Marx Aff Supplement - Michigan 7 2024 KLAB

Surveillance DA---AFF---KLAB 2024
Notes
Thank you to the entirety of KLAB ’24 for contributing to this file, but special thanks to the card-cutters:
Meryem Anderoglu
Owen Chen
Davis Liang
Skylen Lundquist
Max Wong
Emma Yu
This is intended as a supplement file for the Marxism AFF vs the Surveillance DA, and contains a Terror Talk K as the primary source of offense. As such, a large portion of the file is dedicated to defensive arguments to demonstrate the constructed nature of the supposed terror threat.
Organized by Davis.
Terror Talk K
Links---General
The collective fear of terrorism is rooted in the drive to uphold US hegemony and capitalism.
Kumar ’20 -- Deepa Kumar (professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University), “Terrorcraft: empire and the making of the racialised terrorist threat,” Race & Class, 62(2), 34-60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396820930523] eyu
This security logic rested on the assumption that order was a necessary pre-condition for capitalism to thrive both domestically and globally. Modernisation programmes in the ‘developing world’ and the War on Poverty at home both relied on the intersection of economic development with security. W. W. Rostow, the eminent economist and national security advisor to Johnson, put it succinctly to Johnson in 1967 when he said: ‘I was much struck by the parallels between your formulation of domestic policy and those you have applied to foreign policy. At home your appeal is for law and order as the framework for economic and social progress. Abroad we fight in Vietnam . . . [to] build a future of economic and social progress.’39 Thus, developmentalism, policing and militarism became pillars for the advancement of capitalism and the restoration of a US-led global imperial order. This was the context for the rise of counter-insurgency doctrine, which rested on development plus force.40 As one expert put it, counter-insurgency is ‘armed social work’.41 Resistance to this order was organised by anti-colonial and anti-imperial forces in countries in the Global South, and by social movements domestically. From the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the anti-Vietnam War movement, US domestic and foreign policy was called into question. These movements took a radical turn in the mid-1960s. As Gilmore explains, from the LA Watts uprising onwards radical, Black, Brown, Yellow and Red Power movements fought the ways the state organized poor peoples’ perpetual dispossession in service to capital. Radical white activists, students, wage workers, welfare rights agitators added to domestic disorders by aligning with people of color: they also launched autonomous attacks against symbols and strongholds of US capitalism and Euro-American racism and imperialism.42 In 1975, Samuel Huntington, drawing the lessons for the elite of these movements, would decry the ‘excess of democracy’, arguing that if the US could not control its domestic populations it would not be able to retain its status as the pre-eminent ‘hegemonic power in a system of world order’.43 The Trilateral Commission, an instrument of the liberal elite, which published Huntington’s essay, set out to address what it termed the ‘crisis of democracy’ by forming a global alliance of nations in North America, Western Europe and with Japan. The solution to the crisis involved intervention into various spheres of social and political life. One dimension was the use of counter-insurgency methods to suppress dissent. The US’s expanded policing capacities around the world coincided with incarceration domestically. As Stuart Schrader shows, the security experts who developed counter-insurgency doctrine and practices did so by drawing initially on insights from domestic cases, which they then applied abroad, learning lessons that were subsequently brought back home.44 Saigon and Los Angeles were but two points in an emerging global grand strategy designed to restore order and US economic and military hegemony. In their now classic analysis, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his co-authors first identified the turn towards an ‘exceptional state’ and the use of racism as a means to address structural crises. In the UK, black youth were criminalised and a moral panic generated around black ‘mugging’. Despite the lack of any real uptick in the type of crime called mugging, this new racial project became the pretext to enact authoritarian solutions and legitimate draconian policing. As they state, ‘[p]olicing the blacks’ became ‘for all practical purposes, synonymous with the wider problem of policing the crisis’.45And, if ‘mugging’ came to the UK from the US, ‘fully thematised and contextualized’ and ‘embedded in a number of linked frames’,46 ‘terrorism’ in its particular racialised form of ‘Arab terrorism’ and later ‘Islamic terrorism’ came to the US as a collaborative project between conservatives in Israel and the US. Together with urban crime, riots, feminist agitation, and anti-war protests, terrorism became part of a generalised moral panic that the national security state needed to subdue in order to restore order, the stability of capitalism and global imperial dominance.
