Negative 1nc

Permutation

AT: Permutation

Combining a cosmopolitan ethics with state action ends up subverting the cosmopolitan goal – the affirmative’s domestic categorization means the permutation devolves into statism – that turns the case

Bauman et al, 14 – professor at the University of Leeds (Zygmunt, “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance” International Political Sociology (2014) 8, 121–144)
The transformation of territorial lines into a Mobius strip rearticulates the sovereign games that states usually play. While big data collection blurs categorizations of what is “domestic” and what is “foreign,” the consequent reconfiguration of the boundaries of the sovereign state into a Mobius strip has in turn become a site, in and of itself, of political struggles, resistance and dissent. Along the Mobius strip, states, social movements, and individuals can play a variety of games, reenacting the meanings of sovereignty and citizenship, security, and liberty. In the case of states, reactions against mass surveillance have varied from assertions of universal rights to reconstitutions of sovereign territorial boundaries, from the digitization of security to the digitization of geopolitics. Several dimensions of the Brazilian government’s recent reaction against techniques of mass surveillance are exemplary of the different games that states play along the Mobius strip. This section will address these games and how they shape political struggles around the digitized reason of state.

How to Turn the Mobius Strip Back into Sovereign Lines

Edward Snowden’s exposure of NSA surveillance operations in Brazil—including the monitoring of President Rousseff’s mobile phone and the collection of data from the country’s oil company and, indiscriminately, from Brazilian citizens— triggered a series of actions in several arenas. In addition to the postponement of a state visit to the United States, originally scheduled for October 2013, President Rousseff dedicated her statement at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly to the issue of mass surveillance or, as she called it, “a global network of electronic espionage.” The statement condemned the NSA’s practices on two grounds: violation of human rights and “disrespect to national sovereignty.” Consistent with Rousseff’s speech, the most noticeable outcome was the inclusion of privacy rights in the agenda of the UN Human Rights Committee and the introduction of a Resolution at the UN General Assembly, with the support of the German government. Even though the resolution did not mention the United States, its proposal was a way to censure the practices of mass surveillance conducted by American agencies. Nevertheless, contrary to the many accusations of violations of national sovereignty (vocalized by many governments, Brazil and Germany included), what distinguished this reaction was the stage on which it took place and the vocabulary through which it was articulated. At the UN, states are supposed to employ a universal vocabulary, enabling therefore claims for the recognition of privacy as a human right.

The enactment of a universal vocabulary destabilizes the core of mass surveillance practices, bringing to the fore the ways in which they constitute their main object of concern: the “data subject.” The “data subject” is a conditional form of existence whose rights are dependent upon its behavior within digital networks. The observation and analysis of specific behaviors make it possible to draw generic profiles and to identify threats and targets. Hence, the degree of separation between the subject and an identified target triggers specific surveillance techniques and defines the rights to which the “data subject” is entitled. Under the digitized reason of state regime, individual rights are conditioned by a specific series of relationships and by the particular positions that the subject occupies within these boundless networks. “Data subjects” are constituted and accessed with regards to their particular position. Their rights depend upon how distant—or not—they are from given targets. This positional articulation is at odds with the cosmopolitan assumptions that underpin the universal rights campaign by the Brazilian and German governments. Their attempts to reconstitute individual rights, and ultimately the regulative idea of an autonomous subject, against the digitized reason of state, might appear outdated and, perhaps, conservative. In this sense, political debates regarding the techniques of mass surveillance at the General Assembly were primarily a struggle between two modes of existence: the data subject and the cosmopolitan subject of universal rights. Nevertheless, the cosmopolitan leaning of the General Assembly resolution was a way to reconstitute the promises of the modern international, not only through the safeguarding of individual autonomy, but also through the assertion of the responsibility of states in protecting it. Against the practices of mass surveillance, states such as Brazil and Germany have tried to turn the Mobius strip back into sovereign territorial lines.

