Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Addendum
Biometrics Addendum
1AC Cards/Impacts
expansion. While full-body scanners at airport security checkpoints have been the most prominent face of this
security than human agents while avoiding the liability of racial profiling. However, cultural critics of biometrics
analog antecedents of contemporary digitized biometrics highlight the legacy of biometrics as techniques of
discredited, biometrics researchers continue to cite anthropometric methods (Magnet 2011: 39). Sir Francis Galton's
use of the term biometry additionally highlights the connection between anthropometry and contemporary
biometrics. In 1910, Galton used this term to describe the process of collecting measurements in service of
anthropometric hypotheses.3 Though practices of measuring the body have a long history, the contemporary
meaning of biometrics appeared in the early 1980s. The Oxford English Dictionary's first noted use of the term
appeared in American Banker in 1981, in which authors hoped that biometrics would prove useful for unspecified
biometric surveillance
systems proliferated in tandem with neoliberal reforms before their
exponential expansion under the rubric of homeland security . In the midst of
banking operations.4 This is consistent with Kelly Gates's (2011) claim that
the continuing proliferation of biometric technologies, transgender theory and trans bodies provide a unique
Because our vocabularies of gender and race have such limited ability to provide useful information about an
individual, one might think that attempts to secure identities to bodies would be minimally invested in gender or
race. Nevertheless,
about gender and race into biometric systems even as they claim to
produce objective technologies. Beyond the utility of trans bodies for highlighting the gendered
and raced assumptions of biometrics, it is also crucial for the lives of transpeople that we continue to investigate
Biometrics are not only deployed to protect expensive, privatized resources (such as banking assets); these
techniques are frequently imposed upon the most vulnerable populations in the most coercive relationships. This
includes mandated fingerprint scanning for welfare recipients, retinal and fingerprint scanning for prisoners, and
fingerprint scanning for migrants to the United States through the Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT
Biometrics -- Violent
Abstraction from experience renders the body open to
interpretation and discrimination.
Haggerty & Ericson 2K [Kevin D. Haggerty (Professor of Criminology &
Sociology @ University of Alberta), & Richard V. Ericson (Professor of Criminology
and Sociology @ University of Toronto), The surveillant assemblage, British Journal
of Sociology Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 4 (December 2000) pp. 605622,
http://bigo.zgeist.org/students/readings/IPS2011/8/Haggerty%20ericson
%202000.pdf]
A great deal of surveillance is directed toward the human body. The
observed body is of a distinctively hybrid composition. First it is broken
down by being abstracted from its territorial setting. It is then
reassembled in diferent settings through a series of data flows. The result
is a decorporealized body, a data double of pure virtuality. The monitored
body is increasingly a cyborg; a flesh-technology-information amalgam
(Haraway 1991). Surveillance now involves an interface of technology and
corporeality and is comprised of those surfaces of contact or interfaces
between organic and non-organic orders, between life forms and webs of
information, or between organs/body parts and entry/projection systems
(e.g., keyboards, screens) (Bogard 1996: 33). These hybrids can involve something
as direct as tagging the human body so that its movements through space can be
recorded, to the more refined reconstruction of a persons habits, preferences, and
lifestyle from the trails of information which have become the detritus of
contemporary life. The surveillant assemblage is a visualizing device that
brings into the visual register a host of heretofore opaque flows of
auditory, scent, chemical, visual, ultraviolet and informational stimuli. Much of
the visualization pertains to the human body, and exists beyond our normal
range of perception. Rousseau opens The Social Contract with his famous
proclamation that Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. To be more
in keeping with the human/machine realities of the twenty-first century, his
sentiment would better read: Humans are born free, and are immediately
electronically monitored. If such a slogan seems unduly despairing, one might
consider the new electronic ankle bracelet for infants, trademarked HUGS, which is
being marketed to hospitals as a fully supervised and tamper-resistant protection
system that automatically activates once secured around an infants ankle or wrist.
Staff [are] immediately alerted at a computer console of the newly activated tag,
and can enter pertinent information such as names and medical conditions.