Their security threats are heightened to justify US imperialism.
Khurshid & Hassan ’20 – [Ayisha Khurshid (Associate Professor of International and Multicultural Education at Florida State University) Ahdi Hassan (Global Institute for Research Education & Scholarship: Amsterdam, Netherlands), “Semantic Complications in the War on Terror Discourse and Manipulation of Language by State and Non-State Actors,” International Research Journal of Management, IT & Social Sciences Vol. 7 No. 1, January 2020, pages: 162-168, https://doi.org/10.21744/irjmis.v7n1.838] eyu
The relationship between terrorism and media can be studied on three levels; “terrorists and government”, “terrorists and media” and “government and media” (Crelinsten, 1989). All three actors use and manipulate language to suit their purpose. When the media are used by the governments especially in the case of the War on Terror, not only the government policies are articulated and made legitimate, but also the portrayal of the enemies’ identities is built around the discourse of ‘others’, where at times they are dehumanized via animal metaphors like rat, hunt, and snare, etc. (Steuter & Wills, 2009) and object metaphors like elements. Such dehumanizing strategies are used to depict enemies as monsters not worthy of humane treatment (Maiese, 2003). The media are not only used by the governments to channelize their views and to shape public opinion but recently the terrorist organizations have also been making use of media to disseminate their views. They also use the media for propaganda to achieve their goals (Wilkinson & Gunnell, 2000) and spread terror (Weimann, 2005). Rothenberger et al. (2018), have employed Critical Discourse Analysis to study the discursive strategies used by ‘terrorist groups’ to build their identities by using websites to communicate. Similar methods have been employed to scrutinize how magazines produced by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) position their identities. The results indicate differences in the policy goals where the former is directed towards the outward change i.e. other countries, whereas the formers’ aim is to declare the Caliphate (Novenario, 2016). When it comes to media as an actor, Schudson (2011) gives three main reasons which compel American journalists to abandon a “neutral stance”. “In moments of tragedy, journalists assume a pastoral role” (Schudson, 2002) means that while covering tragic stories, an element of grief is added into the script and an atmosphere of gloom is created. Then, in moments of “public danger” (ibid.) journalists abandon an objective approach. By “public danger” Schudson means danger posed by “hurricanes’ and ‘terrorists”. The third situation arises when there are ‘threats to national security’ (ibid.). The 9/11 event provoked all these three factors, there were deaths of innocent people, there were threats to the public by terrorists, and lastly, it was a matter of national security. Under normal circumstances, journalists would have covered the event by detaching themselves from the public, but it was a matter of war, so journalists had to abandon objectivity. Soon after the collapse of the twin towers “the media hunt for the villains had begun” (Huffington, 2001). President Bush’s speeches were hugely backed up by the US media. The rhetoric had once again begun, “Us vs. them,” (Clift, 2010) “peace lovers vs. terrorist,” “democracy vs. tyranny” etc. Lewis (2014), explicates how the Bush-Cheney administration had built up their discourse on key terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.
Their impact starts at zero, reinscribes racialized violence and surveillance, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and ignores the root cause.
--WoT = War on Terror
Sharma and Nijjar ’23 [Sanjay Sharma, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Jasbinder S. Nijjar, lecturer in sociology at the University of Surrey; “Post-racial politics, pre-emption and in/security”; 05-01-2023; European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 27, no. 2; doi.org/10.1177/13675494231168177; accessed 07-25-2024] dliang
Pre-empting racialized terror
Discussions and critiques of predictive policing focus on ‘everyday’ types of crime and generally do not address state securitization, such as counter-terrorism. Predictive policing software programs algorithmically model ‘future’ crime by seeking to identify pat- terns of occurrence through analyzing historical data. Embedded in the martial logic of pre-emption, this militarized mode of policing has intensified under the WoT, which has mobilized a seemingly benign ‘community policing’ discourse to embed surveillance, data collection, risk analysis and pre-emptive action into the routine machinery of public policy and daily life (see Kalra and Mehmood, 2013; Kundnani, 2016; Webber, 2016). However, the heightened emphasis on pre-emptive national security policies and measures is complicated and problematized by the fact that terrorism is a high-impact, improbable event that is remarkably difficult to algorithmically model.