Nevertheless, the cosmopolitan move was not made at the expense of state sovereignty, at least not in the case of the Brazilian government. Within this particular game, the enactment of a cosmopolitan vocabulary authorizes the state to act in order to protect its citizens’ rights, including the right of privacy and, as will be discussed below, to protect data. Hence, at the UN, the game that Brazilian authorities are playing is actually an attempt to reconcile individual autonomy, state sovereignty, and universal rights. Although strategically this game challenges the foundations of the digitized reason of state, the techniques mobilized and eventually deployed to protect citizens’ rights may, in effect, reinforce it. Claiming that privacy is a human right, Brazilian authorities support the creation of a multilateral and multi-stakeholder arrangement “capable of ensuring freedom of expression, privacy of individuals and respect for human rights” (Rousseff). Yet, the same claim authorizes the Brazilian government to declare its resolve to “do everything within its reach to defend the human rights of all Brazilians and to protect the fruits born from the ingenuity of [its] workers and [its] companies” (Rousseff). That is, what President Rousseff has in mind is a set of domestic measures intended to build up national capabilities to protect the privacy of Brazilian citizens against the threat of US mass surveillance.4 Even though the multilateral regulation of cyberspace and the national capacity for the protection of citizens’ privacy might complement each other, the prospects for the development of techniques of national protection may trigger another game: a digitized geopolitics.

The Digitized Reason of State and Its Digitized Geopolitics

The policies announced by the Brazilian government to contain the threats presented by US mass surveillance techniques include the increase of international Internet connectivity and domestic content production. According to Brazilian authorities, the production of domestic content, such as a national email service or a national social media, would allow Brazilian citizens to keep their data within national borders. The debate regarding the creation of a “European data cloud” raises similar issues. Indeed, Brazilian authorities are not alone. In a similar vein, Dutch authorities have tried to keep the government’s data out of the reach of American companies, while the European Union is discussing the possibility of isolating data storage from US mining techniques, and the German government is trying to keep traffic local by warning Internet users when they pull out of European cyberspace. Not to mention the well-known cases of the Chinese “Great Firewall” or the Iranian “Halal Internet.” In every case, states are thickening their digital borders. Although one should not overlook the differences between what Brazilian or German authorities are doing to protect data and privacy, and what the Chinese government is doing with its firewall, in each of these cases a massive infrastructure has to be built. Hence, a vast array of technologies, legislations, and expertise has to be developed and deployed either to protect data, to control traffic or even for surveillance. On top of all of these investments in state capacities for protection or surveillance, security professionals and intelligence experts have to be mobilized to manage the national systems.

By building their fortresses in the clouds, states shift from the cosmopolitan move to strategic play. While the first move is based on claims to universal rights, the strategic game is based on claims to state sovereignty, or in this case cybersovereignty. Within these strategic games, very often, the reference to universal rights fades and ends up being replaced by a strategic reasoning embedded in uncertainty and fear. Concepts such as national interest, national or state security, espionage, and war come to the fore when state representatives go public to support policies and techniques that protect a given society. Cyberspace is, then, described as a US-centered space, and so US cyber power should be balanced through the development of national cyber capabilities or international coalitions.

In the Brazilian case, attempts to expand international Internet connectivity (within the regional space but also on a global scale) are consistent with the idea of protecting national data as well as of balancing or competing with the US position in cyberspace. The program comprises three articulated initiatives: the construction of intercontinental undersea fiber cables, many of them connecting Southern countries; a satellite program, planning to launch a “Geostationary Defense and Strategic Communications satellite” in 2016; and, finally, an overland fiber cable connecting countries in South America. One of the core moves in this game has been the announcement of a BRICS cable, connecting all of the BRICS countries independently from the United States.5 Every single initiative articulates different branches of the Brazilian government with Brazilian or transnational corporations, and every project is transnational by its own nature.6

This new game results in an expansion of the digitized reason of state. Instead of evading the Mobius strip, states play geopolitics within it. The digitized geopolitics assumes that cyberspace is a battlefield and that states must build up their own cyber capabilities in order to defend themselves and/or must engage in international coalitions in order to face the challenges posed by mass surveillance and digital espionage. The paradoxical effect of this particular game seems to be that states’ resistance against mass surveillance ultimately reinforces the digitized reason of state regime. Reproducing the opposition between security and freedom, while playing the digitized geopolitics game, states might end up subsuming citizenship and rights to the positional logic of a data subject. While fighting against mass surveillance, states may create the appropriate conditions to conduct mass surveillance themselves.

