Framing

Biopolitics is the ability for strong government systems to sort and

control the lives of humans into different classes
We believe this notion is dangerous and thus provide a topical
framework.
You should vote for the team who best advocates for a
resistance to the current biopolitical structures in America
Prefer because it’s a- Root Cause – Federman 11 notes
Federman and Holmes 11. Cary Federman, professor of justice studies at Montclair State University and Dave
Holmes, professor of health sciences at the University of Ottawa, “Guantanamo Bodies: Law, Media, Biopower,”
MediaTropes eJournal Vol III, No 1 (2011): ♥Tina
Agamben asks, regarding Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction: what is the structure of sovereignty that
it
“consists in nothing other than the suspension of the rule ?” (Agamben, 1998, 17). For Agamben, the
state of exception is not a state of chaos. The state of exception is the “situation that results” from the suspension of the
rules (Agamben, 1998, 18). What defines chaos is not excess but its existence within a state . With
the suspension of the law, the “juridical order’s validity” (Agamben, 1998, 18) is suspended, withdrawn, and abandoned;
the outside and the inside collapse on each other. The sovereign has now created and defined “the very
space in which the juridico-political order can have validity ” (Agamben, 1998, 29). But the
validity of the juridical order is, at the same time, ambiguous. What is outside and what
is inside now exist in a “zone of indistinction” (Agamben, 1998, 19). Under these conditions, the state
of exception moves to the forefront of politics, redefining norms along the way . And in this
process of redefinition, the meaning of life for Agamben is clarified: the status of the
enem[ies to the system]y is one of bare life. The state of exception “implicated bare
life within it” (Agamben, 1998, 83). What is bare life? Agamben writes that in Roman law, homo sacer is the one who is
both sacred and damned. Homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is
permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be
killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in its sphere. (Agamben, 1998, 83; italics in original) In a
world bereft of nature, history, and a deity as a ground for ethics, life loses its
meaning as a thing-in-itself. The sovereign is the “guarantor” of the situation of life (Schmitt,
2005, 13). But what does Schmitt mean by life? Agamben locates two meanings for life in modernity. “The Greeks had no
single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life’” (Agamben, 1998, 1). They used two distinct terms for life: zoe,
“which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings,” and bios, “which indicated the form or way of
living proper to an individual or a group” (Agamben, 1998, 1). For Agamben, the central image (and producer) of life
during a time shrouded in the friend/enemy distinction is the concentration camp. The camp is a “no man’s
land between coma and death” (Agamben, 1998, 161). The camp comes into existence as a
political concept when the state of exception is normalized. The camp is not a temporary
camp, a displacement camp for refugees on their way to someplace else, but a permanent
feature of the modern world, modern politics, and of modern thought (Agamben, 1998, 174). It
is a place to house the zoes of the world (Agamben notes that in Greek, zoe has no plural; 1998, 1). Because it houses
the exceptional, it is a space of exception. When Heinrich Himmler created “a
concentration camp for political prisoners,” Agamben writes, he placed it “outside the
rules of penal and prison law” (Agamben, 1998, 169).

Essentially, when the government has too much control,

they sort the lives of humans into levels. For example, the
reason why poverty still exists is because, institutionally,
our system controls the lives of humans into certain classes.

B- Our speech act. Conley 06 notes

Conley in 2006  (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)

Here Deleuze and Guattari have faith in ‘subjects’ who undermine control by creating
new lines of flight. These subjects deviate from the dominant order that uses ‘order-
words’ to obtain control. Order-words produce repetitions and reduce differences. They
produce molar structures and aggregates that make it more difficult for new lines to take
flight. Yet something stirs, something affects a person enough to make her or him deviate
from the prescriptive meanings of these words. Deleuze and Guattari would say that the
subject molecularises the molar structures imposed by the state. People continually trace
new maps and invent lines of flight that open smooth spaces. Deleuze and Guattari call it
a ‘becoming-revolutionary’ of the people. In 1980, the philosophers also claim that humans inaugurate an age of
becoming-minoritarian. The majority, symbolized by the 35-year-old, white, working male, they declare, no longer
prevails. A new world is opening, a world of becoming-minoritarian in which women, Afro-
American, post-colonial and queer subjects of all kinds put the dominant order into
variation. Changes of this nature occur at the limit of mental and
social territories, from unstable borders without any clearly defined division
between inside and outside. They occur in and through affects, desire and
language. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-minoritarian must be accompanied by
a withering of the state and its institutions without which any generalized transformation would be impossible.
Thought they make clear in ‘Rhizome’ that the connections they advocate are different from those of computers that
function according to binary oppositions, the philosophers keep open the possibilities of transformations of subjectivities
by means of technologies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 475).Deleuze and Guattari are keenly aware both of the ways that
technologies transform subjectivities and of writing in a postcolonial, geopolitical context. Nonetheless, they write about
the state in a rather general and even monolithic way without specifically addressing a given ‘nation-state’. It is as if the
real villain were a general European concept of state inherited from the romantic age. The institutional apparatus of the
state dominates and orders its subjects, preventing them from being creative or pursuing their desires . It keeps them
from making revolutionary connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473). To construct
rhizomes and create smooth spaces for an optimal circulation of desire, the state, armed
with its ‘order-words’, has to be fought until, finally, it withers away and, in accord with
any and every utopian scenario, all identity is undone.