In professional security circles, attempting to predict acts of terrorism is commonly compared to the futility of ‘finding the needle in the haystack’ (Aradau and Blanke, 2017). For example, a large-scale study by Weisi Guo (2019) examined over 30,000 acts of terrorism in more than 7000 cities worldwide since 2002. The findings indicate that the frequency with which terror attacks occur is random and that such attacks are ‘memoryless’ (the chance of a new attack occurring is essentially independent of previous attacks). It is almost impossible to build accurate predictive terrorism models based on historical data because this would assume that terrorism has stable, discernable patterns of occurrence and is thus rhythmic and non-random (Munk, 2017).
Notably, Nassim Taleb (2010) has elaborated on how terrorism can be grasped as a ‘black swan event’, which has the following key attributes: First, as an exceptional event, terrorism cannot be easily anticipated and lies beyond our regular expectations; second, it is an event with extreme impact that can cause profound social change; and third, while an act classified as terrorism is rare, we are nonetheless compelled to ‘concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable’ (p. xviii).
The 9/11 attack and subsequent ones in Europe heightened a realization and a sense of fear that improbable events do occur, with devastating consequences. In response, the reactionary declaration of a WoT presented ‘Islam’ as a capricious threat to national security. Two decades of the ongoing WoT have made Islam synonymous with overlapping anxieties about extremism and the threat of terrorism (Kundnani, 2015). The ‘Muslim as a potential terrorist’ rationalized a racialized and militarized regime of state surveillance that has eroded democratic rights and civil liberties (Bunyan, 2010; Norris, 2017; Sharma and Nijjar, 2018). In addition, the WoT effectively legitimized state-sanctioned racial violence and death production, in the form of rendition, indefinite detention without trial and torture against ‘suspect’ Muslims, as exemplified by the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison (Giroux, 2010).
Western states have abjectly failed to acknowledge that neocolonial domination and neoliberal global instabilities fomented what has been reductively labeled as ‘Islamic’ terrorism. Domestic deregulation, privatization and de-industrialization, alongside foreign bombardment, have reorganized racial order to produce ‘masses of surplus populations’ (Kundnani, 2021: 52). Rather than addressing terrorism as a complex geopolitical problem that implicates and incriminates Western states and their economic imperatives, the WoT has fixated on the failure of securitization alongside the perceived threat of Islam. In particular, the inability of intelligence agencies to predict the 9/11 terror attacks incited a turn toward a techno-solutionist ideology: ‘Intelligence, counter-terrorism, policing and counterinsurgency have been transformed by the promise of big data and predictive analytics to uncover unexpected patterns and pinpoint potentially suspect ‘needles’’ (Aradau and Blanke, 2017: 374).
However, if it is near impossible to accurately predict low-frequency improbable events, then upon what grounds do counter-terrorism predictive analytics operate? The deployment of such analytics to predict acts of terror has more to do with their performativity than their accuracy. That is, the ‘performativity of prediction’ can alter the space it inhabits and bring into being what it predicts (MacKenzie, 2015). This mode of prediction, premised on fabrication, is not strictly manifested as prevention based on identifying and managing determinate threats in a knowable world. Rather, it operates through a logic of pre-emption that confronts indeterminate threats in an unknowable world (Massumi, 2010, 2015).
Both prevention and pre-emption aim to neutralize threats and regulate the future, but Brian Massumi (2015) contends that they differ in operational logics. Prevention works based on a calculable threat existing prior to its intervention, with the possibility of identifying and addressing its causes to prevent it from materializing. In contrast, the WoT advanced pre-emption as a response to threats to national security that are yet to materialize, and that may not materialize, but are nonetheless imagined as always capable of doing so. The ‘black swan’ event of 9/11 instituted a ‘military doctrine’ of pre-emption that rendered terrorism a permanent, ceaseless threat, ‘tirelessly agitating as a background condition, potentially ready to irrupt’ (Massumi, 2015: 30). David Theo Goldberg (2009: 44) makes a similar point, noting how ‘the ordinary calculation of risks becomes the risk society’, how ‘threats to (a) society become the threatened society’ and how socio-political arrangements become predicated on (constant) fear.
