Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Index........................................................................................................................................................... 1
1AC............................................................................................................................................................. 1
Drone Stare..................................................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Alt Causes............................................................................................................................................. 1
A2: Targets Turn.......................................................................................................................................... 1
Total War......................................................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Surveillance Inevitable.......................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Militarization of Police Inevitable...........................................................................................................1
Solvency......................................................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Loopholes............................................................................................................................................. 1
A2: State/Local will use............................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Knowledge Production Fails.................................................................................................................. 1
A2: Crime Turn............................................................................................................................................ 1
A2: Accountability Turn................................................................................................................................ 1
A2: Terrorism DA............................................................................................................................................. 1
No Link Drones Ineffective....................................................................................................................... 1
Link Turn Inefficient.................................................................................................................................. 1
Link Turn Targeted Surveillance...............................................................................................................1
Link Turn Hacking.................................................................................................................................... 1
No Impact Nuclear Terrorism Unlikely......................................................................................................1
No Impact Nuclear Terrorism Unlikely......................................................................................................1
K of DA Terror Talk................................................................................................................................... 1
K of DA Terror Talk................................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Experts Say Threats Real..................................................................................................................... 1
Politics DA....................................................................................................................................................... 1
Drones Reform Popular............................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Courts CP................................................................................................................................................. 1
Congressional Action Necessary.................................................................................................................1
Perm Solvency............................................................................................................................................ 1
4th Amendment not Applicable to Drones.....................................................................................................1
4th Amendment not Applicable to Drones.....................................................................................................1
A2: Rule of Law NB..................................................................................................................................... 1
A2: Rule of Law NB..................................................................................................................................... 1
Court action doesnt shield politics.............................................................................................................. 1
A2: ASPEC...................................................................................................................................................... 1
2AC............................................................................................................................................................. 1
1AC
Contention 1 is Inherency:
Drone use by law enforcement agencies is proliferating under a regulatory patchwork
that merely governs safety concerns mass surveillance is inevitable without
overarching federal reforms.
OBrien, 2013 (Jennifer, Editor of Journal of Information Technology and Privacy Law, WARRANTLESS
GOVERNMENT DRONE SURVEILLANCE: A CHALLENGE TO THE FOURTH AMENDMENT, The John
Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law, 30:1, Online:
http://repository.jmls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1732&context=jitpl)
The United States is not the only country to recognize the potential of drones and multiple counties now use the small
unmanned aircraft in agriculture,54 scientific research,55 and industrial maintenance.56 However, currently the largest use of
unmanned aircraft is by the United States military.57 The United States military has been exponentially utilizing
drone technology for various conflicts.58 Drone use has not been limited to military operations overseas and
since 2005 the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) has used drones for surveillance along both
the Mexican and Canadian borders.59 Unarmed drones have also joined the fight against Mexican drug cartels.60 The next
transition for drone technology will be public use by law enforcement.61 Drones are increasingly being used in a vast array of
civilian and governmental situations.62 An example of a future law enforcement drone is AeroVironments Qube, already advertised as targeting the
needs of first responders.63 Among the highlighted features of the Qube is its size,64 mobility,65 and advanced technology.66 Smaller drones, like the
and several safety concerns with drone operation in the national airspace, the FAA published guidelines for operating drones in 2007.72 These FAA
guidelines distinguish between civil and public drone use.73 For civil drone use to be authorized, the operator must be issued a Special Airworthiness
Certificate.74 The FAA presently only issues a Special Airworthiness Certificate for experimental uses. 75 An operator who has been issued an
integration of drones into the national airspace is the absence of a sense and avoid capability in most drones.86 Recent crashes87 and hacks88 have
also raised safety concerns over the future nationwide use of drones. In response to the Act, the FAA has started making changes to the current
unmanned aircraft guidelines.89 The
process for publicly operated drones remains similar to the 2007 process, requiring
if the agency can prove to be
proficient in flying its drone it will be granted an operational COA.91 Along with safety concerns, privacy concerns have
also developed over the authorization of governmental domestic drone use.92 The general privacy concern is that drone use
law enforcement agencies to first apply for a COA.90 This COA will serve training and evaluation purposes and
will infringe upon areas protected under the Fourth Amendment, areas in which individuals enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy.93 Privacy
concerns have already been raised regarding the use of drones for surveillance along the Canadian and Mexican borders. 94 New advances in drone
technologies increase such privacy concerns. 95 Many privacy organizations have called for the FAA to include privacy concerns in the new regulations
of unmanned aerial vehicles.96 However, it has also been suggested that the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has also expressed concerns over law enforcement drones being used for mass tracking and surveillance of
enforcement agencies have countered the privacy concerns by emphasizing that the real motivation for drone use lies in the life-saving capabilities for
Unless federal
legislation is passed forbidding warrantless governmental drone surveillance, challenges to such use will fall
under the purview of the Fourth Amendment.
officers and civilians.102 Additionally, there have been self-imposed restrictions and guidelines on governmental drone use.103
And, in the absence of coherent limitations on drone use, federal agencies have
developed fleets of drones groups like the Department of Homeland Security and
Customs + Border Patrol are loaning federal drone missions out to state and local
jurisdictions.
