Download The plan buys into surveillance legalism which teaches conformity to

Format/Explanation
In this debate you will be debating the Islamophobia affirmative. This is an affirmative that reads a plan
that includes the USFG. Their advantage is racialized surveillance is bad.
The 1ac is totally assumed. It’s not even in the file.
The 1nc is below and is part of a larger 1nc strategy that involves Topicality, a DA, and a counterplan.
Cx of 1nc: 1 minute.
2ac: 2 minutes.
Cx of 2ac: 1 minute
2nc: 5 minutes.
Cx of 2nc 2 minutes.
1ar: 2 minutes
2nr: 5 minutes.
2ar: 4 minutes.
1nc K
The plan buys into surveillance legalism which teaches conformity to the law over
questioning it in the first place – that turns case.
Jennifer Granick, 14 (The Surveillance State’s Legalism Isn’t About Morals, It’s About Manipulating the
Rules) http://justsecurity.org/17393/ics-legalism-morals-manipulating-rules/ accessed online 7/15/15
Margo Schlanger has written a great article forthcoming in the Harvard National Security Journal about
intelligence legalism, an ethical framework she sees underlying NSA surveillance. Margo makes the case
that NSA and the executive branch haven’t been asking what the right surveillance practices should
be, but rather what surveillance practices are allowed to be. She takes the concept of legalism from
political theorist Judith Shklar: “the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule
following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules.” In the model of
legalism that Margo sees the NSA following, any spying that is not legally prohibited is also right and
good because ethics is synonymous with following the rules. Her critique of “intelligence legalism” is
that the rules are the bare minimum, and merely following the rules doesn’t take civil liberties concerns
seriously enough. My question is whether legalism serves as a moral code for US Intelligence
Community (IC) leadership, or only as a smokescreen. I believe the evidence shows that since 9/11,the
IC, and specifically the NSA has not followed the rules. Rather, the agency has resorted to legalistic
justifications in pursuit of other goals—namely whatever might be useful in countering terrorism.
Before 9/11, the agency may have been focused on complying with FISA. But afterthat day, the NSA’s
approach was that it “could circumvent federal statutes and the Constitution so long as there was some
visceral connection to looking for terrorists.” In other words, since 9/11, the moral center of gravity in
the surveillance world has focused on doing whatever is necessary for hunting terrorists, not following
the rules. Margo also argues that the NSA’s legalism equates to, for better or worse, the
empowerment of lawyers. Sign-off by lawyers is, as Margo says, an important part of the process.
Lawyer opinions gave telecommunications firms legal immunity for their cooperation with the
government in conducting mass surveillance. Lawyers were used to compel compliance from
underlings within the intelligence community. They’ve been used cynically for public relations
purposes, trading on the public trust in the actions of government lawyers to cloud the public debate
over legality. They’ve been used to marginalize the role of Congress in approving surveillance. The
decisions of lawyers inside the surveillance community have allowed America’s spies to secretly expand
their power as they develop classified capabilities and practices that the public and Congress haven’t yet
become aware of, and have not even begun to regulate. But calling this “empowerment” is misleading.
We see lawyers who object to policies that may harm civil liberties bypassed in favor of handpicked
counsel who give their bosses the answers they want. Lawyers are ratifying surveillance decisions
policy makers have already made. That’s not empowerment, it’s subservience.
Questioning on the law is essential to question the ethics we live under
Farley ’03 (Maria Grahn-Farley, Visiting Scholar at the Boston College Department of
Sociology, “The Ideology of Genus & The Ghost of Heidegger(c)”, Page 4 of 26, Published
in 2003, Accessed July 14 2015 on Lexus Nexus, CMT)
What does it mean to question, or rather to formulate and then ask the question: Should same-sex
couples legally be able to adopt children? It is not possible to ask the question without also leaving room
for an answer. The question also determines the range of the answers that it is possible to give. 15 To
make this into a question is to act unethically, to essentially question someone's humanity. It is to make
the question of adoption an ethical question within a highly unethical and unquestioned questioning of
humanity itself. In this case it was the Parliament committing an act of "outing," 16 without having to
take the responsibility for the act because it was disguised in the form of a question-answer routine. 17
More broadly, to question who may adopt is to question who is really (or fully) human, and to question
this is to begin a discourse [*9] about ethics in the space of the unethical. The moment that the
question of someone's humanity is asked, a space for a definition of the non-human is also created. 18
This space or void calls out to be populated by those who do not qualif2y as humans, all those whose
humanity has been denied by the senders and the receivers of the question that created the space for
the non-human. 19 To question someone's humanity by locating the question inside the "law-room"
also raises the question of the ethics of law. 20 The pretext for the debate about same-sex couples and
adoption was two-fold: it was about children and it was about being granted entrance. This Article will
argue that it was not about children and it was not about entrance. Instead of being about children, it
was about a fear of contamination. Instead of being about entrance, it was about containment.