Biopolitics has numbed us to society such as us blinding

accepting overarching surveillance. This is key for the
educational value of debate
 Our Sole Contention is a Corrupt
State
Currently, surveillance is used as a way to flex the US control of the
populace, and outwardly show the power relations between the
government and the common man.
Indeed, past reforms have failed as Mill 20
Chris Mills, 9-24-2020, "Bipartisan representatives demand answers on expired surveillance programs,"
TheHill, https://thehill.com/policy/technology/518122-bipartisan-representatives-demand-answers-on-
expired-surveillance-programs //SS
“With the expiration of Section 215, we are concerned that the executive branch may, once again, be using
questionable legal theories of executive authority to justify the illegal surveillance of the American people,” Jayapal
and Davidson wrote in the letter, which was signed by another 37 other representatives. The letter raises concerns
about comments made by then-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.)
during debate over the reauthorization suggesting that EO 12333[recent executive orders]
could be used to conduct the same surveillance authorized by
the USA Freedom Act. A similar interpretation was used to justify Stellar Wind, the
Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens’ phone calls and emails. “If what
Burr said is true, it sounds like the government thinks most of Stellar Wind is still on the table ,”
Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel at the progressive group Demand Progress, told The Hill.
 First is throught ending the surveillance
state
Blas, 2014 {a.t. Blas, Zach. "Informatic opacity." The Journal of Aesthetics and
Protest 9 (2014).}
On June 7, 2013, the National Security Agency’s surveillance program was made public in news media with
the aid of whistleblower Edward Snowden, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and filmmaker Laura Portrais. Their reports revealed a suite of
software designed for global, invasive data searches and analysis, including PRISM, a data-mining application used to collect billions of
metadata records from various telecommunications and social media companies, and Boundless Informant, a visualization tool developed
to track and analyze collected data; a third was announced on July 31, 2013, as XKeyscore, a search system that mines extensive online
databases containing browsing histories and emails. Just as philosopher Michel Foucault once described the panopticon as the exemplary

this assemblage of software, whose reach is yet to be

diagram of surveillance in the modern age, 

fully known, will arguably become our contemporary replacement.  Both the
panopticon and NSA software control through an optical logic of making
visible. While the panopticon employs the threat of continuous visibility as a disciplinary means to achieve docile conditioning, the
NSA implements technical platforms to produce informatic
visibilities on populations, which is the aggregation of data for identifying,
categorizing, and tracking. Here, visibility is light as information . For instance, take PRISM: a
prism mediates and manages light, and as a transparent device, it suggests a mediation that is invisible, elided, obscured. Through a
seemingly phantasmagorical process, a prism catches light from the world and refracts and parses it, and PRISM’s logo depicts this, as light
rays are intersected by a prism to exude a single rainbow with demarcated color fields.

Loewenstein 14 notes
Loewenstein, Antony, The Guardian, 7-10-2014 ["The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control",
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/11/the-ultimate-goal-of-the-nsa-is-total-population-control,
accessed 12-25-2020] A&M ML

A Fisa court in 2010 allowed the NSA to spy on 193 countries around the world, plus the World Bank, though there’s evidence that even the
nations the US isn’t supposed to monitor – Five Eyes allies Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – aren’t immune from being spied
on. It’s why encryption is today so essential to transmit information safely. Binney recently told the German NSA inquiry committee that his
[the NSA has] a “totalitarian mentality” that was the
former employer had

"greatest threat" to US society since that country’s US [the]Civil War

Lowenstein 14 furthers that

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet
Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance. On 5 July he
spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs
unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations. “At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the
US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all
audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about
what it stores.” The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric
Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.
Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is
The ultimate goal of the NSA is total
ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited. “

population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law
enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.” He praised the revelations and bravery of former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden and told me that he had indirect contact with a number of other NSA employees who felt disgusted with the
agency’s work. They’re keen to speak out but fear retribution and exile, not unlike Snowden himself, who is likely to remain there for some
time. Unlike Snowden, Binney didn’t take any documents with him when he left the NSA. He now says that hard evidence of illegal spying
would have been invaluable. The latest Snowden leaks, featured in the Washington Post, detail private conversations of
average Americans with no connection to extremism. It shows that the NSA is not just
pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications.
 it’s said to be about terrorism but
“The NSA is mass-collecting on everyone”, Binney said, “and

inside the US it has stopped zero attacks.” The lack of official oversight is one of Binney’s key
concerns, particularly of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa), which is held out by NSA defenders as a sign of the
surveillance scheme's constitutionality. “The Fisa court has only the government’s point of view”, he argued. “There are no other views for
the judges to consider. There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations for US domestic audiences and you can double that
globally.”

