Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

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Surveillance

The neoliberal state only interpolates two kinds of beings: consumers and criminals. This is the root cause for surveillance -piecemeal reforms like the aff inevitably fail.

Passavant, 5 (Paul, Associate Professor of Political Science and PhD in Political Science “The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, Governance” 8/3/2005 https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.3passavant.html Project Muse LAO)

With the end of the Cold War, we have seen the reemergence of the racial discourse of Western civilization versus the savage or barbarian as the predominant mode for mapping the world and America's place within it.34  The Bush National Security Strategy makes clear a twist to this racial discourse that has become particularly prominent since September 11th.  As this document indicates, the enemy of "civilized nations" -- and the American "homeland" -- is "terrorism."35  This document borrows from the racial discourse that underwrote 19th century colonialism and imperialism, but with an important difference.  Now, the other is no longer represented merely as racially inferior but also as a criminal.  The Bush National Security Strategy articulates together two strands of the present -- consumer capitalism and fear of crime.  As William Finnegan has noted, it is both interesting and odd that a national securitystrategy would devote as much space as the Bush Strategy does to discussing economic policy.36  As is clear from the section entitled "Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade," however, it is in fact official U.S. policy to promote -- presumably through military means since this has been identified as a vital U.S. national security interest by its placement in the Bush National Security Strategy -- a neo-liberal global economic regime.  Freedom to be a consumer is the form of freedom that U.S. policy seeks to make enduring through U.S. military operations as the strategy represents political difference -- those who oppose the promotion of the neo-liberal capitalist enterprise -- as criminal: the terrorists.  This only makes clear what had been prefigured in the immediate aftermath of September 11th by The New Republic's Peter Beinart who also represented anti-global capital protesters as equivalent to terrorists in an article published in the September 24, 2001 issue of that magazine.37  Thus, U.S. national security policy is an external projection of the consumer-criminal double.The political mentality of the consumer-criminal double based in a politics of fear that identifies the risk of certain threats as beyond toleration informed political practices prior to September 11th.  For example, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) extended the government's power to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, warrants that are excepted from Fourth Amendment protections in the name of national security's need for counter-intelligence.  The Fourth Amendment limits governmental searches to situations where there is "probable cause" of a crime, the suspect being searched is presented with the warrant, knows that he or she is being searched (the "knock and announce" rule), and can challenge the constitutionality of the warrant.  FISA warrants, however, are under no such limitations -- in "spy world" the object of surveillance must not know that he or she is being searched -- and the basis for the warrant remains secret so that should a target of surveillance be charged with a crime, that person could not challenge the grounds on which the warrant was issued.  While the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act sought to create something of a "wall" (better described as a "filter") between spy world and civil society (it was passed in the wake of the Church Committee revelations about J. Edgar Hoover's misuse of power to spy on civil rights organizations and individuals based on their political beliefs), the AEDPA began to circumvent that wall by allowing the government to spy on not only those suspected of having committed terrorist acts, but on those who provide "material support" for organizations deemed by the Secretary of State to be "terrorist."49  This change, which would have brought those who worked to end apartheid in South Africa by supporting the African National Congress (ANC) within the law's provisions if it had been in effect during the 1980s (since the Reagan administration considered the ANC to be a terrorist organization), allows the government to identify those it deems to be intolerable risks and to act preemptively to prevent possible future illegal action.50 

Contemporary manifestations of surveillance are a product of neoliberal influence of the security industry

Monahan 10 (Tornin, Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity)

Placed in context, specifically in a neoliberal context, surveillance can be interpreted instead as contributing to individual and collective fears specific market-oriented responses to them. Scholars have found, for instance, that the presence of surveillance cameras can generate experiences of fear in people who presume there must be a discernable threat to which the cameras are responding. Security companies have both generated and fed off public ears to grow into a $215-billion industry, catering to government agencies businesses, and individuals alike with their high-tech security “solutions.” Surveillance melds with other forms of fortification as well, such as walls, to regulate inclusion and exclusion as a form of risk management. The empirical validity of such risks is apparently irrelevant. For example, statistically speaking, schools continue to be some of the safest places for children, much safer than the home, the street, or other settings, yet the demand or surveillance systems and police in schools has reached an all-time high. The convergence of the surveillance and neoliberalism supports the production of insecurity subjects, of people who perceive the inherent dangerousness of others and take actions to minimize exposure to them, even when the danger is spurious. Social exclusions and inequalities become more collateral damage in the battle for the semblance of personal safety, not political problems for which society has collective responsibility.