Password authorization is needed to move infants out of the designated protection
area and if an infant is not readmitted within a predetermined time limit an
alarm will sound. An alarm also sounds if an infant with a Hugs tag is brought near
an open door at the perimeter of the protected area without a password being
entered. The display console will then show the identification of the infant and the
exit door on a facility map. Alternatively, doors may also be fitted with magnetic
locks that are automatically activated. As well, Hugs can be configured to monitor
the progress and direction of the abduction within the hospital. Weighing just 1/3 of
an ounce, each ergonomically designed infant tag offers a number of other
innovative features, including low-battery warning, the ability to easily interface
with other devices such as CCTV cameras and paging systems and time and date
stamping. (Canadian Security 1998) Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University
is the self-proclaimed first cyborg, having implanted a silicon chip transponder in
his forearm (Bevan 1999). The surveillance potential of this technology has been
rapidly embraced to monitor pets. A microchip in a pets skin can be read with an
electronic device which connects a unique identifying number on the microchip to
details of the pets history, ownership and medical record. Warwick has proposed
that implanted microchips could be used to scrutinize the movement of employees,
and to monitor money transfers, medical records and passport details. He also
suggests that anyone who wanted access to a gun could do so only if they had one
of these implants . . . Then if they actually try and enter a school or building that
doesnt want them in there, the school computer would sound alarms and warn
people inside or even prevent them having access. (Associated Press 1998) These
examples indicate that the surveillant assemblage relies on machines to make and
record discrete observations. As such, it can be contrasted with the early
forms of disciplinary panopticism analysed by Foucault, which were largely
accomplished by practitioners of the emergent social sciences in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. On a machine/human continuum, surveillance at that time
leaned more toward human observation. Today, surveillance is more in keeping with
the technological future hinted at by Orwell, but augmented by technologies he
could not have even had nightmares about. The surveillant assemblage does
not approach the body in the first instance as a single entity to be molded,
punished, or controlled. First it must be known, and to do so it is broken down
into a series of discrete signifying flows. Surveillance commences with the
creation of a space of comparison and the introduction of breaks in the
flows that emanate from, or circulate within, the human body. For example,
drug testing striates flows of chemicals, photography captures flows of reflected
lightwaves, and lie detectors align and compare assorted flows of respiration, pulse
and electricity. The body is itself, then, an assemblage comprised of myriad
component parts and processes which are broken-down for purposes of
observation. Patton (1994: 158) suggests that the concept of assemblage may
be regarded as no more than an abstract conception of bodies of all kinds,
one which does not discriminate between animate and inanimate bodies,
individual or collective bodies, biological or social bodies. It has become a
commonplace among cultural theorists to acknowledge the increasing
fragmentation of the human body. Such an appreciation is evidenced in Groszs
(1995: 108) schematic suggestion that we need to think about the relationship
between cities and bodies as collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds
between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often temporary
sub- or micro-groupings . . . their interrelations involve a fundamentally disunified
series of systems, a series of disparate flows, energies, events, or entities, bringing
together or drawing apart their more or less temporary alignments. Likewise, the
surveillant assemblage standardizes the capture of flesh/information flows
Impact Framing
The ableist construction of biometric technologies functions as
a normalizing technique to manage and exclude disabled
bodies.
Saltes 13 [Natasha Saltes (PhD Candidate in Department of Sociology @ Queens
University, MA in Critical Disability Studies), Abnormal Bodies on the Borders of
Inclusion: Biopolitics and the Paradox of Disability Surveillance, Surveillance &
Society 11(1/2): 55-73, 2013, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillanceand-society/article/view/abnormal/]
Writing in the context of racism and sexual oppression, McWhorter (2009) hones in on the concept of abnormality
abnormality (Foucault 2003, quoted in McWhorter 2009: 30), she writes: [I]t
on behalf of society as a whole. (McWhorter 2009: 30-31) In the same way that psychiatry became a technology of
abnormality (Foucault 2003a: 163), so too did
in that it
(able)
and
(Hansen and Philo 2009). Kitchin (1998) recognizes the ways in which
disability is spatially produced through power relations that work to organize people with impairments. He claims
excessive demand clause, the political tactic of managing bodies through the use of medical data to categorize
desirable immigrants from undesirable immigrants in accordance with perceived excessive demand on health and
theme of surveillance as biopower, Ceyhan (2012) echoes Wiebes sentiment, remarking that surveillance operates
as a technology of biopoliticalized security (2012: 39) as a means of mitigating uncertainty. Indeed, it is the
Canadian states assumptions about impairment and its inclination toward managing economic risk and
uncertainty that the purpose of conducting disability surveillance at the border becomes evident. Biopolitics at the
categories and the computer codes by which personal data is organized with a view to influencing and managing
people and populations (2003: 2). It is the process of predicting and preventing risk by classifying subgroups of
society deemed to pose a threat (Lyon 2003). Lyon attributes social sorting and digital discrimination to the
prevalent use of networked technology (2003: 8) and the rising attention paid to the body itself as a source of
surveillance data (2007: 55). The concept of social sorting and the emphasis on the body as a source of data is
especially relevant in the context of disability surveillance in that the collection and documentation of information
The
data double therefore can become disabled in much the same way as the
individual insofar as it is not perceived, viewed, monitored and treated
equally as non-impaired data doubles. The data double itself may include
biometric details or other forms and fragments of information that allude
to or signify the embodiment of impairment. The implication of this is that the
abnormality of the body is extended to the digital and what serves to
mark, label and stigmatize the body in the physical environment now has the ability to mark,
about the body reduces people with impairments to impaired bodies and further still to impaired data.