Legal reform isn’t a negative state action – it sucks advocacy in to support the state and deradicalizes the alternative

Neocleous, 8 - Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, Critique of Security, p. 72-75)
But there is a wider argument to be made, one with political implications. The idea that the permanent emergency involves a suspension of the law encourages the idea that resistance must involve a ‘return to legality’, a return to the ‘normal’ mode of governing through the rule of law. This involves a serious misjudgement in which it is simply assumed that legal procedures – both international and domestic – are designed to protect human rights from state violence. ‘Law’ itself comes to appear largely unproblematic and the rule of law ‘an unqualified human good’.108 What this amounts to is what I have elsewhere called a form of legal fetishism, in which Law becomes a mystical answer to the problems posed by power. In the process, the problems inherent in Law are ignored. Law is treated as an ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ reality, explained according to its own dynamics, a Subject in itself whose very existence requires that individuals and institutions ‘objectify’ themselves before it. This produces the illusion that Law has a life of its own, abstracting the rule of law from its origins in class domination, ignoring the ways in which the rule of law is deployed as a political strategy, and obscuring the ideological mystification of these processes in the liberal trumpeting of the rule of law. To demand the return to the ‘rule of law’ is to seriously misread the history of the relation between the rule of law and emergency powers and, consequently, to get sucked into a less-than-radical politics in dealing with state violence. Part of what I am suggesting is that emergency measures are part of the everyday exercise of powers, working alongside rather than against the rule of law as part of a unified political strategy in the fabrication of social order.

The question to ask, then, is less ‘how can we bring law to bear on violence?’ and much more ‘what is it that the law permits emergency measures to accomplish?’109 This question – the question that Schmitt, with his fetish for the decision cannot understand,110 which is also why contemporary Left Schmittianism is such a dead loss – disposes of any supposed juxtaposition between legality and emergency and allows us to recognise instead the extent to which the concept of emergency is deeply inscribed within the law and the legal condition of the modern state, and a central part of liberalism’s authoritarian moment: the iron fist in the velvet glove of liberal constitutionalism. Far from suspending law or bracketing off the juridical, emergency powers lie firmly within the legal domain. How could they not, since they are so obviously central to state power and the political technology of government – part of the deployment of law, rather than its abandonment? Once this is recognised, the supposed problematic of violence disappears completely, for it can then be seen that emergency powers are deployed for the exercise of a violence necessary for the permanent refashioning of order – the violence of law, not violence contra law. Liberalism struggles with this, and thus presents it as an exceptional moment; fascism recognises it for what it is, and aestheticises the moment. As David Dyzenhaus points out, while the stripping of liberties in the name of emergency, the denial of rights on the grounds of necessity, and the suspension of freedoms through the exercise of prerogative might appear quite minor compared to what happens in fascist regimes, the fact that the stripping, denial and suspension does happen under the guise of emergency and in full view of the courts brings the legal order of liberal democracies far closer to the legal order of fascism than liberals would care to admit.111 But in a wonderful ideological loop, the rule of law is also its own ideological obfuscation of that fact.112

The political implications of this are enormous. For if emergency powers are part and parcel of the exercise of law and violence (that is, law as violence), and if historically they have been aimed at the oppressed – in advanced capitalist states against the proletariat and its various struggles, in reactionary regimes against genuine politicisation of the people, in colonial systems against popular mobilisation – then they need to be fought not by demanding a return to the ‘normal’ rule of law, but in what Benjamin calls a real state of emergency, on the grounds that only this will improve our position in the struggle against the fascism of our time. And this is a task which requires violence, not the rule of law. As Benjamin saw, the law’s claim to a monopoly of violence is explained not by the intention of preserving some mythical ‘legal end’ such as security or normality but, rather, for ‘the intention of preserving the law itself’. But violence not in the hands of the law threatens it by its mere existence outside the law. A violence exercised not by the state, but used for very different political ends. For ‘if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, [then] this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence . . . is possible’.113

