open, pluralistic, participatory model of policy making but more, according to Sandra Rosenthal (2002,p. 218), as the political expression of the functioning of the
It provides the conditions for the application of intelligence

through experimental inquiry to facilitate negotiation, adjustment,
accommodation and compromise required to produce the balance of
interests in intelligent decision making. For Dewey, the democratic process is
inherently experimental, cooperative, transformative; a process through
which individuals and communities grow by learning (Rosenthal, 2002, p. 220). In this sense, the
development of a model of policy learning in government needs to be set
in the context of moves to promote a learning society founded upon a
stronger institutional basis for free and open communication of knowledge
and for discussion and debate. The final word should be given to Dewey (1954,p. 208, emphasis in original): The
essential need ... is the improvement of the methods and conditions of
debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.We
have asserted that this improvement depends essentially upon freeing
and perfecting the processes of inquiry and of dissemination of their
conclusions.
experimental method.
Black Nihilism K
1NC
Black nihilism is not only physical spiritual, emotional, and
religious nihilism.
Warren 15 (Calvin R. Warren, George Washington University, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, The
New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 215-248, Michigan State University Press)
nihilism is a spiritual-psychic disorder that requires a spiritual

antidote. In this configuration of the spiritual, the nihilist is in need of deliverancedeliverance from the bondage of hope-death. We might, however, think of
the nihilists not as the fleshly embodiment of hope-death, but as spiritualists invested in the
deliverance of the spiritual from the clutches of the Political. The black
nihilist, in this regards, is profoundly spiritual and addresses the contamination of the spiritual by its political sequelae. Unlike the politicaltheologian, the nihilist does not promise redress within the structure of the
political, for this is impossible, but offers, instead, rejection of the political
as a spiritual practice itself.3 In a very thought provoking discussion published in Religious Dispatches about the murder of Trayvon Martin and
For West and Brogden,
George Zimmermans acquittal, J Kameron Carter, Anthea Butler, and Willie James Jennings conceptualize anti-blackness as a form of spiritual idolatry. Evoking the seminal text Is God a
anti-black political organization is often

anchored in a racist theologyone that considers anti-blackness Gods
will. Dr. William R Jones put the theodicy question to Black Liberation theologians and questioned this undying fealty to a liberation grounded in political reconfiguration and
emancipatory rhetoric. Is God a White Racist not only articulates the disjuncture
between emancipatory hope and the devastating reality of black
suffering, but also questions the place of the Political within this liberation
theology. This theology, indeed, presupposes certain metaphysical assumptions
about the Politicalprogress, linear time, and agencyand Dr. William R
Jones reveals a certain paradox within liberation theology: it is grounded
in the Political, but lacks a strong political philosophy to justify this
grounding (i.e. a philosophy that connects the theological to the Political). This becomes even more problematic
because these metaphysical presumptions are themselves instruments of
anti-blackness. Antiblackness, ironically, becomes the very foundation for
the purported liberation from antiblackness in this theology. This is precisely the contradiction
White Racist (1973), written by Dr. William R Jones, these scholars suggest that
that Dr. William R. Jones intimates throughout the text, and it is this entanglement that renders political liberation somewhat of a ruse. In the article Christian Atheism: The Only
Response Worth its Salt to the Zim- merman Verdict (2013), J. Kameron Carter perspicuously foregrounds the problem 18 of the Zimmerman verdict as a perverse deification of antiblackness. If the shooting of Trayvon Martin was gods will, as Zimmerman expressed to Sean Hannity in an interview, then this god considered black death a moral imperative, or an
act of righteousness, and Zimmerman, in shooting Trayvon Martin, assumed the role of the obedient disciple. For Kameron, this god is nothing more than an idol, a spiritual imposture
The white, western god-man is an idol that seeks to

determine what is normal. It is a norm by which society governs the body
politic or regulates, measures, evaluates, and indeed judges what is
proper or improper, what is acceptable citizenship. It is this idol, the idol
of the American god, that is the symbolic figure Zimmerman identified
himself with and in relationship to which he judges Trayvon Martin as, in
effect, religiously wantingwanting in proper citizenship, and ultimately
wanting in humanity (3) The white, western-god-man (or the American god) that Carter describes
bears resemblance to what Sylvia Wynter would call Manboth are philosophicaltheological apparatuses of anti-blackness, and they function to colonize
essential spheres of existence (Man colonizes human and the white, westem-god-man colonizes God). The white,
western-god-man and Man index a process of extreme epistemological
and metaphysical violence, and this violence serves as the foundation of
western society and its politics. The only response to this epistemological and metaphysical violence, according to Carter, is atheism. It is
created by modernity and its institutions:
here that we hear an uncanny resonance with Ernest Blochs Atheism in Christianity (1972), in which a good Christian must necessarily be a good atheist. True Christianity necessitates
a certain atheism, in fact it depends on it, to fortify the boundaries between the just/ unjust and the righteous/unrighteous. In other words, when a Christian encounters the idol of antiblackness, she must assume an atheistic posture toward this idol to remain faithful (or as Carter would describe it to be worth your salt).
Struggling is necessary to overcome anti-blackness.