label and stigmatize the body digitally. Referring to electronic patient records (EPR) as an example of the
digitalization of the body, van der Ploeg considers the data they contain to be extended forms of unique
identifiers due to the personal information they contain, including biometric data (2003: 62). The increased use of
biometric identifiers in EPRs (as well as in other contexts such as immigration) are
superimposing traditional forms of identifiers such as name and birth date as they are
considered a more reliable representation of identity (van der Ploeg 2003). In challenging the gendered neutrality of
consequences that arise from surveillance practices that operate on a level of abstraction (2009: 286). Building
from Monahans argument on the socially de-contextualized collection of data and applying it to disability
surveillance provides a useful means with which to contextualize the consequences of conducting disability
capturing physiological markers of bodies including fingerprints, face or voice recognition, iris and handwriting
authentication. The data produced by the body is then used to verify identity (Maddern and Stewart 2010).
biometric systems do not only verify identity, but they also play a
significant role in assigning identities. This is worth considering in light of the governments
However,
reliance on biometric data, which stems from the belief that biometric technology is infallible (Maddern and Stewart
2010). The use of biometric technology at the Canadian border is being touted by Citizenship and Immigration
Canada (2012b) as a highly reliable way to reduce identity fraud. In a public notice released online announcing the
scheduled implementation of biometric technologies in 2013, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (2012b) states
that biometrics would strengthen the integrity of Canadas immigration program by helping prevent known
criminals, failed refugee claimants, and those previously deported from using a different identity to obtain a visa
and that biometrics will strengthen and modernize Canadas immigration processes. In lauding the collection of
biometric data as part of the immigration process, the Canadian government neglects to consider how the
technology might have a discriminatory impact for certain groups. Pugliese (2010) questions the infallibility of
biometric
technologies fail to accurately capture the data and images of bodies that
do not conform to the features of whiteness, which biometric technologies were designed
to accommodate. 7 Similarly, by virtue of their ableist design, biometric technologies also filter
technologies that filter bodies through a racialized lens. He looks in particular at the ways in which
bodies through a normalized lens. Trials have shown that biometric systems are not
designed to conform to disabled people, but that disabled people are
expected to be able to conform to the systems design (Maddern and Stewart 2010).
The ableist way in which they collect physiological data inherently carries out the function of social sorting by
classifying and categorizing those who are not able to pass easily through the system. The passage below
illustrates this point: For someone in a wheelchair if you cant perfectly adapt your position it could be difficult. For
blind people it certainly can be difficult because they cant seeYou dont actually have to focus, but you do have
to keep a constant relationship with the camerathats why we couldnt get acceptable enrolment (in a recent trial)
for a quite a large selection of people with disabilities. (respondent and biometric technology user quoted in
Maddern and Stewart 2010: 247) This quote reveals the challenges that biometric technologies present for some
biometric systems inability to accept and process their varied physiological traits. Similarly, Garfinkel suggests that
combination with provisions that emphasize ontological normality such as the excessive demand clause, do not
account for the social construct of disability. Consequently, it is not ableist and discriminatory social structures,
Root Cause
Ableism is foundational to all oppression
Siebers 9 [Tobin Siebers (Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism @ University
of Michigan), The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification, 10/28/9, Lecture,
http://disabilities.temple.edu/media/ds/lecture20091028siebersAesthetics_FULL.doc]
Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another . It is a form
of intergroup violence. That oppression involves groups, and not individuals,
means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression
always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a
public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances .
Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferioritywhat some call in-built or biological
signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation
and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic
disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying
human inferiorityand the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppressionthe
prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human
race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of
justifiable human inferiority.
Interrogation Good
The affirmatives rhizomatic characterization of bodily
surveillance is key to accurate diagnoses of modern power.