That this possibility of and necessity for revolutionary violence is so often omitted when emergency powers are discussed is indicative of the extent to which much of the Left has given up any talk of political violence for the far more comfortable world of the rule of law, regardless of how little the latter has achieved in just the last few years. But if the history of emergency powers tells us anything it is that the least effective response to state violence is to simply insist on the rule of law. Rather than aiming to counter state violence with a demand for legality, then, what is needed is a counter-politics: against the permanent emergency, by all means, but also against the ‘normality’ of everyday class power and the bourgeois world of the rule of law. And since the logic of emergency is so deeply embedded in the rhetorical structure of liberalism’s concept of security, this means being against the politics of security. For the very posing of political questions through the trope of emergency is always already on the side of security. To grasp why, we need to now refocus our attention more specifically on security as a political technology.

Using the legal system creates a legal fetishism that inevitably reinforces sovereign boundaries – only wholesale rejection solves

Kienscherf, 13 – professor of sociology at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin (Markus, US Domestic and International Regimes of Security: Pacifying the Globe, Securing the Homeland, p. 152-155)
Kyle Grayson (2012: 36) suggests that what is at the heart of the debate about the liberal practice of targeted killing is a fundamental dilemma about liberalism itself Is liberalism a good system that can produce bad outcomes or a bad system that can produce good outcomes?" This question can be rephrased as follows: Can liberalism still provide the grounds for challenging the increasing use of illiberal, and sometimes even lethal, practices of security in the name of liberalism?

First, governmentalities of security in general, and certain security practices (such as targeted killings) in particular, can be challenged in the name of effectiveness. In fact, the overall field of security is marked by contradictions and controversies. Security professionals often disagree on the priority of specific insecurities as well as on questions of tactics, operations and strategy The afore- mentioned critique of drone attacks serves as a good example of tactical and operational differences, both amongst security professionals and between them and political decision-makers. However, critical accounts of the supposed (in) effectiveness of particular rationalities and practices of security completely tend to ignore the fundamental problematic at the heart of liberal security, namely the biopolitical division between good" and bad" circulations. Moreover, the very ineffectiveness of governmentalities of security in promoting sustainable security and their tendency to even reinforce existing insecurities, ultimately drives their perpetual (re)adjustment and expansion. For, if security is but a response to perceived insecurities, then the more that threats proliferate, the louder will be the calls for ever more security. Ultimately, critiques of the effectiveness of particular governmentalities of security are bound to be complicit in the search for ever more and better security.

Second, the expansion of governmentalities of security can be challenged in the name of peace. This critique is based on two interrelated assumptions: (1) that governmentalities of security are a mere extension of warfighting into hitherto civilian domains, and (2) that there is still a clear-cut difference between war and peace. This view implies a resurrection of the inside/outside binary, in order to be able to critique the militarization of security from a civilian position of peace. However, if war and peace are completely intermingled, and if security increasingly operates according to a "logic" of pacification - waging 'savage wars of peace" (Kipling 1899) within a global homeland, then 'peace' can hardly offer a vantage point for the critique of liberal security. For, although global peace may indeed be desirable the, often violent, means of pacification deployed in pursuit of global peace and stability are clearly not.

Third, the expansion of governmentalities of security can be challenged in the name of the rale of law. If security hinged on declaring mere exceptions to the normality of the rule of law, we could just attempt to strengthen legal mechanisms to make it much harder or even impossible to declare a state of exception. However, if the use of emergency powers has become a routine technology of government, if the passage and enforcement of laws itself has become a security tactic, and if we can no longer distinguish between normality' and the 'exception', this is clearly not a viable option. What is more, challenging the expansion of security in the name of law also entails what Neocleous calls "a form of legal fetishism' (2008: 73: see also 2000). Legal fetishism treats law as 'a mystical answer to the questions of power', while ignoring how law is bound up in relations of power and how it sometimes even serves as a mere tactic of power (2008: 73).