The atheism that Carter proffers, however, is entangled in the metaphysical bind
that sustains the very violence his atheism is designed to dismantle. For
him, this atheism entails social, political, and intellectual struggle...
struggle in solidarity with others, the struggle to be for and with others,
the struggle of the multitude, the struggle that is blackness [as] the new ecclesiology (4)
The term struggle here presents political metaphysics as a solution to
the problem of anti-blackness through labor, travail, and commitment one embraces progress and linearity as social goods. With
this metaphysics, according to Carter, we can struggle to get rid of these Stand Your Ground Laws that are in place
in many states besides Florida, struggle against state legislatures (such as North Carolinas) that are enacting draconian laws of various sorts, struggle in the name of the protection of
struggle to imagine a new politics of belonging . (4) This

struggle contains the promise of overcoming anti-blackness to usher in a
not-yet-social-order. Again, the trick of time is deployed to protect
struggle from the rigorous historical analysis that would demand
evidence of its efficacy. The not- yet-social-order, situated in an
irreproachable future (a political prolepsis), can only promise this overcoming against a
history and historicity of brutal anti-black social organization. Carter is looking for a political
womens agency about their own bodiesin short,
theologyalthough weve always had one under the guise of democratic liberalismthat will provide conditions of life by mobilizing the discourses of hope and future temporality.
The problem that this theology encircles, and evades, is the failure of social justice and
liberation theology to dismantle the structure of anti-black violence ; this brings
us full circle to the problem that Dr. William R. Jones brilliantly articulated. Are we hoping for a new strategy, something completely novel and unique, that will resolve all the problems of
the Political once and for all? If the Political itself is the temple of the idolatrous godthe sphere within which it is worshipped and preservedcan we discard the idol and purify the
temple? Does this theology offer a political philosophy of purifi- cation that will sustain the progress that struggle is purported to achieve? In short, how does one translate the spiritual
principle of hope into a political programa political theology? The problem of translation haunts this theology and the looking-forward stance of the political theologian cannot avoid
the rupture between the spiritual and the Political.
Rejection of the system of legality is the only way to solve.

Can we reject this racist god and, at the same time, support the political
structure that affirms this idol? Can we be partial atheists? This
becomes a problem for Carter when he suggests that we abandon this
idol, but fails to critique the structure of political existence, which
sustains the power of this idol. Atheism as imagined here would entail
rejecting the racist- white-god, or a racist political theology, and replacing
it with a just God, or an equitable political theology. Will replacing the idol
with a more just God transform the political into a life- affirming structure
for blackness? Unless we advocate for a theocracy, which is not what I believe Carter would propose, we need an answer to this question of translation. The answer
to this 20 question is glaringly absent in the text, but I read this absence as an attempt to avoid the nihilistic conclusion that his argument would naturally reach. We
might even suggest that one must assume a nihilistic disposition toward
the Political if justice, redress, and righteousness are the aims. The
problem with atheism, then, is that it relies on the Political as the sphere
of redemption and hope, when the Political is part of the idolatrous
structure that it seeks to dismantle. In this sense. Dr. William R. Jones becomes an aporia for Dr. Kameron Carters text, if we read
Jones as suggesting that black theology offers no cogent political philosophy, or political program, that would successfully rid the Political of its anti-black foundation. The
Political and antiblackness are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The
utopian vision of a not- yet-social order that purges anti-blackness from

its core provides a promise without reliefits only answer to the
immediacy of black suffering is to keep struggling. The logic of struggle,
then, perpetuates black suffering by placing relief in an unattain- able
future, a future that offers nothing more than an exploitative reproduction
of its own means of existence. Struggle, action, work, and labor are
caught in a political metaphysics that depends on black- death. The black
nihilist recognizes that relying on the Political and its grammar offers
nothing more than a ruse of transformation and an exploited hope.
Instead of atheism, the black nihilist would embrace political apostasy :
it is the act of abandoning or renouncing a situation of unethicality and
immoralityin this sense. The Political itself. The apostate is a figure that self-excommunicates him/herself from a
body that is contrary to its fundamental belief system. As political apostate, the black nihilist renounces
the idol of anti-blackness, but refuses to participate in the ruse of
replacing one idol with another. The Political and Godthe just and true God in Carters analysisare incommensurate and inimical. This is
not to suggest that we can exclude God, but that any recourse to the Political results in an immorality not in alignment with Godly principles (a performative contradiction). The project to
If anti-blackness is contrary to our beliefs, selfexcommunication, in other words black nihilism, is the only position that
seems consistent.
align God with The Political (political theology) will inevitably fail.
Working within the grammar of politics and legalism will never