Ball 5 [Kirstie Ball (Professor of Organization @ The Open University Business
School, PhD in Organization Studies from Aston University), Organization,
Surveillance and the Body: Towards a Politics of Resistance, Organization, January
2005 vol. 12 no. 1 89-108, http://org.sagepub.com/content/12/1/89.short]
theorizing about surveillance practices has turned to the centrality of
the body, not least in those at the workplace. Although many acknowledge Foucaults nod towards the
Recent
rehabilitated body of the incarcerated subject in the panopticon and the political technologies of the body identified
in The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1976), the theoretical
surveillance technologies
can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from another
technological medium. Meaning refers to the potential of new
surveillance technologies to enable diferent interpretations of life to be
made, as well as interpretations of surveillance itself. At least three common meanings are attributed to
Representation refers to the technological element, acknowledging how
surveillance practice: surveillance as knowledge; surveillance as information; and surveillance as protection from
threat. Manipulation
meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where power/resistance operates, and where
argues that intermediation is an important socio-technical process in the perpetuation of surveillance practices.
assemblage is the human body , which is broken into a series of data flows to the end of feeding
the information categories on which the surveillance process is based (Hier, 2003). Thus, it is not the
identity or subjectivity of individuals that is of interest, but rather the
data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can contribute ;
these are then reapplied to the body as part of the influencing and managing process to which Lyon refers.
(Bogard, 1996: 33). They characterize the human body as flesh made information, drawing on arguments that
emphasize hybridity and cyborgism (Haraway, 1991), positioning it as a marginality, a state of in-between-ness of
technologies and the local (Leigh-Starr, 1991). This is a point to which I shall return. Although Haggerty and Ericson
However, Haggerty and Ericson do not venture far enough: the degree of tension and inbetween-ness
characterizing the hybrid or cyborgian subject (Haraway, 1991) is underemphasized. In a manner similar to Ball
(2002), the identification of the body is more akin to Callons (1991) intermediarya hybrid entity that points
A
politicization of the constitutive instability of the body is needed to
augment a practical and analytical understanding of how resistance to
surveillance practices might be conceptualized. In order to address this
argument, a brief review of developments concerning a sociology of the
body will be reviewed, and its contribution to an understanding of
resistance to surveillance will be considered.
back to the network of which it is part and defines roles for other actors within it (Michael, 1996).
Embodiment Good
Building a politics of diference centered on embodied
experiences of disability is key to overcome the abstracting
limitations of the social model and destabilize ableist
discourse.
Loja et al 13 [Ema Loja (Researcher Fellow @ University of Leeds Center for
Disability Studies, PhD in Psychology from University of Porto), Maria Emlia Costa
(Professor of Psychology @ University of Porto), Bill Hughes (Professor of Sociology
@ Glasgow Caledonian University) & Isabel Menezes (Associate Professor in
Education @ University of Porto), Disability, embodiment and ableism: stories of
resistance, Disability & Society, Volume 28, Issue 2, 2013,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2012.705057]
What
counts as a legitimate body' (Shilling 1993, 145) is a question that has been
at the core of disability discourse. Disabled people have struggled with a
corporeal identity that is predominately defined by a medical model that reduces it to abnormality
(Zitzelsberger 2005), stressing the need for correction or normalization (Edwards and Imrie 2003). The medical gaze
1998) states, some bodies matter more than others: some are, quite frankly, disposable'. Disabled bodies
epitomize the latter. The social model of disability makes a clear distinction between impairment and disability. It
rejects medical categories focusing on the elimination of prejudice and discrimination and defends self-
considers the impaired body untouched, unchallenged: a taken-for-granted fixed corporeality' (Meekosha 1998,
175) and within disability studies the term body tends to be used without much sense of bodiliness as if the
body were little more than flesh and bones' (Paterson and Hughes 1999, 600). However, debate about the body and
impairment is re-emerging within the disability movement (for example, Shakespeare 1992; French 1993).
The
movement has been recovering this lost corporeal space, and as Hughes and
Paterson (2006, 101) emphasize: disability is experienced in, on and through the
body, just as impairment is experienced in terms of the personal and
cultural narratives that help to constitute its meaning'. To bring bodies back in' (Zola
1991, 1) or to recognize how corporeal practices produce and give a body its place in everyday life' (Turner 2001,
the falling away from which represents the pathway to disability (Campbell 2009), which for disabled people
produces two consequences: the distancing of disabled people from each other and the emulation by disabled
people of ableist norms (Campbell 2008). The body politics of Critical Disability Studies that ableism envisages
offers valuable ways to theorize disability and challenge disability oppression (for example, Corker 1999; Hughes
understood as a struggle for recognition' (Honneth 1995a, 1995b) embodies the deconstruction of ableism and the
celebration of difference.