Barry, 2013 (Tom, senior policy analyst at Center for International Policy, Drones Over Homeland, April 23,
CIP, Online: http://www.ciponline.org/research/html/drones-over-the-homeland)
Drones are proliferating at home and abroad. A new high-tech realm is emerging, where remotely controlled and
autonomous unmanned systems do our bidding. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Aerial
Systems (UAS) commonly known as drones are already working for us in many ways. This new CIP International
Policy Report reveals how the military-industrial complex and the emergence of the homeland security apparatus have
put border drones at the forefront of the intensifying public debate about the proper role of drones domestically.
Drones Over the Homeland focuses on the deployment of drones by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is
developing a drone fleet that it projects will be capable of quickly responding to homeland security threats,
national security threats and national emergencies across the entire nation. In addition, DHS says that its
drone fleet is available to assist local law-enforcement agencies. Due to a surge in U.S. military contracting since 2001, the
United States is the world leader in drone production and deployment. Other nations, especially China, are also rapidly gaining a larger market share of
the international drone market. The
United States, however, will remain the dominant driver in drone manufacturing and
deployment for at least another decade. The central U.S. role in drone proliferation is the direct result of the
Pentagons rapidly increasing expenditures for UAVs. Also fueling drone proliferation is UAV procurement by the Department of
Homeland Security, by other federal agencies such as NASA, and by local police, as well as by individuals and corporations. Drones are also
The U.S. government now patrols nearly half the Mexican border by drones alone in a largely unheralded shift to control
desolate stretches where there are no agents, camera towers, ground sensors or fences, and it plans to expand the
strategy to the Canadian border. It represents a significant departure from a decades-old approach that emphasized fences and agents.
Since 2000, the number of Border Patrol agents on the 1,954-mile border more than doubled to surpass 18,000, and fencing multiplied nine times to 700
miles. Under
the new approach, Predator B drones sweep remote mountains, canyons and rivers with highresolution video cameras and return within three days to shoot video in the same spot, two officials with direct
knowledge of the effort said on condition of anonymity because details have not been made public. The two videos are then
compared for analysts who use sophisticated software to identify tiny changes -- perhaps the tracks of a farmer or cows,
perhaps those of immigrants entering the country or a drug-laden Hummer, they said. About 92% of drone
missions have shown no change in terrain, but the others raised enough questions to dispatch agents to
determine whether someone got away. The agents, who sometimes arrive by helicopter because an area is so remote, look
for any sign of human activity -- footprints, broken twigs, trash. About 4% of missions have been false alarms, such as tracks of
livestock or farmers, and about 2% are inconclusive. The remaining 2% offer evidence of illegal crossings from
Mexico, which typically results in ground sensors being planted for closer monitoring. The government has
operated about 10,000 drone flights under the strategy, known internally as Change Detection, since it began in
March 2013. The flights currently cover about 900 miles, much of it in Texas, and are expected to expand to the Canadian
border by the end of 2015. The purpose is to assign agents where illegal activity is highest, said R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of
Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol's parent agency, which operates nine unmanned aircraft across the country.
"You have finite resources," he said in an interview. "If you can look at some very rugged terrain [and] you can see there's not traffic, whether it's tire
tracks or clothing being abandoned or anything else, you want to deploy your resources to where you have a greater risk, a greater threat." If the video
shows the terrain unchanged, Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher calls it "proving the negative" -- showing there isn't anything illegal happening there
and therefore no need for agents and fences. The
strategy was launched without fanfare and is being expanded as President Obama
considers issuing an executive order by the end of this year to reduce deportations and enhance border security. Rep.
Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, applauded the approach while saying that surveillance gaps
remained. "We
can no longer focus only on static defenses such as fences and fixed [camera] towers," [Rep.
McCaul] he said. Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who co-wrote legislation last year to add 20,000 Border Patrol agents and 350 miles
of fencing to the Southwest border, said, "If there are better ways of ensuring the border is secure, I am certainly open to considering those options."