solve black nihilism is the only way to stop anti-blackness.
The point of this essay

is that political hope is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the
world, and placing hope in the very structure that sustains metaphysical
violence, the Political, will never resolve anything. This is why the black
nihilist speaks of exploited hope, and the black nihilist attempts to
wrest hope from the clutches of the Political. Can we think of hope outside
the Political? Must salvation translate into a political grammar or a
political program? The nihilist, then, hopes for the end of political hope
and its metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not antithetical to hope; it does
not extinguish hope but reconfigures it. Hope is the foundation of the
black nihilistic hermeneutic. In Blackness and Nothingness (2013), Fred Moten conceptualizes
blackness as a pathogen to metaphysics, something that has the ability
to unravel, to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If we read Vattimo through Motens brilliant analysis,
we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger and Nietzsche were really 31
after. It is a blackened world that will ultimately end metaphysics, but
putting an end to metaphysics will also put an end to the world itselfthis
is the nihilism that the black nihilist must theorize through. This is a far
cry from what we call anarchy, however. The black nihilist has as little
faith in the metaphysical reorganization of society through anarchy than he
they does do in traditional forms of political existence. The Black nihilist
offers political apostasy as the spiritual practice of denouncing
metaphysical violence, black suffering, and the idol of anti-blackness The act of reBlack nihilistic hermeneutics resists the point, but is subjected to it to have ones voice heard within the market place of ideas.
nouncing will not change political structures or offer a political program; instead, it is the act of retrieving the spiritual concept of hope from the captivity of the Political.
Ultimately, it is impossible to end metaphysics without ending blackness,

and the black nihilist will never be able to withdraw from the Political
completely without a certain death-drive or being-toward-death. This is
the essence of black suffering: the lack of reprieve from metaphysics, the
tormenting complicity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a
coherent grammar to articulate these dilemmas. After contemplating these issues for some time in my office, I
decided to take a train home. As I awaited my train in the station, an older black woman asked me about the train schedule and when I would expect the next train headed toward Dupont Circle. When I told her the trains were running slowly, she began to talk about the government shut down. They dont care anything about us, you know, she said. We elect these
people into office, we vote for them, and they watch black people suffer and have no intentions of doing anything about it. I shook my head in agreement and listened intently. Im
going to stop voting, and supporting this process; why should I keep doing this and our people continue to suffer, she said. I looked at her and said, I dont know maam; I just dont
understand it myself. She then laughed and thanked me for listening to heras if our conversation were somewhat cathartic. You know, people think youre crazy when you say things
like this, she said giving me a wink. Yes they do, I said. But I am a free woman, she emphasized and I wont go back. Shocked, I smiled at her, and she winked at me; at that
moment I realized that her wisdom and courage penetrated my mind and demanded answers. Ive thought about this conversation for some time, and it is this reason I had to write this
essay. To the brave woman at the train station, I must say you are not crazy at all, but thinking outside of metaphysical time, space, and violence.
must hope for the end of political hope.
Ultimately, we
K Links
LinkPanopticon
Panopticism is the root cause of surveillance, which promotes
governmentality and discrimination in both race and gender.
Ball 12 (Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, Routeledge-Surveillance Handbook, Colonialism and
Surveillance, Political Sociologist, Pg 272-273)
Greg Elmers chapter addresses this question about the place of panoptic models in the study of surveillance, and the place of Foucaults work in this field more generally. Elmer
the three key themes of panopticism, discipline and control to argue

for the continuing relevance of Foucaults work to the study of
surveillance. He does so by returning to the works of Jeremy Bentham the
original creator of the panopticon modelin order to make a distinction between understandings of
surveillance that focus on the reality of monitoring versus the more
Foucauldian emphasis on the likelihood of being watched . Elmer argues that Foucaults truly unique
concentrates on
contribution was to emphasize discipline, which entails a kind of automatic docility and self-government. Other authors have drawn upon different components of Foucaults wider body
Here, Ayse Ceyhans contribution focuses upon

Foucaults notions of biopower and governmentality, and how they
relate to contemporary forms of algorithmic surveillance which involve a
power over life itself. This often relies on population statistics and probability calculations. She demonstrates the
relevance of Foucaldian concepts to contemporary issues, showing in
particular how such surveillance is now central to neoliberal regimes, used
to manage populations and reassure an often anxious public. The French theoretical tradition
of work to advance our theorizing of surveillance.
contains other rich resources that can usefully advance our theorizing of surveillance. William Bogard outlines some of these works, detailing how insights from philosophers such as Jean
Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze can apply to the study of surveillance. Bogard foregrounds the model of the surveillant assemblage which is comprised of heterogeneous component
He also accentuates the prominence of a