Disability is Pervasive
Constant interrogation of ableism is critical the specter of the
disabled body permeates our cultural imaginary and
foundationally informs our epistemology.
Snyder & Mitchell 1 [Sharon L. Snyder (assistant professor in the Department
of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago), &
David T. Mitchell (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Ph.D. in
Disability Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago), Re-engaging the
Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment, Public Culture 13(3):
367389, 2001, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/13/3/367.full.pdf]
Consequently, disability studies has formulated the problem of the medicalized body in a manner similar to that
undertaken earlier in body studies, taking up medical institutions (and the ancillary administering of diagnosis,
reference point in deciding matters of human value and communal belonging. In this emergent field, the able body
is no longer characterized as merely a false quantitative ideal, as it had been in body studies, but rather as an
(1995) analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical development of disability activism and
community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick (1996) analyzes the influential role of public health films in
the promotion of eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak show, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues that
disabled peoples bodies have been represented as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology that
marks the disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white, masculine citizenry. Paul K. Longmore
(1997) assesses television genres, such as disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect mainstream
representations of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Narrative Prosthesis
(Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of disability to literature in Europe and the United
States by discussing the longstanding artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization.
approach established by other civil rightsbased programs. While many minority movements have argued that their
disability
studies has formulated an analysis of social depreciation targeting the
perpetual recourse to images of disability in narrative and visual mediums .
As a result, disability studies follows a figuration of marginality as the
expression of an overheated symbolic organism that conveys potent
meanings as a result of its palimpsest-like discursive history (cf. Stewart 1993).
social devaluation occurs as a result of their marginal presence in representational media,
Theaters of Repression The work of disability studies scholars consolidated the argument that bodily and cognitive
differences were integral to various registers of meaning-making within culture. While the earliest research in the
field kept returning to a denunciation of three prominent literary figuresShakespeares Richard III, Melvilles
Captain Ahab, and Dickenss Tiny Timthe growing body of historical research called for wider ranging
methodologies. As with later developments in race and gender studies, disability studies outgrew its denunciations
of stereotypes; instead, theorists began to argue that disability represented a deep-seated, yet uninterrogated,
beliefs in a homogeneous bodily order. Out of these efforts to elucidate the constructed nature of disabled bodies in
history, disability studies set out to diagnose the investments of an ableist society in disabilitys various
If we accept
that society discriminates against impaired people, then we can also
understand the claim of the disablement structure of society . What I hold,
ultimately, is that there certainly is a causal relation between oppression and
disability, when society plays a strong role in excluding and marginalizing
impaired people. But in maintaining that disability is squarely socially
caused, the social model theorists are over-socialising their position . Their
model, then, as we have seen, needs clarifications and extensions [56]. More specifically, the social model
overlooks the impairment efects, in terms of their restriction of activities
or the possible inabilities to perform diferent functions . In so doing, it
downplays the importance of the relational nature of impairment,
disability, and society. Moreover, in asserting the total separation between impairment and disability,
it opens up the chance of a proliferation of terms other than disabilities ,
simply reintroducing a linear causal link between impairment and disability and in all cases.
to denote inability or being unable to do things, which, if politically correct, appears less justified theoretically. One
example to illustrate this position is related to some forms of congenital blindness, which, for instance, prevent
people from performing certain actions, such as driving a car. This form of impairment, which can be considered a
clear inability and a disability if referred to driving (at present society is structured to have sighted drivers only), is
certainly not a cause of inability or disability in many other possible activities, like enjoying music or cooking or
acting as a state minister. It is now clearer, therefore, why some
the need to reconsider impairment, and why medical sociologists have pointed to the relational
aspect of some impairment with illness and disability. These considerations highlight the need for a different
framework, providing a more coherent basis for the understanding of impairment, disability, society and their
reciprocal implications. I suggest that a philosophical perspective based on Amartya Sens capability approach
could take these issues in fruitful directions. The discussion of the latter, however, is well beyond the aim of this
article. A final critical point, on the relation between impairment, disability and society, concerns moral and social
considered societys responsibility? Moreover, even if one fully endorsed the social model position, it would be quite
problematical how society could be held responsible in the case of disablement connected to the activity of driving
its potential risks, when all that could have been done to prevent the accident has been done and when rescue has
Framework Cards
T-Consent