Last but not least, the expansion of governmentalities of security can be challenged in the name of the perhaps most cherished principle of liberalism - freedom. Doing so rests on the assumption that freedom and security have become unbalanced m favor of security, so that we have to somehow rebalance them. However, if liberty and security are completely wrapped up in one another, this is surely pointless. For, as shown in the course of this book, liberal security aims to promote the freedom of some circulations by interdicting others. To put it crudely, liberal security has so far primarily tended to ensure the freedom of well-to-do white people, while severely curtailing that of poor people of color, both domestically and globally.

Liberal security is increasingly set to respond to insecurities and threats that are held to circulate across local, national, regional and global levels. These insecurities and threats are, moreover, held to emanate from particular spaces and populations that more often than not also happen to be amongst the most deprived. The security solutions prescribed in response to these problems tend to take the form of pacification campaigns, targeting particular spaces and populations, in order to (re)integrate them into a global order, while containing and/or eradicating elements within these populations and spaces that are seen as threats to the global order. Contemporary liberal security thus marks both an externalization of domestic order maintenance, projecting rationalities and practices of liberal government onto the global level, and an internalization of external order building, re-importing colonial violence into the homeland. Authoritarian practices, or emergency powers, have been and continue to be used in, and by, liberal regimes in the name of securing liberal order. These authoritarian practices are no mere aberration, but have become a permanent feature of liberal rule, leading to what some critics have called a permanent state of exception. Yet, these authoritarian practices are not directed at all and sundry. They tend to target some more than others. In fact, liberal authoritarianism in general, and liberal violence in particular, tends to be aimed at individuals, populations and spaces that are seen as either recalcitrant to liberal rule or as threats to the liberal capitalist order The actual degree of authoritarianism is, moreover, supposed to be adjusted to the perceived level of risk embodied by the targeted individuals, populations and spaces. However, liberalism's nuanced calculations of risk always tend to bleed into a much cinder friend/enemy binary.

Liberal rule is torn between a universalistic deterritorializing tendency of temporal development, of becoming-liberal, on the one hand, and a particularistic, reterritorializing tendency of spatial separation, on the other. Liberal rule constantly seeks to extend its fundamental promises of freedom (the rule of law and peace) to ever more populations and spaces, working towards "a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open expanding frontiers' - that is to say, towards the becoming-liberal of the entire globe (Hardt and Negri 2000: vii). Yet at the same time, liberal rule constantly draws and redraws borders between those who can be ruled liberally, and those who either have to be rendered amenable to liberal rule or have to be violently excluded. The contradiction between the deterritorializing and the reterritorializing forces at play in liberal rule manifests itself in attempts to distinguish between those circulations that need to be promoted and those that need to be interdicted. As these ‘bad' circulations are held to threaten processes at the local, national, regional and global level, the universal promotion of liberal rule entails both the externalization of internal forms of liberal government and the internalization of external forms of violence. Liberalism's tendency to project the hitherto domestic promotion of the processes of the population onto the global level encounters both resistance and the emergence of circulations that are seen as pulling the processes of the population at risk. Consequently, attempts to include ever more populations and spaces in the liberal order, while violently excluding dangerous ones, inevitably reinforce existing divisions and engender new ones. Indeed, liberal governmentalities of security are constantly expanding to make the biopolitical distinction between ‘good' and 'bad' circulations on an increasingly wider scale, potentially including the entire globe. The constant expansion of liberal security is geared towards (re)producing a liberal capitalist order, but it also ultimately reinforces the social, economic, political and cultural divisions this order invariably entails.

Liberal security can thus hardly be challenged on liberal grounds. After all, liberal governmentalities of security are deployed in the name of freedom, the rule of law and peace and with the express purpose of securing a liberal order. In fact, a critique of liberal security has to be a critique of liberalism itself. The expansion of liberal governmentalities of security can only be challenged if we constantly ask the follow ing set of questions: Whose freedom and security do they seek to provide for and at what costs to others? On what fundamental economic, social, political and cultural inequalities is the provision of security based, and to what extent does it reproduce these inequalities?