hyper-real form of surveillance that involves complex models of
anticipatory simulation. The second section on difference, politics, privacy foregrounds how surveillance, used as
adevice in governmental practice, can both reproduce and exacerbate
different forms of disadvantage. The state is one of the most established
agents of surveillance, deploying an extensive data collection
infrastructure to analyze and manage populations. Toni Wellers chapter
places these state functions in a wider historical context, accentuating
how processes of rationalization and the rise of bureaucracy fostered
state governmental efforts. These were themselves connected to practices
of warfare and welfare, as state officials gathered data to protect citizens
against external threats, but also to manage populations understood as
forms of human resources. Such monitoring efforts, whether conducted by
the state or other agencies, are routinely connected to structures of
discrimination, as institutions make decisions about how to deal with
different individuals and groups. Hille Koskela draws attention to dynamics
pertaining to gender, discrimination and surveillance cameras,
accentuating how such devices have often reproduced the gendered gaze,
while doing little to rectify the types of harms that women experience . At the
parts which are aligned through processes of disassembling and reassembling.
same time, however, the introduction of personal webcams has allowed women (primarily) to become involved in projects of selective exposure which complicate existing gendered
. Simone Browne builds upon the theme of discriminatory

surveillance, focusing on different ways that surveillance is involved in
racializing populations. She accentuates historical context, stressing how
seemingly disparate technologies of representation are shaded by racial
factors. This includes such diverse forms of monitoring as the census,
wanted posters and biometrics, all of which have at different times and in different ways been part of racializing projects.
dynamics of watching and being watched
The aff approaches the solvency to their impacts from the

wrong starting point, meaning they can never solve. The
panopticon is the true root cause for racism sexism in
surveillance.
Following a historicalor more aptly put, archaeologicalorder, the

chapter begins with a discussion of the panopticon, before turning to the
concepts of discipline and lastly, control. There is a logic to this order beyond publishing history. First, as a
master signifier of sorts (and notably, the only noun in this grouping of concepts), the panopticon for better
or worse continues to serve as a key theoretical frame of surveillance
studies. As we shall see, however, for Foucault the panoptic prison first and foremost served to explicate a logic that could be seen at work in the spatial design of a series of
key social, medical, educational and psychological institutions . The building blocks of surveillance studies, if we
can refer to these central concepts as such, thus begin with Foucaults
interpretation of an architectural plan for a panoptic building. This
deconstructive move calls into question the externalization of panoptic
gazes at work in surveillance studies and their subsequent assumption of
a panoptic theatre that assumesat all timesa meaningful panoptic
object. The concept discipline as developed by Foucault, in the context of his writings about the panopticon in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, first published in 1975
(1977 in English), amplifies the philosophers theory of power, as a bio-political phenomenon, an internalization of power. Curiously the notion of
self-governing, or modifying ones behavior in the face of the panopticon,
is perhaps one of the least developed theories in surveillance studies . As such, this
section of the chapter emphasizes Foucaults theory of panoptic subjectivity, the importance of automated forms of political power and his more implicit critique of Benthams liberalism.
This section subsequently seeks to offer a more explicit discussion of the nature of coercion in the work of Bentham and Foucault, a remedy for the overly individualistic concerns
notably loss of private propertyin surveillance studies scholarship. Moving to the third concept, the chapter argues that controlin particular as articulated in the work of Gilles Deleuze
has tended to lend more weight to networked and immanent forms of surveillance, perspectives that highlight and otherwise question the ever-changing and everexpanding
surveillance systems, mechanisms, protocols, policies, techniques and technologies. This last section of the chapter questions why surveillance studies is far more likely to cite Deleuzes
brief and sketchy postscript, than his preceding book-length manuscripta work entirely dedicated to the work of Michel Foucault. It is argued that the postscripts explicit object of
which call into

question the immanent process of managing and governing the future.
studynew technologies has obscured or displaced the theoretical contributions that Deleuze brings to Foucaults disciplinary mechanisms,
The Panopticon promotes Governmentality, a clear violation of

human rights, ethical obligation to vote on this impact since
the aff cant solve for their impacts.
While surveillance studies has developed a strong attachment to the panopticon as a guiding theoretical inspiration, the concepts genesis as both an architectural drawing and a set of
letters, as interpreted by Foucault, is largely unexplored (see Murakami Wood 2007 for some exception to this oversight). Studies of Foucaultian panopticism often treat Bentham as an
introductory footnote and fail to question how the panopticon has emerged from a decidedly selective translation and interpretation. Oscar Gandy (1993), for instance, in the seminal
The
Panopticon is the name given by Jeremy Bentham to the design for a
prison (my emphasis, 9). To speak of the panopticon, in other words, is to all-too-often reference only Foucaults words, not the distinct interpretation of Benthams
panopticon plans and letters. The panopticon was not just a name or title for a building
coined by Bentham, it was a sustained political project, and a schematic
drawing of a reformist liberalism. It was in other words an expression of a much broader political philosophy, replete with an
book The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, says only that It is from Foucault that I derive the underlying concept of panopticism
architectural drawing to explicate its intended effects. The core theoretical and political contributions of Foucaults Discipline and Punish cannot be grasped without noting the diversions,
interpretations, strategic omissions and outright rejection of passages from Benthams series of letters on the panopticon from 1787 (see Bentham 1995). Benthams panoptic writings
were developed and subsequently published as a series of letters and an architectural drawing of a prison that invoke strong visual imagery of sightlines and architectural viewpoints.
They connote a plan in the making, a proposal whose components were