Advanced surveillance capabilities only exist to protect the state from constructed threats in a global economy

Gill 1995 (Stephen, The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1995), pp. 1-49 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.)

The introduction of information technology in general, and surveillance capabilities in particular, in the context of the growing influence of neoliberal discourses, is often introduced by and may favor internationally mobile fractions of capital, especially corporate capital and financial services firms. The tendency of these fractions of capital is to deepen their activity within civil society and the economy as well as to internationalize as they seek to maximize profits and offset risks. The use of surveillance and sorting techniques for maximizing knowledge about and influence over workers, savers, and consumers appears to be growing. At the same time, when surveillance and information technologies are introduced in the workplace and in the wider society they tend to provoke both resistance (e.g., neo-Luddism) and nihilism (e.g., computer hackers using Pentagon computers to store pornography). These technologies also offer some democratic potential if used with appropriate processes of accountability and in the context of democratic controls. Another key impetus for the widening use of surveillance techniques is the internal and external response of certain political elements within state apparatuses to problems associated with economic globalization and interstate rivalry, and in particular to the perception of the loss of control, regulatory effectiveness, or indeed authority over economic activity within national boundaries. Whereas mobile capital is associated with the interdependence (or capitalist) principle of world order, the territorial and political logic of state surveillance is often associated with the reinforcement or persistence of nationalist blocs and security complexes. Such blocs may seek to restrict or to channel the freedom and mobility of such capital for reasons of national security.

Surveillance has the dual function of disciplining society into free-market ideologies and securing the body politic from threats to the social order – criticism of surveillance must begin with a recognition of this dual function.

Deukmedjian in 2013(John Edward, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology, University of Windsor, “Making Sense of Neoliberal Securitization in Urban Policing and Surveillance,” CRS/RCS, 50.1)