Indeed, NBC 13 finds

NBC Universal. “NSA Has Access to 75 Percent of US Internet Traffic,
Says WSJ.” NBC News, NBC News, 21 Aug. 2013,
www.nbcnews.com/technolog/nsa-has-access-75-percent-us-
internet-traffic-says-wsj-6C10967780. Accessed 4 Jan. 2021.
The National Security Agency's surveillance network has the capacity to
[can]reach around 75 percent of all U.S. Internet
communications in the hunt for foreign intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Citing
current and former NSA officials, the newspaper said the 75 percent coverage is more of Americans' Internet
communications than officials have publicly disclosed. The Journal said the agency keeps the content of some emails sent
between U.S. citizens and also filters domestic phone calls made over the Internet. The NSA's filtering, carried out with
telecom companies, looks for communications that either originate or end abroad, or are entirely foreign but happen to be
passing through the United States, the paper said. But officials told the Journal the system's broad reach makes it more
likely that purely domestic communications will be incidentally intercepted and collected in the hunt for foreign ones.
When you affirm, the NSA no longer can do this surveillance that
seeks to control the population and the people on the “lower” end of
the power structures. Indeed, Ropek 20
Lucas Ropek, No Publication, 12-10-2020 ["Privacy Policy and the Biden Presidency: A
Promising Outlook?", https://www.govtech.com/security/Privacy-Policy-and-the-Biden-
Presidency-A-Promising-Outlook.html, accessed 1-7-2021] A&M SS
In the Biden era, could we finally see[s] the passage of a federal privacy
law? So far, the indicators look good. Americans' interest in expanded privacy rights is bipartisan, enthusiastic and
growing, and the expectation that both states and the federal government will be responsive to
this interest is at an all-time high. "The general election really indicated a huge desire among
consumers for greater privacy protections," said Pollyanna Sanderson, policy counsel with the Future of Privacy Forum, one
of the many organizations lobbying for stronger protections. In 2020, there was a groundswell of privacy-related policies that passed with overwhelming support in legislatures
throughout the country, she said. These included bills like Michigan's Search Warrant for Electronic Data Amendment, which passed with an 89 percent majority, or a
Massachusetts bill that gives consumers new protections for their vehicle data, and which 75 percent of state residents voted in favor of. The recent measure to strengthen the
California Consumer Privacy Act via creation of the Privacy Protection Agency, a new compliance-oriented entity, also passed with much support.
 The Second way fights government
overreach is by ending NSA decryption
Encryption is the process of protecting information by hiding it in a
secret code. Right now theNew York Times 13
Editorial Board, New York Times, 9-21-2013 ["Opinion",
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/close-the-nsas-back-
doors.html, accessed 1-2-2021] A&M SS
In 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped build an international encryption
system to help countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to the many users of the system,
a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a “back door”
into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using
its technology.¶ Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make clear that the
agency has never met an encryption system that it has not tried to
penetrate. And it frequently tries to take the easy way out. Because modern cryptography can be so
hard to break, even using the brute force of the agency’s powerful supercomputers, the agency prefers to
collaborate with big software companies and cipher authors, getting hidden access built
right into their systems.¶ The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica recently reported that the
agency now has access to the codes that protect commerce and banking systems, trade
secrets and medical records, and everyone’s e-mail and Internet chat messages,
including virtual private networks. In some cases, the agency pressured
companies to give it access; as The Guardian reported earlier this year, Microsoft provided access
to Hotmail, Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. According to some of the Snowden documents given to Der Spiegel, the
N.S.A. also has access to the encryption protecting data on iPhones, Android and BlackBerry phones. ¶
Larson 13 continues that
Jeff Larson, ProPublica, 9-5-2013 ["Revealed: The NSA's Secret Campaign to Crack,
Undermine Internet Security", https://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-
campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption, accessed 1-3-2021] A&M SS
The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption,
us[es]ing supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and
behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools
protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age,
according to newly disclosed documents.¶ This story has been reported in partnership between The New York Times, the
Guardian and ProPublica based on documents obtained by The Guardian. ¶ The agency has circumvented or
cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and
banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and
automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of
Americans and others around the world, the documents show.¶ Many users assume — or have been assured
by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants
to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected
information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a
highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J.
Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Encryption is important as Kozel 16 notes that

Susan Kozel No Publication, xx-xx-xxxx ["",
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/31479/627661.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y,
accessed 1-3-2021] A&M SS
What can we extract from these three disparate but similarly named materialisations of digital culture? From the Whisper app it is possible
to read a largescale breach of trust and the need to protect ourselves without completely censoring our digitally mediated expression. From
see how the poeticising of bio-data to obscure actual
whisper(s) the wearables project, we
physiological information is a play of ambiguity: this was a first glimpse of what I am
now calling performing encryption. And from The Whisperers we see a picture of a society
forced to rely almost exclusively on analogue, physical, verbal and somatic performances
of encryption. This last whisper is the cautionary tale: the desperate repression that can result[s]
from pervasive systemic surveillance. Together these three cultural events act as a prologue to
this chapter, grounding the dilemma of how performers and researchers into performativity
can preserve digital expression while maintaining affective privacy. In more politically
straightforward terms, the dilemma is how to facilitate a cultural shift away