expressed and shared in specific details, moving the reader through the
exact measurements of an entire building. The first set of letters (numbers I-VI) are designed to capture the imagination
of the addressee, the last two (letters V and VI) subsequently provide an overarching summary of the panopticons architectural advantages. In conjunction with the drawings or plans of
the panopticon these introductory letters form the fundamental architectural or diagrammatic components of Foucaultian panopticismthey invoke a plan that embodies a theory of
Focusing on these first six letters we can clearly see where Foucault in
many respects inverts the governmental aspirations of Benthams
panopticon, an interpretation that places the panoptic subject at the
centre of the panopticon. The distinction moves the focus away from the
building as such, to the prisoners, from the act of directly watching to the
probability of being watched. The role of the panopticons tower and inspector, to use Benthams term, serves as a fundamental difference
power.
between the two authors work. The second of the panopticon letters introduces the importance of the centre of the building, for Bentham much more than a tower or viewing position
the tower also doubles as a residence: The apartment of the inspector occupies the centre; you may call it if you please the inspectors lodge (Bentham 1995: 35). Bentham further
A very material point is, that

room be allotted to the lodge, sufficient to adapt it to the purpose of a
complete and constant habitation for the principal inspector or head
keeper, and his family. The more numerous also the family, the better;
since, by this means, there will in fact be as many inspectors, as the
family consists of persons, though only one will be paid for it.
explains that, as a familial, domestic space, the lodge plays a key role in the efficient monitoring of the inmates:
LinkNeolib
Biometrics and the surveillant assemblage are part of
neoliberalism
Muller 10 (Benjamin J. Muller, Security, Risk and the Biometric State: Governing Borders and Bodies, page
52-53)
Haggerty and Ericson, in their discussion of the surveillant assemblage ,

comment that: "The radical nature of this vision becomes more apparent when one
realizes how any particular assemblage is itself composed of different
discrete assemblages which are themselves multiple " (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 608). It is this precise
vis. on which is fitting to the analysis here . As Salter and Lippert and O'Connor point out in their respective discussions of the
assemblage, there is a distinct separation between the assemblage and the
rationalities or technologies of rule that end up "eroding private-sector
best practices into the state" (Lippert and O'Connor 2003: 333). To this end, there are two core
issues I wish to discuss briefly in relation to this emerging ID card
assemblage and the incorporation or mutual overlap of private sector
best practices and modes of governing by/of the state: governing through
risk and neoliberalism. The literature on risk assessment, governing
through risk and the employment of technologies of risk is burgeoning
both in terms of theoretical innovations and material case studies (Amoore and de
Goode 2008; Aradau and van Munster 2007; Salter Muller 2008b; Rasmussen Aradau and Munster (2007) provide a convincing account of
the extent to which "risk" has become dominant aspect Of security politics in nearly all spheres. My focus on through risk here, while
related to the overall discussion in the book, is to highlight specifically the
extent to which private interests. Whether risk managers. actuaries or simply as a logic
Of governing the Of as a model of govern- (Evald 1991), are influential in the
escalation Of specifically biometric Il) card strategies as the sole legitimate
solution to a particular articulation of the contemporary problem that is
"insecure identity.- While 'here are transnational pressures for instituting machine readable (MRTD) With ubiquitous biometric aspects, from the US as well
as organizations like the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). the identity
that is generally believed most insecure is that more Closely associated With one's a Identity theft/fraud is far Widespread When it Comes to accessing bank accounts,
fraudulent use of credit cards, and so on, Whereas the effective use of
fraudulent passports is far less prevalent. Nonetheless. as the concept of the
assemblage suggests, the private and public connate , Whereas in the South African Case drive ID card as
if more to do With "banking the un-banked- as with any of the typical rationales for
national ID card strategies raised earlier (see Breckenridge 2008). Similarly. neoliberalism as a
mode Of governance folds neatly into the emerging ID assemblage.
Race pessimism is a response to neoliberalism and is a just

Eagleton 95 (Terry Eagleton Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University,
Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, In defense of history: Where do postmodernists
come from?, Monthly Review, vol. 3 no. 47 (July 1995), pp. 59-70)
Imagine a radical movement that had suffered an emphatic defeat . So emphatic, in

fact, that it seemed unlikely to resurface for the length of a lifetime , if at all. As
time wore on, the beliefs of this movement might begin to seem less false
or ineffectual than simply irrelevant. For its opponents, it would be less a matter of
hotly contesting these doctrines than of contemplating them with
something of the mild antiquarian interest one might have previously
reserved for Ptolemaic cosmology or the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas .

Radicals might come to find themselves less overwhelmed or out-argued
than simply washed up, speaking a language so quaintly out of tune with
their era that, as with the language of Platonism or courtly love, nobody even bothered any
longer to ask whether it was true. What would be the likely response of the left to such a dire
condition? Many, no doubt, would drift either cynically or sincerely to the
right, regretting their earlier views as infantile idealism . Others might keep
the faith purely out of habit, anxiety, or nostalgia, clinging to an imaginary identity and
risking the neurosis that that may bring. A small clutch of left
triumphalists, incurably hopeful, would no doubt carry on detecting the stirrings of
the revolution in the faintest flicker of militancy . In others, the radical impulse
would persist, but would be forced to migrate elsewhere . One can imagine
that the ruling assumption of this period would be that the system was, at
least for the moment, unbreachable; and a great many of the left's
conclusions could be seen to flow from this glum supposition. One might expect, for example,
that there would be an upsurge of interest in the margins and crevices of
the system--in those ambiguous, indeterminate places where its power
seemed less secure. If the system could not be breached, one might at
least look to those forces which might momentarily transgress, subvert, or
give it the slip. There would be, one might predict, much celebration of the marginal--but this
would be partly making a virtue out of necessity, since the left would itself
have been rudely displaced from the mainstream, and might thus come,
conveniently enough, to suspect all talk of centrality as suspect. At its
crudest, this cult of marginality would come down to a simpleminded
assumption that minorities were positive and majorities oppressive. Just how
minorities like fascist groups, Ulster Unionists, or the international bourgeoisie fitted into this picture
would not be entirely clear. Nor is it obvious how such a position could
cope with a previously marginal movement--the ANC, for example--becoming politically dominant, given its
formalist prejudice that dominance was undesirable as such. The historical basis for this way of thinking would
be the fact that political movements that were at once mass, central, and
creative were by and large no longer in business. Indeed, the idea of a
movement that was at once central and subversive would now appear
something of a contradiction in terms. It would therefore seem natural to
demonize the mass, dominant, and consensual, and romanticize whatever
happened to deviate from them. It would be, above all, the attitude of those younger
dissidents who had nothing much, politically speaking, to remember, who had no actual
memory or experience of mass radical politics, but a good deal of
experience of drearily oppressive majorities. If the system really did seem
to have canceled all opposition to itself, then it would not be hard to
generalize from this to the vaguely anarchistic belief that system is
oppressive as such. Since there were almost no examples of attractive political systems around, the claim would seem
distinctly plausible. The only genuine criticism could be one launched from
outside the system altogether; and one would expect, therefore, a certain
fetishizing of "otherness" in such a period. There would be enormous
interest in anything that seemed alien, deviant, exotic, unincorporable, all
the way from aardvarks to Alpha Centauri, a passion for whatever gave us
a tantalizing glimpse of something beyond the logic of the system
altogether. But this romantic ultra-leftism would coexist, curiously
enough, with a brittle
pessimism--for the fact is that if the system is all-powerful, then there can be by definition nothing beyond it, any more than there can be anything beyond the infinite curvature of
If there were something outside the system, then it would be