Rejecting liberal reforms is a necessary starting point – alternative forms of political
organization are necessary to counter legalism.
Margo Schlanger, 15 (is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and the founder
and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse) “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security
Agency's Civil Liberties Gap”
A significant benefit of traditional, repressive authoritarian mechanisms is their efficiency. For example,
subjecting civil society organizations to intense regulatory oversight to impede their operation is likely to
be less efficient and more costly than immediately shutting them down. Likewise, imprisoning a
journalist for critical commentary may also be more efficient at chilling speech than a protracted libel
lawsuit. A decision to adopt these openly authoritarian practices may increase today's payoff, but it will
also generate significant costs that may reduce tomorrow's. 395 [*1732] As discussed above,
maintaining an openly authoritarian regime can be a costly proposition given the international
crackdown on authoritarian practices in the post-Cold War era 396 and the domestic overthrow of authoritarian leaders
in the aftermath of the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring. Stealth authoritarianism provides an optimal decoy by manipulating information
output about anti-democratic practices and modifying the perceptions of the relevant actors. 397 Practices that appear clearly repressive in a
transparently authoritarian regime appear more ambiguous in a regime that employs stealth authoritarian practices. Stealth authoritarianism
raises the actual or apparent costs of detecting and eliminating authoritarian practices for both domestic and global actors, which generates
significant payoffs. As to domestic actors, opposition becomes more costly if the governing regime utilizes mechanisms that exist in regimes
with favorable democratic credentials to perpetuate its rule. As an initial matter, detection of anti-democratic measures can be more difficult
than in a transparently authoritarian regime. Repressive practices, masked by the rule of law, may go undetected by significant segments of the
polity, which, in turn, can raise the costs of mobilization against the incumbents. For example, where a criminal prosecution (backed with
sufficient evidence) or a libel lawsuit is employed against a political dissident, it can be difficult to differentiate between legitimate application
and abuse, at least compared to transparently authoritarian practices. For
similar reasons, as Christopher Schmidt explains,
segregationists in the Southern United States abandoned costly direct legal methods of oppression, such
as expressly legalized discrimination, in favor of indirect, less transparent, and race-neutral legal
methods to defend white supremacy. 398 Even where detected, stealth authoritarian practices may be
less objectionable to segments of the domestic polity than direct repression. Stealth authoritarianism
becomes even more palatable where the regime couples stealth authoritarian practices with desirable
democratic reforms. In addition, the existence of a limited space for political opposition and
discontent can create the illusion of political competition and meaningful electoral choice among
competing political actors. The illusion of choice can pacify the polity by allowing citizens to
experience participation in the democratic process, without providing a meaningful opportunity to
displace the incumbents. Especially in fully authoritarian regimes, the use of stealth [*1733] authoritarian
practices can also be praised as signs of democracy since these practices rely on formal legal
mechanisms that exist in regimes with favorable democratic credentials. The ability to challenge the
incumbents, raise political arguments, and establish reputations may justify participation in the
electoral marketplace by opposition activists. 399 As a result, the public incentive to oppose a regime
that applies stealth mechanisms of control may be less than an openly repressive one. That, in turn,
may impede the opposition's mobilization efforts. Without participation by broad segments of the
population, the opposition movement runs the serious risk of being disregarded as an
unrepresentative fringe faction. 400 As Adam Przeworski explains, "[a] regime does not collapse unless and until
some alternative is organized in such a way as to present a real choice for isolated individuals." 401 In
a regime that perpetuates its power through the same mechanisms that exist in democratic regimes,
constructing that alternative reality often presents a costlier proposition.