Biometrics is T
Abernathy et al 13 (William, S-American professor at the Harvard University
Business School, 9-14-2003, "Biometrics: Who's Watching You?," Electronic Frontier
Foundation, https://www.eff.org/wp/biometrics-whos-watching-you)
Among the many reactions to the September 11 tragedy has been a
renewed attention to biometrics. The federal government has led the way
with its new concern about border control . Other proposals include the use of
biometrics with ID cards and in airports, e.g. video surveillance enhanced by
facial-recognition technology. The purpose of this document is to sketch out EFF's concerns about
biometrics. In today's public arena, biometric technologies are being marketed as a "silver bullet" for terrorism;
however, very little independent, objective scientific testing of biometrics has been done. Deploying biometric
systems without sufficient attention to their dangers makes them likely to be used in a way dangerous to civil
liberties. This document is very much a work in progress and we welcome comments. Biometrics refers to the
automatic identification or identity verification of living persons using their enduring physical or behavioral
characteristics. Many body parts, personal characteristics and imaging methods have been suggested and used for
biometric systems: fingers, hands, feet, faces, eyes, ears, teeth, veins, voices, signatures, typing styles, gaits and
clearly in advance how the system is to work, in both in its successes and in its failures. Despite these concerns,
specifically requires the federal government to "develop and certify a technology standard that can be used to
verify the identity of persons" applying for or seeking entry into the United States on a U.S. visa "for the purposes of
conducting background checks, confirming identity, and ensuring that a person has not received a visa under a
different name." The recently enacted Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, Sec. 303(b)(1),
requires that only "machine-readable, tamper-resistant visas and other travel and entry documents that use
biometric identifiers" shall be issued to aliens by October 26, 2004. The Immigration and Naturalization Service
(INS) and the State Department currently are evaluating biometrics for use in U.S. border control pursuant to
EBSVERA. The chronic, longitudinal capture of biometric data is useful for surveillance purposes. Our Surveillance
technology, must be consciously "given." It is difficult, for instance, to capture a scan of a person's retina or to
system or when they're being tracked. But even hard-to-grab biometrics involve a trust issue in
the biometric capture device and the overall system architecture. To be effective, a biometric system
must compare captured biometric data to a biometric database . Our National ID
System page highlights issues surrounding database abuse, which has both static and dynamic dimensions. The
static issues surrounding databases are mainly about safeguarding large and valuable collections of personally
identifying information. If these databases are part of an important security system, then they (and the channels
used to share PII) are natural targets for attack, theft, compromise, and malicious or fraudulent use. The dynamic
Databases
that seek to maintain accurate residence information must be updated
whenever one moves. Databases that are used to establish eligibility for
benefits must be updated so as to exclude persons no longer eligible. The
broader the function of the system, the more and broader the updating
that is required, increasing the role of general social surveillance in the
system. By far the most significant negative aspect of biometric ID
systems is their potential to locate and track people physically. While many
surveillance systems seek to locate and track, biometric systems present the greatest
danger precisely because they promise extremely high accuracy . Whether a
issues surrounding databases mainly concern the need to maintain reliable, up-to-date information.
specific biometric system actually poses a risk of such tracking depends on how it is designed. Why should we care
about perfect tracking? EFF believes that perfect tracking is inimical to a free society. A society in which everyone's
actions are tracked is not, in principle, free. It may be a livable society, but would not be our society. EFF believes
that perfect surveillance, even without any deliberate abuse, would have an extraordinary chilling effect on artistic
and scientific inventiveness and on political expression. This concern underlies constitutional protection for
anonymity, both as an aspect of First Amendment freedoms of speech and association, and as an aspect of Fourth
technology systems have certain aspects in common. All are dependent upon an accurate reference or
Definitions
Resolved means to reduce by analysis
(Merriam Webster Dictionary 2010)
benefit because Foucault allows himself to consider personal self-surveillance as well as institutional surveillance.
AT: Policymaking
Policymaking Bad
Makau 96 (Josina., Ph.D. in Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkeley,
Responsible Communication, Argumentation Instruction in the Face of Global Perils)
Weisel's critique of German education prior to world war II points to another danger of traditional argumentation
grasping or appreciating the importance of Weisel's critique. Similarly, they would have difficulty grasping or
appreciating Christian's framework for an ethic of technology an approach that requires above all, openness,
trust and care. The notion of conviviality would be particularly alien to these trained technocrats. Traditionally
trained debaters are also likely to fail to grasp the complexity of issues. Trained to view problems in black and
white terms and conditioned to turn to "expertise" for solutions, students, and traditional courses become
subject to ethical blindness. As Benhabib noted, 'Moral blindness implies not necessarily an evil or unprincipaled
person, but one who can not see the moral texture of the situation confronting him or her.' These traditional
debaters, deprived of true dialogic encounter , fail to develop 'the capacity to represent' to themselves the
'multiplicity of viewpoints, the variety of perspectives, the layers of meaning, etc. which constitute a situation'.