Border missions fly out of Sierra Vista, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Ft. Huachuca, or Corpus Christi,
Texas. They patrol at altitudes between 19,000 and 28,000 feet and within 25 to 60 miles of the border. The first
step is for Border Patrol sector chiefs to identify areas that are least likely to attract smugglers, typically far from towns and roads. Analysts scour the
drone videos at operations centers in Grand Forks, N.D., Sierra
Drone deployment to detect immigrants has further securitized the border military
leadership, training, and assets have been drawn into border policing exacerbating
border violence.
Wall and Monahan 11 [Tyler Wall Eastern Kentucky University, USA. Tyler Wall is an Assistant Professor in the School of Justice Studies
as Eastern Kentucky University. He received his Ph.D. in Justice Studies, an interdisciplinary degree from Arizona State University. He has published his
work in academic journals such as Theoretical Criminology, Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, & World Order, Identities: Global Studies in
Culture and Power, and Surveillance & Society, among others. Torin Monahan Vanderbilt University, USA. Torin Monahan is Associate Professor of
Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Monahan is an associate editor of the leading academic journal on
surveillance, Surveillance & Society. Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes] [MBM]
UAVs are also being used as technologies of state surveillance and policing and are deployed in securityscapes other than military combat zones. For instance, in the USA drones are increasingly being used to police
foreign migrants in relationship to its territorial borderzones, particularly by locating people who are attempting
to enter the country illegally. In addition, as we will detail below, some police depart- ments are now conceiving of drones as surveillance
devices that might prove useful in the routine policing and monitoring of domestic territories. Soon after President Obama announced in May
2010 that 1200 National Guard soldiers (Werner and Billeaud, 2010) would be deployed to the already heavily
militarized and surveilled USMexico border (Dunn, 1996; Pallitto and Heyman, 2008), conservative Arizona Governor Jan
Brewer wrote a letter to Obama urging him to send also what she referred to as aviation assets, specifically military UAVs
and helicopters (Lach, 2010). Brewer asserted that drones have proven effective in US military campaigns over- seas
and that they would therefore assist in securing the US border: I would also ask you, as overseas operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan permit, to consider wider deployment of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] along our nations southern border. I am aware of how effective
these assets have become in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and it seems UAVs operations would be ideal for border security and counterdrug missions. (Quoted in Lach, 2010) This
appeal for drones at the border obscures the fact that UAVs have already
been providing aerial surveillance over US border regions (Shachtman, 2005; Gilson, 2010). Since 2006, the USA has
spent approximately $100 million for UAVs on both the southern and northern US borders as part of its efforts to
create a so-called virtual fence (Canwest News Service, 2007). As of 2010 the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was
operating six unarmed Predator drones for overhead surveillance missions along the USMexico border, five of
which were based in Brewers state of Arizona (Gilson, 2010). Since late 2007 or early 2008, the CBP has been testing drones in
US/ Canada border regions (Canwest News Service, 2007). CBP officials credit their drones with helping bust 15,000
lbs of pot and 4,000 illegal immigrants (Gilson, 2010). In the words of a defense executive: It is quite easy to
envision a future in which (UAVs), unaffected by pilot fatigue, provide 247 border and port surveillance to protect
against terrorist intrusion ... Other examples [of possible uses] are limited only by our imagination (McCullagh,
2006). Clearly, drones have been enlisted in efforts to restrict illegal immigration and combat the war on drugs.
The notion of drug drones has become fashionable in international drug enforcement, especially for use in maritime operations
(Padgett, 2009). For instance, under the name Monitoreo, which is Spanish for monitoring, the US Southern Command recently conducted a drone
testing project that mobilized an Israeli-made $6.5 million Heron drone from El Salvadors Comalapa Air Base to track down suspected drug cartel
members who were allegedly using the open waters to smuggle drugs into the USA (Padgett, 2009; see also Shachtman, 2009). By remaining
thousands of feet in the air for up to 20-hours while being equipped with a set of sensors better suited for spotting the subs [mini-submarines] that have
become so popular among narco-cartels (Shachtman, 2009), this particular Heron drone promises to be a longer endurance technology than
conventional planes commonly used in drug surveillance. As Time magazine journalist Tim Padgett (2009) writes, If
When the rationalities and technologies of the war on terror are applied to
other domains and other perceived threats, there is a heightened danger that existing legal protections and rights
will be vitiated in the process, thereby ratcheting up cultures of control that already disproportionately harm
marginalized populations (Wacquant, 2009). For instance, DHS fusion centers may have originated as organizations to
share data on terrorist threats, but they have since been linked to spying on non-violent anti- war protesters,
environmentalists, students at historically black colleges, and others (Monahan, 2011). In contemporary cultures of
control, all populations may be called uponor be responsibilizedto manage risk in highly individualized ways and
through increasingly privatized means (Rose, 1999), but this in no way indicates a diminished role for the state, or statecorporate apparatuses, in extending discipline and control into domestic territories (Garland, 2001; Monahan, 2010). The
use of drones in non-combat settings may symbolically transform those sites to arenas of agonistic engagement
and further militarize domestic police departments and government agencies to the detriment of individual
liberties and the public good.
similar discourses and institutional arrangements.