from passive acceptance of dataveillance (data surveillance) in order to

reclaim agency over our bodies and digital traces . This is ontological
because it goes beyond ways of acting or thinking, it relates to new materialisations that
may take the form of human actions, political constructs or technological configurations.
This is the terrain for performing encryption . A POLITICAL ONTOLOGY This is not a
manifesto or a call to action – at least not yet. It is too simple to identify a difficult political situation and point to solutions from the world
of performance. It
is important first to deepen and, in fact, to trouble the task a little further by
revealing one of the most worrying and at the same time hopeful dimensions: how bodies
performing with mobile media (assemblages of technologies and flesh) are both
complicit in politically suspect digital practices and able to produce counter-practices . This
can be understood if we look to the political ontology of dance proposed by Andre Lepecki in Exhausting Dance (2006), and then transpose
his argument into performances, both artistic and social, with digital networked devices. Lepecki constructs a two-layered argument by
describing how dance is not only related to politics but can be ontologically and politically embedded in the formation of repressive political
events. In
terms that are relevant to performing encryption, he witnesses rearrangements
and refigurations of dance in relation to politics. “[R]earrangements of the very notion of
dance” refer not only to “the position of dance in relation to politics, but of the
ontological and political role of movement in the formation of those disturbing events”
(Lepecki 2006: 16
 The Third is through Chilling Anti-
Government Activism
Wong 15 notes that

Cynthia M. Wong, Human Rights Watch, xx-xx-xxxx ["World Report

2015: Rights Trends in Internet at a Crossroads",
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/global-0,
accessed 12-25-2020] A&M SS
A joint report published by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties
Union in July 2014 documented the insidious effects of large-scale surveillance on the
practice of journalism and law in the US. Interviews with dozens of journalists showed
that increased surveillance, combined with tightened measures to prevent leaks and government contact with media,
are intimidating sources, keeping them from talking to
journalists (even about unclassified topics of public concern) out of fear that they could face retaliation, lose their security
clearances or jobs, or even face prosecution. Ultimately, this
is having a detrimental impact on the amount and quality
of news coverage,
particularly on matters related to national security, intelligence, and law
enforcement. This effect undermines the role of the fourth estate in holding
government to account. Steve Coll, staff writer for the New Yorker and dean of the Graduate School of
Journalism at Columbia University, explained: “Every
national security reporter I know would say that the
atmosphere in which professional reporters seek insight into policy failures [and] bad
military decisions is just much tougher and much chillier.” Public understanding
of national security policies that are carried out in our name is essential to the
functioning of healthy democracies and open societies.

Paglen 14 the people are

Trevor Paglen, Human Rights Watch, 7-28-2014 ["With Liberty to Monitor All",
https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/07/28/liberty-monitor-all/how-large-scale-us-
surveillance-harming-journalism-law-and, accessed 12-26-2020] A&M SS
Every national security reporter I know would say that the
atmosphere in which professional reporters seek insight into policy
failures [and] bad military decisions is just much tougher and much
chillier. — Steve Coll, staff writer for The New Yorker and Dean of the Graduate School of
Journalism at Columbia University, February 14, 2014 Numerous US-based journalists covering
intelligence, national security, and law enforcement describe the current reporting
landscape as, in some respects, the most difficult they have ever faced. “This is the worst I’ve seen in
terms of the government’s efforts to control information,” acknowledged Jonathan Landay, a veteran national security and intelligence
correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.68 “It’s a terrible time to be covering government,” agreed Tom Gjelten, who has worked with
National Public Radio for over 30 years.69 According to Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated
Press, “We say this every time there’s a new occupant in the White House, and it’s true every time: each is more secretive than the last.”70
Journalists are struggling harder than ever before to protect their sources, and sources are more reluctant to speak. This environment
makes reporting both slower and less fruitful. Journalists
interviewed for this report described the
difficulty of obtaining sources and covering sensitive topics in an atmosphere of
uncertainty about the range and effect of the government’s power over them. Both
surveillance and leak investigations loomed large in this context—especially to the extent
that there may be a relationship between the two. More specifically, many journalists see the government’s
power as menacing because they know little about when various government agencies share among themselves information collected
through surveillance, and when they deploy that information in leak [what they] will do with it,” observed James Asher, Washington Bureau
Chief for McClatchy Co., the third largest newspaper group in the country. 72
One Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
for a newspaper noted that even a decrease in leak prosecutions is unlikely to help,
“unless we [also] get clear lines about what is collectable and usable.”73 Others agreed.
“I’m pretty worried that NSA information will make its way into
leak investigations,” said one investigative journalist for a major outlet.74 A reporter who covers national defense
expressed concern about the possibility of a “porous wall” between the NSA and the Department of Justice, the latter of which receives
referrals connected to leak investigations.75 Jonathan Landay wondered whether the government might analyze metadata records to
identify his contacts.76 A national security reporter summarized the situation as follows: “Do we trust [the intelligence] portion of the
government’s knowledge to be walled off from leak investigations? That’s not a good place to be.”77 While
most journalists
said that their difficulties began a few years ago, particularly with the increase in leak
prosecutions, our interviews confirmed that for many journalists largescale surveillance
by the US government contributes substantially to the new challenges they encounter.
The government’s large-scale collection of metadata and communications
[which]makes it significantly more difficult for them to protect
themselves and their sources, to confirm details for their stories, and ultimately to inform the

public.