They are thus inclined to lack 'the kind of sensitivity to particulars, which most agree is essential for good and
perspicacious judgment.' Encouraging student to embrace the will to control and to gain mastery, to accept
uncritically a sovereign view of power, and to maintain distance from their own and others 'situatedness,' the
traditional argumentation course provides an unlikely site for nurturing guardians of our world's precious
We can now return to the initial terms of our problem: we live in societies
and States known as 'democracies', a term by which they are
distinguished from societies governed by States without law or with
religious law. How are we to understand that, at the heart of these
'democracies', a dominant intelli-gentsia, whose situation is not obviously
desperate and who hardly aspire to live under diferent laws, day in day
out blame all of humanity's misfortunes on a single evil they call
democracy? Let's take things in order. What is meant when it is said that we live in democracies? Strictly speaking,
democracy is not a form of State. It is always beneath and beyond these forms. Beneath, insofar as it is the necessarily egalitarian,
can be said to be more or less democratic. Usually the mere existence of a representative system is re-garded as the crucial
criterion for defining democracy. But this system itself is an unstable compromise, the result of opposing forces. It tends toward
have nothing extravagant about them and in the past many thinkers and legislators, hardly moved by a rash love of the people,
have carefully considered them as potential means to maintain a balance of powers, to dissociate the representation of the general
will from that of particular interests, and to avoid what they considered as the worst of governments: the governments of those who
love power and are skilled at seizing it. All one has to do today to provoke hilarity is list them. With good reason for what we call
democracy is a statist and governmental functioning that is exactly the contrary: eternally elected members holding coministerial
functions and whose essential link to the people is that of the representation of regional interests; governments which make laws
themselves; representatives of the people that largely come from one administrative schoo1;48 ministers or their collaborators who
are also given posts in public or semipublic companies; fraudulent financing of parties through public works contracts;
businesspeople who invest colossal sums in trying to win electoral mandates; owners of private media empires that use their public
AT: Predictability
Everything is chaos
Der Derian 98 [James, The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and
Baudrillard, in On Security ed. Ronnie Lipschutz.
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html]
Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbess and Marxs interpretations of
security through a genealogy of modes of being . His method is not to uncover some deep
meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of
the past which have been created out of fear, and to affirm the creative
diferences which might yield new values for the future .33 Originating in
the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the
history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment
and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox . In brief, the history is one of
individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical other
of life, the terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized,
triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien
otherswho are seeking similarly impossible guarantees . It is a story of
diferences taking on the otherness of death , and identities calcifying into a
fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his
reinterpretation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must begin with Nietzsches
idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and
generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically
establishes the primacy of the will to power: Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of selfpreservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength
affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable,
to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the reader: Look, isnt our need for knowledge
precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something
that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who
sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of
fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything
true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is
sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it . Nietzsche
elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols: The causal instinct is thus
conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The why? shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its
That
which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is
excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but
own sake so much as for a particular kind of causea cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving.
for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanationthat which most quickly and frequently abolished the
A safe life
requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the
unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostilityrecycling
the desire for security. The influence of timidity, as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people
who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the necessities of
security: they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil
feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38
experiences.39 The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the offworld. Trust, the good, and other common values come to rely upon an artificial strength: the feeling of
security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he
owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god.40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false
sense of security can come from false gods: Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in
every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be
true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes.41 Nietzsches interpretation of the origins of religion
can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to ones ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only
through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe existsand that one has to pay them
back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these
forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new
strength.42 Sacrifices, honors, obedience are given but it is never enough, for the ancestors of the most powerful
tribes are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede
into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be
transfigured into a god. 43 As the ancestors debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the
role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: to rely upon an artificial strength: the feeling
one lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes
underrate them today), one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries
and hostile acts to which the man outside, the man without peace, is exposed since one has bound and
The establishment
of the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of
being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by written treaty, however, and distant gods by temporal
pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44
sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased and dissimulated. The
The fear of
the external other is transvalued into the love of the neighbor quoted in
the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured
through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original
source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal
otherness, generates the values which uphold the security imperative .
subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective resentment. The result?
Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining
security: My rights are that part of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to
preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that
they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle
with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to
themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power.
Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsches critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions
that created the security imperative and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it have diminished if not
disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good
conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment,
recreation and evaluation.46 Nietzsches worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has
rhetorical questions: Of future virtues How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more
solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that reverence which
overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the
incomprehensible and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown
less fearful? With the diminution of our fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness, not
also diminished?47 It is of course in Nietzsches lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds
the celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age.