Border Militarization in the broadest sense, militarization refers to the use of military rhetoric and ideology, as well as
military tactics, strategy, technology, equipment, and forces (Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border 3). More specifically,
militarization suggests the intermingling between police and military forces, so much so that police engage in
military functions and the military engages in police activity. As Timothy J. Dunn argues, one of the most significant sites
of border militarization is the US-Mexico border, as the US Customs and Border Patrol has increasingly teamed up
with US military forces in order to deter drug trafficking for the past three decades. As a consequence of this relationship, and because the border is
also the stage for concerns over undocumented migration, both migration and drug trafficking have become central to the
development and implementation of militarization policies and practices. The intentional development of such policies is more than
three decades in the making, beginning with the earliest implementation during the end of US President Carters administration. for example, events such as the Mariel boatlift
as
immigration gained salience as a social, political, and economic issue in the United States, the INS budget
and staff also increased (Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border 35). The INS made equipment and technology
enhancements, increasing its enforcement capacities, which were designed to ameliorate concerns over national
security that emerged particularly following Mariel. While Carter set the ground for increased militarization, President Reagans
administration was most responsible for rolling out the immense infrastructure that would lead to the most
drastic border militarization. As Reagan came into office in the United States, the US approach to the US-Mexico border took the
characteristic of low-intensity conflict doctrine (L i C). Though this approach typically refers to how the US military managed counter- insurgencies
internationally, especially in Central America, it also refers to the supposedly low level of military involvement (with significant
effects) designed for maintaining social control over targeted civilian populations domestically on the USMexico border (Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border 35). In other words, the militarization of the US-Mexico border was
designed to be relatively minor in the sense that the goal was not to have an overwhelming military- like presence, but rather one that was visible and tactical
enough to suggest control. Spending for the in S, and especially the Border Patrol, grew tremendously as the number of staff increased 90
percent and funding 149 percent (Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border 49). Moreover, the Reagan administration established
detention as an appropriate punishment for non-Mexican undocumented migrants (Mexicans could simply be sent back) and for political asylum
seekers. Thus, more detention facilities were established, and as is consistent with L i C doctrine, many nongovernmental
organizations housing resources were used for detention (Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border 59). In addition to this growth, the
Border Patrol also incorporated increased high-tech equipment ranging from M-1 4 and M-16 military rifles to
extensive sensor and night-vision systems, television surveillance, and airborne infrared radar, to name a few
of the new technologies. By the time George H. W. Bush was elected president, the INSs realm of control had greatly
expanded, and most congressional allocations for spending were aimed at the Enforcement Division. The so-called War on Drugs was in full swing
by this time, and it functioned as a convenient excuse to exacerbate enforcement measures on the US- Mexico
border, while also leading to a close association between drug trafficker and illegal alien among immigration officials
(Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border 87). Additionally, the increased emphasis on targeting criminal aliens, those
immigrants who had committed crimes other than overstaying visas or making a clandestine crossing into the
United States (actions which are misdemeanors), further linked immigration and crime. Moreover, the reach of this category was
of ten unclear as immigrants who hadnt committed other crimes were regularly detained alongside so-called
criminal aliens at the growing number of detention facilities in the United States. Under the first Bush administration,
in 1980, which landed tens of thousands of Cuban refugees in the United States, provoked alarmist calls for stricter immigration policies. Dunn explains that
reports emerged of systemic human rights abuses at the hands of Border Patrol agents. The in S also waged its
largest immigration enforcement crackdown since the infamously named operation Wetback in 1954 in the
Lower Rio Grande v al ley in south Texas. The in Ss strategy, as outlined in a 1989 internal document titled Enhancement Plan for the Southern
Border, included: (1) rigorous enforcement of immigration laws and detention for those who violated laws; (2) quick and thorough processing of asylum claims; and (3) a
media campaign that would work to create pub l ic understanding and acceptance of the difference between claims [for po l iti cal asylum] ma de from a third country and
The INSs
crackdown not only resulted in human rights violations within the United States (and in parts of Mexico and Central America due
to related information-seeking missions), but also demonstrated the in Ss ability to engage in carefully targeted militarization
tactics without disrupting usual business, traffic, and life for most local residents in the area. The entrenchment
of militarization policies and practices undoubtedly existed during the first Bush administration; however, the
detrimental impacts on human lives would take a worse turn during President Clintons administration and in the
those made after entry [into the United States] without inspection ( in S Report 2 as cited in Dunn, Militarization of the US M exico Border 92).