We can further grasp the sense of permanency around the notion of threat through the work of Louise Amoore (2013) who maintains that the risk of terrorism has not necessarily changed. What has changed is the calculus of risk, in conditions of constant emergency, of ceaseless foreboding, of un-ending fear and, as we discuss below, of continuous dread over terrorism. This modality of risk is not expressly involved in the prevention of a probable future event based on existing knowledge. Rather, it looks to preempt an unfolding and emergent event in relation to an array of possible projected futures. It seeks not to forestall the future via calculation but to incorporate the very unknowability and profound uncertainty of the future into imminent decision (p. 9).
The perpetual, background, indeterminate threat of terrorism is the object of pre-emption and its associated practices. That is to say, the performativity of pre-emptive action imperiously makes an indeterminate threat determinate; it brings a threat into being to render it the focus of attention–in this case, the threat of terror. As Massumi (2015: 12) writes, ‘the most effective way to fight an unspecified threat is to actively contribute to producing it’.
Massumi reminds us that the WoT presented the nature and motives of the 9/11 attacks as ‘incomprehensible’, while the former US president, George W. Bush’s formulation of an ‘axis of evil’ framed terrorist states and actors as ‘inhuman’. We would stress that the discourse of the WoT animates a profoundly racialized account of a terrifying and terrorizing Muslim ‘other’, with Islam long deemed the deadly antithesis of white Euro- modern norms (Goldberg, 2009). While generating profound popular and political fear itself, the specious link between Islam and the threat of terrorism corresponds ‘the existential terror of not knowing what is going to happen’ (Wang, 2018: 238). That is, fear over Islam and potential terrorist violence interacts with acute anxieties over a funda- mentally unknowable and uncontrollable future. Deep insecurity over race and the future of civilization nonetheless fuels militarized and academic-driven counter-terrorism policies, which inform and institutionalize novel techno-solutionist practices to pre-empt impending terror and remediate racially-coded trepidation (see Martin, 2014).
Counter-terror is an algorithmic mode of governance that reinscribes racial capitalism’s biopolitical control---their representations are transformed into racist predictive policing measures.
--WoT = War on Terror
Sharma and Nijjar ’23 [Sanjay Sharma, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Jasbinder S. Nijjar, lecturer in sociology at the University of Surrey; “Post-racial politics, pre-emption and in/security”; 05-01-2023; European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 27, no. 2; doi.org/10.1177/13675494231168177; accessed 07-25-2024] dliang
The objective of preventing crime, rather than simply responding to already committed crime, has a long history in Western nations. Some of the earliest forms of militarized policing in Britain’s colonies reflected a ‘commitment to a preventative function’ (Brogden, 1987: 11), as part of a broader strategy of racial regulation. However, it was during the 1970s in the USA that prevention became an explicit strategy in attempts to reduce rising levels of crime and make policing more efficient and effective. This heralded a future-orientated intervention-based approach premised on the prediction and pre-emptive management of crime.
The impact of advances in digital technology on policing over the last few decades has accelerated and entrenched a belief in the possibility of data-driven crime prediction. What is now commonly referred to as ‘predictive policing’ has been understood as the proactive use of algorithmically mediated data analysis for the purpose of finding patterns in datasets, based on which risk estimates are produced for either individuals or locations and are operationalized in the form of targeted prevention measures (Egbert and Leese, 2021: 19).
The growth of predictive policing is connected to an increasing number of crime-prediction software applications. In particular, the for-profit company, PredPol (re-named Geolitica), pioneered the adoption of these kinds of crime-forecasting tools among police departments in the USA and UK.
The PredPol software was developed in 2010 through a collaboration between the Los Angeles Police Department and researchers from the University of California. A co-founder of the company, the anthropology professor Jeff Brantingham, used a time- and place-based approach to identify urban geolocations that were supposedly more at risk of certain crimes. Brantingham, working with other colleagues, repurposed algorithms used f

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