entirely unknowable and thus incapable of saving us; but if we could draw
it into the orbit of the system, so that it could gain some effective foothold there, its otherness would be
instantly contaminated and its subversive power would thus dwindle to
nothing. Whatever negates the system in theory would thus be logically
incapable of doing so in practice. Anything we can understand can by
definition not be radical, since it must be within the system itself ; but
anything which escapes the system could be heard by us as no more than
a mysterious murmur. Such thinking has abandoned the whole notion of a
system which is internally contradictory--which has that installed at its
heart which can potentially undo it. Instead, it thinks in the rigid
oppositions of "inside" and "outside," where to be on the inside is to be
complicit and to be on the outside is to be impotent. The typical style of
thought of such a period, then, might be described as libertarian
pessimism--libertarian, because one would not have given up on the
dream of something quite other than what we have; pessimism, because
one would be much too bleakly conscious of the omnipotence of law and
power to believe that such a dream could ever be realized. If one still believed in subversion,
but not in the existence of any flesh-and-blood agents of it, then it might
be possible to imagine that the system in some way subverted itself,
deconstructed its own logic, which would then allow you to combine a
certain radicalism with a certain skepticism. If the system is everywhere , then
it would seem, like the Almighty himself , to be visible at no particular point ; and it
would therefore become possible to believe, paradoxically enough, that whatever was
out there was not in fact a system at all. It is only a short step from
claiming that the system is too complex to be represented to declaring
that it does not exist. In the period we are imagining, then, some would no
doubt be found clamoring against what they saw as the tyranny of a real
social totality, whereas others would be busy deconstructing the whole
idea of totality and claiming that it existed only in our minds . It would not
be hard to see this as, at least in part, a compensation in theory for the
fact that the social totality was proving difficult to crack in practice. If no
very ambitious form of political action seems for the moment possible, if
so-called micropolitics seem the order of the day, it is always tempting to
convert this necessity into a virtue--to console oneself with the thought
that one's political limitations have a kind of objective ground in reality, in
the fact that social "totality" is in any case just an illusion. ("Metaphysical" illusion makes your position
sound rather more imposing.) It does not matter if there is no political
agent at hand to transform the whole, because there is in fact no whole to
be transformed. It is as though, having mislaid the breadknife, one
declares the loaf to be already sliced. But totality might also seem
something of an illusion because there would be no very obvious political
agent for whom society might present itself as a totality. There are those
who need to grasp how it stands with them in order to be free, and who
find that they can do this only by grasping something of the overall
cosmic space.
structure with which their own immediate situation intersects. Local and
universal are not, here, simple opposites or theoretical options, as they might be for those
intellectuals who prefer to think big and those more modest academics
who like to keep it concrete. But if some of those traditional political agents are in trouble, then so will be the
concept of social totality, since it is those agents' need of it that gives it
its force. Grasping a complex totality involves some rigorous analysis; so
it is not surprising that such strenuously systematic thought should be out
of fashion, dismissed as phallic, scientistic, or what have you, in the sort of period we are imagining. When
there is nothing in particular in it for you to find out how you stand--if you
are a professor in Ithaca or Irvine, for example--you can afford to be
ambiguous, elusive, deliciously indeterminate. You are also quite likely, in
such circumstances, to wax idealist-though in some suitably new-fangled rather than tediously old-fashioned sense. For
one primary way in which we know the world is, of course, through
practice; and if any very ambitious practice is denied us, it will not be long
before we catch ourselves wondering whether there is anything out there
at all. One would expect, then, that in such an era a belief in reality as something that
resists us ("History is what hurts," as Fredric Jameson has put it) will give
way to a belief in the "constructed" nature of the world . This, in turn, would no
doubt go hand in hand with a full-blooded "culturalism" which underestimated what men and women had in common as
material human creatures, and suspected all talk of nature as an insidious mystification. It
would tend not to realize that such culturalism is just as reductive as, say,
economism or biologism. Cognitive and realist accounts of human
consciousness would yield ground to various kinds of pragmatism and
relativism, party because there didn't any longer seem much politically at stake in knowing how it stood with you. Everything would become an interpretation, including
that statement itself. And what would also gradually implode , along with reasonably
certain knowledge, would be the idea of a human subject "centered" and unified enough to take
significant action. For such significant action would now seem in short supply; and the result, once more, would be to make a
virtue out of necessity by singing the praises of the diffuse , decentered, schizoid
human subject--a subject who might well not be " together" enough to topple a
bottle off a wall, et alone bring down the sate, but who could nevertheless
be presented as hair-raisingly avant garde in contrast to the smugly
centered subjects of an older, more classical phase of capitalism. To put it
another way: the subject as producer (coherent, disciplined, self-determining) would have yielded
ground to the subject as consumer (mobile, ephemeral, constituted by insatiable
desire). If the "left" orthodoxies of such a period were pragmatist, relativist, pluralistic,
deconstructive, then one might well see such thought-forms as dangerously radical. For does not capitalism need sure
foundations, stable identities, absolute authority, metaphysical certainties, in order to survive And wouldn't the
kind of thought we are imagining put the skids under all this The answer ,
feebly enough, is both yes and no. It is true that capitalism , so far anyway, has felt the need
to underpin its authority with unimpeachable moral foundations. Look, for example, at
the remarkable tenacity of religious belief in North America . On the other
hand, look at the British, who are a notably godless bunch . No British politician could cause
anything other than acute embarrassment by invoking the Supreme Being in public, and the British talk much less about
metaphysical abstractions like Britain than those in the United States do
about something called the United States. It is not clear, in other words,
exactly how much metaphysical talk the advanced capitalist system really
requires; and it is certainly true that its relentlessly secularizing,
rationalizing operations threaten to undercut its own metaphysical claims.