Securitization is enmeshed with neoliberalization and comes into focus through a retracting Keynesian rationality. A mentality of disequilibrium creates the conditions for the deemphasis of disciplinary-surveillance practices in preference to practices of security surveillance. Indeed, consider neoliberalism’s antithesis: within the highly expansive regulatory and socialistic politics of communism what do we find? Following the 1917 October Revolution one of the first decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars called for the establishment of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Sabotage and Speculation, which formed the basis of the longstanding KGB of the Soviet Union (Conquest 1968). The Soviets quickly established a highly centralized and networked security-surveillance apparatus to identify, contain through the use of the Gulag, or otherwise eliminate threats to the revolution. At the same time centralized apparatuses of disciplinary surveillance were never prioritized by the Soviet government since the communal system was expected to ideally be self-disciplinary (Shearer 2009). Neoliberalization fundamentally entails market and financial securitization. At the same time, surveillance apparatuses for the reproduction of disciplined populaces present roadblocks to free market enterprise. A Beckerian entrepreneur, for example, takes risks rather than rationally calculates or structurally constitutes equilibrium—and centrifugal security-surveillance facilitates an ever-widening circuit of risk taking (Becker 1976; Foucault 2008). We see both trends in policing and surveillance from about the 1970s. Among the most significant events include Kelling et al.’s (1974) report on the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment. Funded by the Police Foundation, Kelling’s teammonitored the effects of both saturated random patrol and no patrol over a period of one year. Kelling found that motorized patrol had no statistically significant effect on either fear of crime or crime rates. Kelling et al.’s findings are not surprising—though perhaps because of the benefit of hindsight. The study applied centrifugal experimental design—a scientific design—to measure the efficacy of a centripetal disciplinary practice. Few caught on, and Kelling became highly influential in the years and decades to come, armed with a study that undermined not only the practice of patrol, but also its rational governance through crime statistics and reforms in its efficiency. In the decade that followed there was an onslaught of academic criticism over various aspects of disciplinary policing. Spelman and Brown’s (1981) study, for example, pointed out that rapid response to calls by police only led to a small (3 percent) proportion of arrests in serious cases; Shearing (1984) noted that only a very small proportion of calls were in fact about reporting crime; and Ericson (1982) found that the vast majority of police work focused on maintaining public order through discipline (rather than fighting crime). Until 1993, both government and academics advocated the adoption of community policing as the solution to many of these problematizations (see, e.g., Normandeau and Leighton 1990). Whether through programs like Neighbourhood Watch, Community Consultative Groups, Family Group Conferencing, community policing held out the promise for accomplishing the following dual ends: first, community policing promised to improve police-public relations and information and intelligence flows from the public for guiding resource deployments and facilitating investigations; second, community policing promised to reduce the financial costs of monitoring and disciplining the population because communities would now be mobilized and empowered to watch and discipline their own. Ultimately, what separated police-community programs in the 1950s from the community policing of the 1980s and 1990s was that the disciplining of “the social” was no longer considered to be a social good, but rather an activity driven by market competition and a requirement to download costs. In this sense, O’Malley and Palmer (1996) were quite accurate with their assessment: community policing represents a fundamental realignment of the police provision in post-Keynesian or neoliberal governance away from centralized disciplinary surveillance. What many understandably did not realize at that time (given the prevailing governmental discourses surrounding community governance) was that there was a parallel emphasis on instituting security surveillance. The Audit Commission (1993) was perhaps among the first to advocate cost-effectiveness through an “intelligence-led” approach. The Audit Commission advocated the identification and targeting of prolific offenders through the cultivation and use of informant assets. In essence it advocated for practices of security surveillance. Unlike the nineteenth century where the development of security surveillance was overshadowed by a primary focus on disciplinary surveillance, the Audit Commission called for security surveillance to become a primary focus of police. Still, this meant that during the 1990s there was, depending on place and time, the dual emphasis: on the one hand for police to primarily focus on community policing and on the other to focus on intelligence-led policing. This dual emphasis remains to this day (see Maguire and John 2006) and not only in policing but governance more broadly (i.e., downloading discipline/uploading security). Among the more significant trends that have caught the attention of scholars is the development and expanse of interoperable security-surveillance networks that interconnect variousmilitary and civil governmental agencies and private providers within a pluralizing market (Deukmedjian and Cradock 2009; Dupont 2004; Lippert and O’Connor 2006). Networks are not new. But it seems that we are witnessing greater horizontal (rather than hierarchically funneled) interagency and intraagency flows and practices. That said, if we were to apply Foucault’s concepts of centripetal and centrifugal function, we can easily see that hierarchical networks are disciplinary-surveillance assemblages—the bottom-up flows of knowledge and expertise increasingly focus until they reach some point, and it is that focal point from which action is directed back downward to the bottom. A disciplinary organization is thus susceptible to “decapitation.” Horizontal networks are expansive, boundless, and centrifugal and as such they afford and engender security. A horizontal network can continue to function even if some of its “nodes” regularly fail, provided redundancy is sufficiently diffuse. Of course, and we have seen this with the financial crisis of 2008 and are seeing it currently in Europe, if a network is insufficiently diffuse and instead contains a small number of critical nodes, then the network is vulnerable to their failure. Still, what is lacking is a better understanding of the interactions between security and disciplinary surveillance within neoliberal deregulation and desocialization. If nodes are market enterprises functioning within an ever more detailed and ever expansive competitive space—one that requires tuning and the identification of someminimum degree of regulation determined by market trends, then nodes increasingly require central arbitration in the determination of their tolerances and intolerances (cf. Foucault 2008). Tolerance is increasingly situated in the continuum of private, local, and individual auspices of self-discipline and surveillance, while intolerance is situated in the continuum of security surveillance and force. The balancing of tolerance and intolerance across this fluid network12 rather than being driven by some equilibrium found in nature is driven by the disequilibrium engendered by neoliberal market politics. Given its centrifugal logic, neoliberalism promotes more risk taking and greater flows of capital and hence promotes more security surveillance on risk taking to identify, disrupt, preempt, contain, prepare for, and increase resiliency toward activity that is seen to potentially cause network instability or failure. We can thus begin to appreciate both the present shedding of disciplinary-surveillance provisions and the securitization of neoliberal economies. If sovereign competition now primarily takes place through a politics of free market capital growth and deregulation, then the protection, preparedness, and resiliency, indeed the insurance (Ericson, Barry, and Doyle 2000) of sovereign markets against problematic risks becomes a paramount function of governance. Neoliberalization animates both the securitization of free markets and the devolution of market discipline through such strategies. Neoliberalism is not terminal: it functions continuously to deregulate, to desocialize, and to promote greater and diverse risk taking and this must be achieved through ever-expansive apparatuses of security surveillance to address the multiform risks that threaten markets. Seen in this light, there are an endless array of risks that require governmental planning, preparation, and monitoring. Some extreme examples range from the RCMP Integrated Security Unit’s preparation against terrorists potentially using artificial snow makingmachines to disperse highly radiological material at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games (Matas 2009), to a 2007 USDA Factsheet that considers food contamination risks in the event of “extraterrestrial hostile action” (Food Safety and Inspection Service 2007).