Dr. Owens 17 furthers that

S Owens, No Publication, xx-xx-2017 ["Sci-Hub", https://sci-
hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504630.2017.1291092, accessed 1-3-
2021] A&M SS
Conclusion While ICTs and SNSs facilitate state surveillance of contentious political movements, this is not to say that
social media does not or cannot play a role in challenging the state and/or its representatives. ICTs and SNSs may well
Social media might very well
facilitate citizen engagement in an enhanced political communicative sphere.
foster[s] climates of communication that make the ground
fertile for social change such as in Philip N. Howard’s analyses of social media in the Middle East
where he concludes that social media are a necessary but not sufficient condition of the various uprisings seen in the Arab
Spring. He argues that in the case of Egypt events there ‘not only helped spark protest
movements in SOCIAL IDENTITIES 9 neighboring countries, they also seeded a global
conversation about the politics of freedom’ (Howard and Hussain, 2013, p. 56). Much as the literature
more broadly pertaining to the use of SNSs suggests that they often augment existing social relationships and social
networks, within the Middle East SNSs also worked with existing social networks to spread information and make the
sharing of information easier (Papic and Noonan, 2011). Of course, this comes with the price of making the same
information readily available to authorities. Governments of liberal democratic and authoritarian bents have all utilised
social media surveillance to monitor and manage outbreaks of dissent. Social media are, however, only one
lens through which to analyse the securitisation of dissent that has intensified across the
globe in recent years. The intensification of control and command responses to
demonstrations, the militarisation of police departments, and the discursive
construction of protestors as domestic terrorists are all evidence of the securitisation of
dissent. These phenomena overlap and intersect with ubiquitous social media
surveillance. Ultimately, the very real danger is that people will more generally
internalise the surveillance network and do the work of censorship upon themselves.
Akin to Foucault’s prisoner in the panopticon (1979), social media users are
reporting that they are less likely to engage in political
conversations online, and that the costs are possibly too high to risk engaging in political dissent. A
report from Pew Research titled ‘Social Media and the “Spiral of Silence”’ (August 26, 2014) analysed the sentiment of
[because of] NSA’s various
internet users following the Snowden revelations regarding the
social media surveillance programmes and found that people do engage in self-
censorship online, and ironically that they were especially reluctant to discuss the Snowden/NSA case on social media.
An informed citizenry
The consequences of this are of great concern to the report’s authors:
depends on people’s exposure to information on important
political issues and on their willingness to discuss these issues
with those around them. The rise of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has introduced
new spaces where political discussion and debate can take place. This report explores the degree to which social media
affects a long-established human attribute – that those who think they hold minority opinions often self-censor, failing to
speak out for fear of ostracism or ridicule. It is called the ‘spiral of silence’. (Hampton et al., 2014) The
internalisation of the surveillance assemblage, and the fear of speaking out for fear of
both being monitored by authorities and friends, means that the spaces for dissent may
actually feel as though they are shrinking by many people. This is perhaps the real risk of
the present surveillance era.