Dismissive of utopian engineering, Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward
only so far as to sight the emergence of new philosophers (such as himself?) who would restore a reverence for
fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-Socratic era
to find the exemplars for a new kind of security. In The Genealogy of Morals, he holds up Pericles as an example, for
lauding the Athenians for their rhathymia a term that incorporates the notion of indifference to and contempt
AT: SSD
Only affirmation empowers resistance every instance is key
it multiplies solvency
Johnson 97 (James, Rochester, Political Theory 25(4), JSTOR)
Resistance trades upon a number of affirmative possibilities. Foucault
locates these possibilities within a quite specific understanding of the rela- tions that
obtain between intellectuals and political movements .27 As he explains: If one
wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines and
disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one
should turn, but towards the possibility of a newform of right, one
which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time liberated from the
principle of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980, 108; emphasis added) The essential political problem for the
intellectual is ... that of ascertaining the possibil- ity of constituting a new politics of truth. (Foucault 1980,
133; emphasis added)
invented-so
Political analysis
and criticism
have
in
to be
too have the strategies which will make it possible to modify the relations of force, to coordinate them in such a way that such a modification is possible and can be inscribed in reality. That is to say,
the problem is ... to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicization. (Foucault 1980, 190;
emphasis added)
AT: Roleplaying
They vacate individual agency to politics proper, weakening
politics and overdefining the value in life
Influxus 7 (Major contributor, Foucault blog,
http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/05/13/dividing-the-individual/)
When you say that the individual is not un-political are you agreeing with Craigs point that
liberal political theory, cannot recognise the political, because it vacates all dividing practices from the domain
categorised through many forms of auto-management. However, if politics takes the relevant aspects of
personhood to be attributes that all persons (supposedly) share-alike, such as reason, autonomy and universal
rights then the only division that matters is the original division of the population into individual persons. Hence,
once liberal political theory is taken up, all relevant decisions of division are already made for it.
AT: Dialogue
Dialogue is intersubjective
Kent et al 2 (Michael L. Kent, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication, Maureen Taylor,
Ph.D., is Gaylord Family Chair of Strategic Communication, Sheila M. McAllister-Spooner, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor
of Communication, Monmouth University, Research in dialogic theory and public relations)
AT: Agonism
A politics of agonism presupposes an essentialist
categorization of antagonism versus agonism which
systematically brackets out ideological challenges
Oksala 12 (Johanna, Academy of Finland Research Fellow in the Department of
Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, 2012
Foucault, Politics, and Violence p. 63-66)
It is my contention that we do not have to accept Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy to argue that
ontological necessity to distinguish the enemy. As I argued in the previous chapter, the foundational violence of
modern states is historical and contingent, not ontological. The conceptualization of necessary exclusion in terms of
friend and enemy leads, moreover, to a problematic narrowing the political arena. The agonism that Mouffe
advocates cannot be, understandably, violent confrontation between enemies. For Schmitt, the hostility inherent in
the friend-enemy distinction ultimately leads to the transformation of the political into war because no amount of
Moufe has to
introduce the important distinction between "antagonism" and "agonism ."
Antagonism takes place between enemies, that is, persons who have no
common symbolic space and who are therefore perceived as negating
each other's identity. Agonism, on the other hand, involves a relation not
between enemies but between "adversaries." Adversaries share a common
symbolic space, but they want to organize this space in a diferent way ."1
The aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism by
discussion, compromise, or exhortation can settle issues between enemies.20 To avoid this,
"providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which,
while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an
adversary" (Monde 2000, 103). In other words, agonism does not result in violence because the democratic-liberal
state and the possibilities it otters for legitimate opposition prevent antagonism from escalating into violent conflict.
kind
of
"third
way,"
for
example."
corrective institutions and detention centers. While Foucault's thought effectively questions the idea of foundational physical violence on the level of the ontological, it exposes it on the level of the ontic. In chapters 5, (3, and 8
I go on to argue that he fundamentally challenges the idea that the liberal-democratic state only aims to positively
channel primordial hostility into legitimate opposi- tion in the form of conflicts between adversaries. Instead, he
tends to appear prominently on the national policy agenda as a result of highly visible and symbolic attacks on
Americans or American property. However, the threat is interpreted through a political lens created by the diffused
structure of power within the American government. (2006b: 183).
chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Spanish people, to name but a few of the targets .
If Americans are
relatively unconcerned about the US government monitoring their own
population, they're even less worried about what it does in other
countries.