Bulk Data

Bulk data collections functions as a barbed wire fence that depoliticizes issues like privacy and reduces the capacity for public debate – restrictions are just a placebo to make us think we have agency

Morozov, 13

(Evgeny- former fellow @ Stanford and Georgetown,“The Real Privacy Problem” http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/)

In the last few decades, as we began to generate more data, our institutions became addicted. If you withheld the data and severed the feedback loops, it’s not clear whether they could continue at all. We, as citizens, are caught in an odd position: our reason for disclosing the data is not that we feel deep concern for the public good. No, we release data out of self-interest, on Google or via self-tracking apps. We are too cheap not to use free services subsidized by advertising. Or we want to track our fitness and diet, and then we sell the data.¶ Simitis knew even in 1985 that this would inevitably lead to the “algorithmic regulation” taking shape today, as politics becomes “public administration” that runs on autopilot so that citizens can relax and enjoy themselves, only to be nudged, occasionally, whenever they are about to forget to buy broccoli.¶ Habits, activities, and preferences are compiled, registered, and retrieved to facilitate better adjustment, not to improve the individual’s capacity to act and to decide. Whatever the original incentive for computerization may have been, processing increasingly appears as the ideal means to adapt an individual to a predetermined, standardized behavior that aims at the highest possible degree of compliance with the model patient, consumer, taxpayer, employee, or citizen.¶ What Simitis is describing here is the construction of what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our intellectual and social lives. Big data, with its many interconnected databases that feed on information and algorithms of dubious provenance, imposes severe constraints on how we mature politically and socially. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was right to warn—in 1963—that “an exclusively technical civilization … is threatened … by the splitting of human beings into two classes—the social engineers and the inmates of closed social institutions.”¶ The invisible barbed wire of big data limits our lives to a space that might look quiet and enticing enough but is not of our own choosing and that we cannot rebuild or expand. The worst part is that we do not see it as such. Because we believe that we are free to go anywhere, the barbed wire remains invisible. Worse, there’s no one to blame: certainly not Google, Dick Cheney, or the NSA. It’s the result of many different logics and systems—of modern capitalism, of bureaucratic governance, of risk management—that get supercharged by the automation of information processing and by the depoliticization of politics.¶ The more information we reveal about ourselves, the denser but more invisible this barbed wire becomes. We gradually lose our capacity to reason and debate; we no longer understand why things happen to us.¶ But all is not lost. We could learn to perceive ourselves as trapped within this barbed wire and even cut through it. Privacy is the resource that allows us to do that and, should we be so lucky, even to plan our escape route.¶ This is where Simitis expressed a truly revolutionary insight that is lost in contemporary privacy debates: no progress can be achieved, he said, as long as privacy protection is “more or less equated with an individual’s right to decide when and which data are to be accessible.” The trap that many well-meaning privacy advocates fall into is thinking that if only they could provide the individual with more control over his or her data—through stronger laws or a robust property regime—then the invisible barbed wire would become visible and fray. It won’t—not if that data is eventually returned to the very institutions that are erecting the wire around us.

Commercial interests of the data-power administration mean that even new restrictions on surveillance will be circumvented – data hunger is a tenant of neoliberalism.

Morozov, 13

(Evgeny- former fellow @ Stanford and Georgetown,“The Real Privacy Problem” http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/)