It is clear, however, that without pragmatism and plurality the system
could not survive at all. Difference, "hybridity," heterogeneity, restless
mobility are native to the capitalist mode of production, and thus by no
means inherently radical phenomena. So if these ways of thinking put the
skids under the system at one level, they reproduce its logic at another. If
an oppressive system seems to regulate everything, then one will
naturally look around for some enclave of which this is less true--some
place where a degree of freedom or randomness or pleasure still
precariously survives. Perhaps you might call this desire, or discourse, or the body, or the
unconscious. One might predict in this period a quickening of interest in
psychoanalsis--for psychoanalysis is not only the thinking person's
sensationalism, blending intellectual rigor with the most lurid materials,
but it exudes a general exciting air of radicalism without being particularly
so politically. If the more abstract questions of state, mode of production,
and civil society seems for the moment too hard to resolve, then one
might shift one's political attention to something more intimate and
immediate, more living and fleshly, like the body . Conference papers entitled "Putting the
Anus Back into Coriolanus" would attract eager crowds who had never
heard of the bourgeoisie but who knew all about buggery. This state of
affairs would no doubt be particularly marked in those societies which in
any case lacked strong socialist traditions; indeed, one could imagine much
of the style of thought in question, for all its suspiciousness of the
universal, as no more than a spurious universalizing of such specific
political conditions. Such a concern with bodiliness and sexuality would
represent, one imagines, an enormous political deepening and enrichment, at the
same time as it would signify a thoroughgoing displacement. And no doubt
just the same could be said if one were to witness an increasing obsession
with language and culture--topics where the intellectual is in any case
more likely to feel at home than in the realm of material production. One
might expect that some, true to the pessimism of the period, would stress
how discourses are policed, regulated, heavy with power, while others
would proclaim in more libertarian spirit how the thrills and spills of the
signifier can give the slip to the system. Either way, one would no doubt witness
an immense linguistic inflation, as what appeared no longer conceivable in political reality was still just about possible in the areas of
discourse or signs or textuality. The freedom of text or language would come to compensate
for the unfreedom of the system as a whole. There would still be a kind of
utopian vision, but its name now would be increasingly poetry. And it would even be possible to
imagine, in an "extremist" variant of this style of thought, that the future was
here and now--that utopia had already arrived in the shape of the
pleasurable intensities, multiple selfhoods, and exhilarating exchanges of the
marketplace and the shopping mall. History would then most certainly
have come to an end--an end already implicit in the blocking of radical
political action. For if no such collective action seemed generally possible, then history would indeed appear
as random and directionless, and to claim that there was no longer any
"grand narrative' would be among other things a way of saying that we no
longer knew how to construct one effectively in these conditions . For this
kind of thought, history would have ended because freedom would finally have been achieved; for Marxism, the
achievement of freedom would be the beginning of history and the end of
all we have known to date: those boring prehistorical grand narratives
which are really just the same old recycled story of scarcity, suffering, and
struggle.

Biometrics Aff and Neg - Northwestern 2015 Sophomores

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Biometrics AffAKON Lab

advnances i biometric authentification are organized around

the idea of race or epidermal thinking

. Similar to Lyon in asserting that bodily surveillance is by no means a new occurrence,

Parenti discusses the surveillance system of the plantation of the

Slave branding was one of

travellers, prisoners and others are having their bodies informationalized

Racialization is the foundation for newer biometric techniques

Instead of a world filled with persons indistinguishable to the imperial

The hereditary characteristics of race marked them off as

by means of which they could be accounted for, offered a form of

conditions for the possibility of fingerprinting, which was itself a

For Galton, the

the correlation between race and fingerprints

Fingerprinting seems race

The intersections of race and gender cant be ignored herean

In an extension of Bell Hooks's notion of "white supremacist

supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal surveillance": the use of

gender and sexuality are inextricably bound to surveillant

). A feminist approach to surveillance

sexualized ways of seeing. The essays in part. 1 make clear .that

All attempts to digitize blackness have failed- in particular

with this particular female classifier

when its calibrated to detect Black women, African classifiers better

we can see how epidermalizationand what I mean by that is the

This should lead us to ask questions about can these technologies be

Surveillance normalizes deviant bodies and imposes selfregulation

surveillance technologies seem to have become a commonplace for

both literal and figurative for challenges to surveillance practices. "

Non normative behavior pushes against the unidirectional

it is almost as though operators construct a map

Non-normative behaviour, however

Thus we affirm a critical biometric consciousness

Blacks live with a constant feeling of malaise and if

Surveillance tactics such as COINTELPRO are utilized to

FBI's counter- intelligence activities were

"There was no legal authority Or justification for such

Break down internal organization To exacerbate simmering

intensifying conflicts within the membership. 3. Create dissension

march.' 6 Hinder the ability of targeted individuals to participate in group

Surveillance has expanded to massive proportions new tech

everyday surveillance has increased to

Surveillance has expanded to massive proportions new tech

everyday surveillance has increased to

networks, once distinct spaces of knowledgecredit records here, medical

Modern surveillance on urban communities is not effective for

Urban surveillance strategies originally conceived to

interpersonal crimes. With reference to terrorism, this utility often shifts

Surveillance is not effective in deterrence reactionary

criminological literature is saturated with debate over the

UK the most high-profile massing of surveillance

Whilst target-hardening measures (such as security bollards and

Surveillance establishes a strong sense of governmentality and

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear:

Predictive policing, also known as Total Information Awareness, is described as

As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt

surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen

One of the most terrifying

the widest net is cast over black communities. Black

This is not a broken system, it is a system

Surveillance BadDiscourse Indict

role of surveillance in post-9/11 institutional arrangements,

Surveillance BadLegalism Ineffective

law has relied upon and