Aggressive journalism checks against governmental overstretch

Mansbach, 2011, ~Abraham, senior lecturer for the Department of
Philosophy at the Ben-Gurion University of Negev, "Whistleblowing as
Fearless Speech: The Radical Democratic Effects of Late Modern
Parrhesia",
http://whistleblowers.dk/ArkivPDF/whistleblowing_and_democratic_val
ues_3rd_jan(1).pdf
Fearless speech not only preserves the value structures of modern
democracies, it extends them. Indeed, its ‘logic’ coincides with the radical democratic project
elaborated by scholars such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985 ). Radical democracy
presents a vision and political program that highlight the moral
worth of human beings and combine the liberal values of
autonomy, freedom, and pluralism with fundamental social
premises like equality and social justice. A central feature of the
project is that it does not invoke a final state or closure; it is an open-ended
endeavor. The basic premise is that the principles of liberty and equality, which are at the core of
this project, exist in irreconcilable tension and that any equilibrium or balance between them is
virtually impossible. The radicalization of liberal democracy does not mean its replacement by other forms of social
arrangement, but rather it consists of trying to extend equality and liberty to an increasing number of social relations. The
ultimate objective is to maintain a living, vibrant democracy. One of the ways to keep democracy vibrant
is to [by] continually critique these [of] principles and values -
politically, publicly, through the organs of civil society, and
through internal regulatory or supervisory bodies. This undertaking
ensures that the values are implemented in material life , on the one
hand, and that they do not become mere elements of ideological
manipulation, on the other. Radical democracy is committed to the principle that liberal
democratic societies must be held accountable for professed ideals. The practice of fearless speech takes up the challenge.
But fearless speech extends the democratic principles and
practices in another critical respect related to identity and
identification. Radical democracy conceives of social space as constructed by ongoing social
conflict. It also conceives of social and political identities as being
constantly transformed by the actions, practices, roles, and
functions of individuals in the different components of society,
such as family and work. For radical democracy to be realized, a new identity informed by the
principles of liberty and equality must be created or constituted Radical democracy demands a
change in identification and of identity. The change is two-
pronged, occurring at both the collective and individual levels.
The first constitutes a radical, democratic we, and the other a
radical, democratic I. While there is a distinction between collective vis-à-vis individual autonomy –
i.e., between the public sphere (respublica) and the private one – it is important to remember that the distinction is
analytical. The two spheres intersect and, in this respect, co-exist in tension: The distinction and tension between these
two spheres and identities, essential to the project of radical democracy, is the flip side, so to speak, of the distinction and
tension between liberty and equality. 'This tension is the very life of modern democracies, and what makes them vibrant.’
The way to invigorate [democracy]this tension is through
(Mouffe 1992 p. 236)
an intensification of democratic action. This action is for the
‘we,’ and includes those struggles waged against inequality in
the spirit of radical democracy. Collective political identities are created through a collective
identification of the democratic demands of a specific social movement, be it for women, workers, the environment, or an
ethnic or religious group. In addition to the collective struggles for liberty and equality that constitute a collective identity,
there are struggles that affect the individual’s identity, either by recreating it or by preserving it. These are struggles where
personal liberty is envisioned and personal autonomy is exercised . Fearless speech, I argue, is
just such an endeavor . It is a personal act that re-creates the individual’s identity, yet simultaneously,
by being beneficial to the public, is not antagonistic to the ‘we.’ I will examine this in detail by focusing on fearless speech
in the workplace. 4. Identity, Identification, and Fearless Speech While there are exceptions, such as workers co-
the workplace is typically a
operatives and voluntary communitarian arrangements like the Israeli Kibbutz,
hierarchical organization where ideological and material elements are combined with a variety of
tactics designed, among other things, to obtain workers’ compliance (Korczynski et al.
2006). Nevertheless, and in spite of the apparent insularity of this system, studies of the ‘logic’ of labor and organizational
processes have identified different forms of resistance that appear in its crevices (Perrucci et al. 1980).
Resistance in the workplace can take many forms, such as outright sabotage,
foot-dragging, and other work-avoidance strategies, such as when employees spend time on personal activities while at
Whistleblowing in the workplace has
work (Certeau 1984; Scott 1985; Jermier 1988).
also been identified as one of these forms of resistance, and
whistleblowers have been called, appropriately, ‘ethical
dissenters’ (Elliston 1982). But this form of resistance is unique
in contrast with other types: the personal-organizational
position of the whistleblower is special. Some believe these individuals naïve for
assuming that organizations adhere to their stated missions and will consequently want to know about and rectify illegal
In reality, whistleblowers are usually highly competent and
activities.
respected and have stronger than normal allegiance to
organizational as well as extraorganizational principles and
norms (De Maria 1996; Brown 2008; Miceli et al. 2008).
Whistleblowers stop being obedient to the organization at that
moment when companies demand that they collaborate directly
or indirectly in illegal activities and/or reprehensible, antisocial
workplace norms or behavior. Such dissent, I want to argue, is related to
the question of identity and identification . That is, to the way in which the
whistleblower perceives his or her self - the self image - and to the way in which he or
she is identified by others. There are different ways in which identity and identification intertwine
with fearless speech. In one, which I will lay out briefly, identity, compliance and oppression converge. The nexus between
While there is a debate about the extent
work and identity is a well-known social fact.
to which the social and economic realities of late capitalism have
transformed this relationship, the workplace continues to be a
powerful source of identity and identification (Leidner 2006). In
the case of workplace whistleblowers, this sense of identification
is revealed in the acceptance of the way in which work is
organized. Its hierarchical structure and attendant system of
control are seen as beneficial to the company’s efficiency, and
whistleblowers demonstrate their identification with the
company by complying with them (Collinson 2006). We could
say that the position whistleblowers occupy in the organization
is one of ‘voluntary subordination.’ As Laclau and Mouffe suggest, the meaning of
subordination here does not entail antagonism; rather, it reflects ‘a set of differential positions between social agents …
Fearless speech is a case of
which constructs each social identity as positivity …’ (1985 p. 154).
resistance to the process of subjectivation (Foucault 1983).

Lack of accountable governance ensures the worst social in

justice and militarized violence

Roberts ’13 (Paul

Craig Roberts currently a columnist. He is a former
editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and
Scripps Howard News Service. He has testified before congressional
committees on 30 occasions and formerly served as an Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of
Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California,
Berkeley and at Merton College, Oxford University. He was a senior
fellow in political economy at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, then part of Georgetown University.“Humanity
Is Drowning In Washington's Criminality” - OpEdNews - 8/13/2013 -
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Humanity-Is-Drowning-In-Wa-
by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-130813-17.html)
If an American citizen lies to a federal investigator, even if not under oath, the citizen can be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Yet, these same federal
Whatever the American political system is, it has
personnel can lie to Congress and to citizens with impunity.