First, let’s address the symptoms of our current malaise. Yes, the commercial interests of technology companies and the policy interests of government agencies have converged: both are interested in the collection and rapid analysis of user data. Google and Facebook are compelled to collect ever more data to boost the effectiveness of the ads they sell. Government agencies need the same data—they can collect it either on their own or in coöperation with technology companies—to pursue their own programs.¶ Many of those programs deal with national security. But such data can be used in many other ways that also undermine privacy. The Italian government, for example, is using a tool called the redditometro, or income meter, which analyzes receipts and spending patterns to flag people who spend more than they claim in income as potential tax cheaters. Once mobile payments replace a large percentage of cash transactions—with Google and Facebook as intermediaries—the data collected by these companies will be indispensable to tax collectors. Likewise, legal academics are busy exploring how data mining can be used to craft contracts or wills tailored to the personalities, characteristics, and past behavior of individual citizens, boosting efficiency and reducing malpractice.¶ On another front, technocrats like Cass Sunstein, the former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House and a leading proponent of “nanny statecraft” that nudges citizens to do certain things, hope that the collection and instant analysis of data about individuals can help solve problems like obesity, climate change, and drunk driving by steering our behavior. A new book by three British academics—Changing Behaviours: On the Rise of the Psychological State—features a long list of such schemes at work in the U.K., where the government’s nudging unit, inspired by Sunstein, has been so successful that it’s about to become a for-profit operation.¶ Thanks to smartphones or Google Glass, we can now be pinged whenever we are about to do something stupid, unhealthy, or unsound. We wouldn’t necessarily need to know why the action would be wrong: the system’s algorithms do the moral calculus on their own. Citizens take on the role of information machines that feed the techno-bureaucratic complex with our data. And why wouldn’t we, if we are promised slimmer waistlines, cleaner air, or longer (and safer) lives in return?¶ This logic of preëmption is not different from that of the NSA in its fight against terror: let’s prevent problems rather than deal with their consequences. Even if we tie the hands of the NSA—by some combination of better oversight, stricter rules on data access, or stronger and friendlier encryption technologies—the data hunger of other state institutions would remain. They will justify it. On issues like obesity or climate change—where the policy makers are quick to add that we are facing a ticking-bomb scenario—they will say a little deficit of democracy can go a long way.¶ Here’s what that deficit would look like: the new digital infrastructure, thriving as it does on real-time data contributed by citizens, allows the technocrats to take politics, with all its noise, friction, and discontent, out of the political process. It replaces the messy stuff of coalition-building, bargaining, and deliberation with the cleanliness and efficiency of data-powered administration.¶ This phenomenon has a meme-friendly name: “algorithmic regulation,” as Silicon Valley publisher Tim O’Reilly calls it. In essence, information-rich democracies have reached a point where they want to try to solve public problems without having to explain or justify themselves to citizens. Instead, they can simply appeal to our own self-interest—and they know enough about us to engineer a perfect, highly personalized, irresistible nudge.

NSA

Metadata has been commodified – justifications for mass surveillance will always emerge in a neoliberal system

Price, 14

(David- prof of anthropology @ Saint Martin’s U, “The New Surveillance Normal: NSA and Corporate Surveillance in the Age of Global Capitalism,” https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/the-new-surveillance-normal/)

The National Security Agency (NSA) document cache released by Edward Snowden reveals a need to re-theorize the role of state and corporate surveillance systems in an age of neoliberal global capitalism. While much remains unknowable to us, we now are in a world where private communications are legible in previously inconceivable ways, ideologies of surveillance are undergoing rapid transformations, and the commodification of metadata (and other surveillance intelligence) transforms privacy. In light of this, we need to consider how the NSA and corporate metadata mining converge to support the interests of capital.¶ This is an age of converging state and corporate surveillance. Like other features of the political economy, these shifts develop with apparent independence of institutional motivations, yet corporate and spy agencies’ practices share common appetites for metadata. Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s global surveillance programs raises the possibility that the state intelligence apparatus is used for industrial espionage in ways that could unite governmental intelligence and corporate interests—for which there appears to be historical precedent. The convergence of the interests, incentives, and methods of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the corporate powers they serve, raise questions about the ways that the NSA and CIA fulfill their roles, which have been described by former CIA agent Philip Agee as: “the secret police of U.S. capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of U.S. companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.”1¶ There is a long history in the United States of overwhelming public opposition to new forms of electronic surveillance. Police, prosecutors, and spy agencies have recurrently used public crises—ranging from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, wars, claimed threats of organized crime and terror attacks, to marshal expanded state surveillance powers.2 During the two decades preceding the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress periodically considered developing legislation establishing rights of privacy; but even in the pre-Internet age, corporate interests scoffed at the need for any such protections. Pre–2001 critiques of electronic-surveillance focused on privacy rights and threats to boundaries between individuals, corporations, and the state; what would later be known as metadata collection were then broadly understood as violating shared notions of privacy, and as exposing the scaffolding of a police state or a corporate panopticon inhabited by consumers living in a George Tooker painting.