nothing whatsoever to do with accountable government. In Amerika no one is accountable but citizens, who are
accountable not only to law but also to unaccountable charges for which no evidence is required. Congress has the power to impeach any presidential appointee as
well as the president. In the 1970s Congress was going to impeach President Richard Nixon simply because he lied about when he learned of the Watergate
burglary. To avoid impeachment, Nixon resigned. In the 1990s, the House impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual affair with a White House
intern. The Senate failed to convict, no doubt as many had sexual affairs of their own and didn't want to be held accountable themselves. In the 1970s when I was
on the Senate staff, corporate lobbyists would send attractive women to seduce Senators so that the interest groups could blackmail the Senators to do their
bidding. Don't be surprised if the NSA has adopted this corporate practice. The improprieties of Nixon and Clinton were minor, indeed of little consequence, when
compared to the crimes of George W. Bush and Obama, their vice presidents, and the bulk of their presidential appointees. Yet, impeachment is "off the table," as
Nancy Pelosi infamously declared. Why do Californian voters send a person to Congress who refuses to protect them from an unaccountable executive branch?
Who does Nancy Pelosi serve? Certainly not the people of California. Most certainly not the US Constitution. Pelosi is in total violation of her oath of office. Will
What is the purpose of the
Californians re-elect her yet again? Little wonder America is failing. The question demanding to be asked is:

domestic surveillance of all Americans? This is surveillance out of all proportion to the
alleged terrorist threat. The US Constitution is being ignored and domestic law violated. Why? Does the US government have an undeclared
agenda for which the "terrorist threat" is a cover? What is this agenda? Whose agenda is more important than the US Constitution and the accountability of

government to law? No citizen is secure unless government is accountable to the

Constitution and to law. It is an absurd idea that any American is more threatened

by terrorism than by unaccountable government that can

execute them, torture them, and throw them in prison for life
without due process or any accountability whatsoever. Under Bush/Obama, the US has returned
to the unaccountable power of caesars, czars, and autocrats. In the famous play, "A Man For All
Seasons," Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, asks: So, you would have me to cut down the law in order to chase after devils? And what will we do, with the
law cut down, when the devil turns on us? This is the most important legal question ever asked, and it is seldom asked today, not in our law schools, not by our bar
associations, and most certainly not by the Justice (sic) Department or US Attorneys. American conservatives regard civil liberties as mere excuses for liberal
judges to coddle criminals and terrorists. Never expect a conservative Republican, or more than two or three of them, to defend your civil liberty. Republicans
simply do not believe in civil liberty. Democrats cannot conceive that Obama -- the first black president in office, a member of an oppressed minority -- would not
defend civil liberty. This combination of disinterest and denial is why the US has become a police state. Civil liberty has few friends in government, the political
parties, law schools, bar associations, or the federal judiciary. Consequently, no citizen is secure. Recently, a housewife researched online for pressure cookers
looking for the best deal. Her husband was searching for a backpack. The result was that a fully armed SWAT team appeared at the door demanding to search the
premises and to have questions answered. I am always amazed when someone says: "I haven't done anything wrong. I have nothing to fear." If you have nothing to
fear from the government, why did the Founding Fathers put the protections in the Constitution that Bush and Obama have stripped out? Unlike the Founding
Fathers who designed our government to protect the citizens, the American sheeple trust the government to their own demise. Glenn Greenwald recently explained
how the mass of data that is being accumulated on every American is being mined for any signs of non-terrorist-related criminal behavior. As such warrantless
searches are illegal evidence in a criminal trial, the authorities disguise the illegal way in which the evidence is obtained in order to secure conviction based on
illegally obtained evidence. In other words, the use of the surveillance justified by the "war on terror" has already spread into prosecutions of ordinary criminals
where it has corrupted legal safeguards and the integrity, if any, of the criminal court system, prosecutors and judges. This is just one of the many ways in which
you have much to fear, whether you think you are doing anything wrong or not. You can be framed for crimes based on inferences drawn from your Internet
activity and jokes with friends on social media. Jurors made paranoid by the "terrorist threat" will convict you. We should be very suspicious of the motive behind
the universal spying on US citizens. The authorities are aware that the terrorist threat does not justify the unconstitutional and illegal spying. There have been
hardly any real terrorist events in the US, which is why the FBI has to find clueless people around whom to organize an FBI orchestrated plot in order to keep the
"terrorist threat" alive in the public's mind. At last count, there have been 150 "sting operations" in which the FBI recruits people, who are out of touch with reality,
to engage in a well-paid FBI designed plot. Once the dupes agree, they are arrested as terrorists and the plot revealed, always with the accompanying statement that
the public was never in any danger as the FBI was in control. When 99 percent of all terrorism is organized by the FBI, why do we need NSA spying on every
communication of every American and on people in the rest of the world? Terrorism seldom comes from outside. The source almost always is the government in
power. The Czarist secret police set off bombs in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. The Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to decimate the
terrorist threat is a way of using fear to
communists and assume unaccountable power in the name of "public safety." An alleged

block popular objection to the exercise of arbitrary government power. In order to be "safe from
terrorists," the US population, with few objections, has accepted the demise of their civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, which reaches back centuries to Magna
Carta as a constraint on government power. How, then, are they safe from their government? Americans today are in the same position as the English prior to the
Great Charter of 1215. Americans are no longer protected by law and the Constitution from government tyranny. The reason the Founding Fathers wrote the
Constitution was to make citizens safe from their government. If citizens allow the government to take away the Constitution, they might be safe from foreign
terrorists, but they are no longer safe from their government. Who do you think has more power over you, foreign terrorists or "your" government? Washington
defines all resistance to its imperialism and tyranny as "terrorism." Thus, Americans who defend the environment, who defend wildlife, who defend civil liberties
and human rights, who protest Washington's wars and robbery of the people on behalf of special interests, all become "domestic extremists," the term Homeland
Security has substituted for "terrorist." Those who are out of step with Washington and the powerful private interests that exploit us, other peoples, and the earth
In the United
for their profits and power fall into the wrong side of Bush's black and white division of the world: "you are for us or against us."

States independent thought is on the verge of being criminalized as are constitutionally guaranteed
protests and the freedom of the press. The constitutional principle of freedom of speech is being redefined as treason, as aiding an
undefined enemy, and as seeking to overthrow the government by casting aspersions on its motives and revealing its secret misdeeds. The power-mad inhabitants
of Washington have brought the US so close to Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia that it is no longer funny. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to see the
difference. The neoconservatives have declared that Americans are the "exceptional" and "indispensable people." Yet, the civil liberties of Americans have declined
the more "exceptional" and "indispensable" that Americans become. We are now so exceptional and indispensable that we no longer have any rights. And neither
Neoconservatives have given
does the rest of the world. Neoconservatism has created a new dangerous American nationalism.

Washington a monopoly on right and endowed its military aggressions with a morality that
supersedes the Geneva Conventions and human rights. Washington, justified by its "exceptionalism," has the right to attack populations in
countries with which Washington is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is using the cover of its "exceptionalism" to murder people in many

Washington is
countries. Hitler tried to market the exceptionalism of the German people, but he lacked Washington's Madison Avenue skills.

always morally right, whatever it does, and those who report its crimes are traitors who,
stripped of their coddling by civil liberties, are locked away and abused until they confess
to their crimes against the state. Anyone who tells the truth, such as Bradley Manning,
Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, are branded enemies of the state and are
ruthlessly persecuted. How does the "indispensable, exceptional nation" have a
diplomatic policy? How can a neoconized State Department be based on anything except
coercion? It can't. That is why Washington produces nothing but war and threats of war.
Wherever a person looks, whatever a person hears, it is Washington's threat -- "we are
going to bomb you into the stone age" if you don't do what we want and agree to what we
require. We are going to impose "sanctions," Washington's euphemism for embargoes,
and starve your women and children to death, permit no medical supplies, ban you from
the international payments system unless you relent and consent to being Washington's
puppet, and ban you from posting your news broadcasts on the Internet. This is the face
that Washington presents to the world: the hard, mean face of a tyrant. Washington's
power will survive a bit longer, because there are still politicians in Europe, the Middle
East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the NGOs
in Russia, who are paid off by the almighty dollar. In exchange for Washington's money,
they endorse Washington's immorality and murderous destruction of law and life. But
the dollar is being destroyed by Quantitative Easing, and the domestic US economy is
being destroyed by jobs offshoring. Rome was powerful until the Germans ceased to
believe it. Then the rotten edifice collapsed. Washington faces sooner or later the same
fate. An inhumane, illegal, unconstitutional regime based on violence alone, devoid of all
morality and all human compassion, is not acceptable to China, Russia, India, Iran, and
Brazil, or to readers of this column. The evil that is Washington cannot last forever. The
criminals might destroy the world in nuclear war, but the lawlessness and lack of
humanity in Washington, which murders more people as I write, is no longer acceptable
to the rest of the world, not even to its European puppet states, despite the leaders being
on Washington's payroll.

Working within the state is key as DeCaroli 7 finds that

(Jenny – Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University,
“Whatever Politics,” in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Ed.
Calarco and DeCaroli, 2007, p. 84)
What is crucial here is whether the
alternative Agamben proposes is radical enough. Does it entail a refusal of the
machine, or merely a reinstatement of it with a different "definition" of what it means to be human? In The Open, Agamben
does seem to
reject Heidegger's problematic separation of Dasein, as a being that can see the open, from the animal, poor in
world, that cannot.45 Ultimately, Agamben appears to be arguing that any negation of the
[biopolitical] machine cannot be accomplished on a
philosophical plane, but only in terms of practice. In the end, practice or human
action, not philosophy, is what counts. Ontology and philosophy are to be considered
only to the extent that they are political operators and, specifically, biopolitical weapons
in the service of the anthropological machine of sovereignty. In order to try to stop the
biopolitical machine that produces bare life, what is needed is human action, "which
once claimed for itself the name of 'politics'" (SE, 88). It is because there is no necessary
articulation "between violence and law, between life and norm," that it is possible to
attempt to interrupt or halt the machine, to "loosen what has been artificially and
violently linked" (SE, 87). This opens a space for a return not to some "lost
original state" but to human praxis and political action (SE, 88).