wake of the north American free Trade Agreements passage. NAFTA advocated free trade and open foreign investment at the same time that it more or less promoted closed
borders for the movement of people (Johnson, free Trade and Closed Borders). The creation of NAFTA was an impetus to restrictionist attitudes and anti-migrant legislation
on the state and federal levels (Johnson, An Essay on immigration 122). f o r example, the 1993 in S campaign operation Blockade/Hold the Line sought to deter
undocumented migration in El Paso, and the 1994 in S campaign operation Gatekeeper aimed to curb migration from Tijuana to San Diego, both of which represented the
highest traffic areas for undocumented crossings. These federal initiatives were bookends to Californias 1994 ballot initiative, Proposition 187 (Save our State). At its most
basic level, according to the summary prepared by the attorney general, Proposition 187 makes illegal aliens ineligible for public social services, public health care services
(unless emergency under federal law), and public school education (cited in o no and Sloop 169). Ultimately, Proposition 187 was deemed unconstitutional, despite passing
with 59 percent voter approval. Both the overwhelming support and the extensive campaign surrounding the initiative paved a pathway for additional anti-migrant initiatives
and legislative efforts through out the United States. Operation Gatekeeper came on the tide of the Proposition 187 campaign, and could have even been viewed as a federal
Clintons immigration positions were constantly under conservative fire, and Gatekeeper
functioned to restore integrity of the San Diego- Tijuana border by enforcing the border more stringently ( n e
vins 3). Gatekeeper was a part of a broader four-stage Southwest Border Strategy that sought to funnel migration
out of metropolitan areas and into desolate areas like the Arizona desert as a means of deterring crossers, and
in fact, in 2001, a General Accounting office report suggested that shifting traffic was the primary effect of the
strategy (Stana and Rezmovic). The rationale for what the University of Arizona Binational Migration institute describes as the funnel effect was that
both the deaths that would undoubtedly occur as well as the danger posed by the desert would be enough to
prevent people from making the clandestine journey (Arnoldo Garca; Rubio- Go ldsmith et al.). 2 Though many earlier militarization strategies
response to the proposition ( n e vins 92).
overtly suggested that the primary goal of militarization was to enable successes in the War on Drugs, the Southwest Border Strategy expressly states its focus as deterring
illegal aliens (Stana and Rezmovic 1). This focus led to the Border Patrols budget being around $1.2 billion in 2001 and, of the 9,096 Border Patrol agents in the United
American Civil Liberties Union and Mexicos national Commission of Human Rights, Mara Jimenez calculates the numbers of deaths and apprehensions along the Southwest
animal predators. Though one might describe the Hernandez murder as an isolated incident, it suggests that
militarization practices have been detrimental for citizens and migrants alike.
Second, the militarized approach to surveillance displayed by drone use abstracts the
experiences of migrants to data points and screen shots transforming real people
into calculable variables and space into control sites. We should challenge this form of
violence and understand its relation to other forms of domination and war.
Wall and Monahan 11 [Tyler Wall Eastern Kentucky University, USA. Tyler Wall is an Assistant Professor in the School of Justice Studies
as Eastern Kentucky University. He received his Ph.D. in Justice Studies, an interdisciplinary degree from Arizona State University. He has published his
work in academic journals such as Theoretical Criminology, Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, & World Order, Identities: Global Studies in
Culture and Power, and Surveillance & Society, among others. Torin Monahan Vanderbilt University, USA. Torin Monahan is Associate Professor of
Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Monahan is an associate editor of the leading academic journal on
surveillance, Surveillance & Society. Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes] [MBM]
The technological mediation vital to what we call the drone stare is most often framed by advocates of UAV
systems as an unproblematic ability to see the truth of a particular situation (see Rattansi, 2010) or to achieve a
totalizing view of the object under cosmic control. In the words of Robins and Levidow (1995: 121): Enemy threatsreal or
imaginary, human or machinebecame precise grid locations, abstracted from their human context. To the extent
that this description is accurate, it would appear to hold true for the use of drones in combat as well as noncombat settings. Journalist Noah Shachtman (2005), who observed drone operators monitoring the USMexico
border, betrays through his description the dehumanizing tendency of drone- mediated perceptions: Everyone
looks like germs, like ants, from the Hunters 15,000- foot point of view. Especially when the ant hill breaks
apart, and everybody scatters in a dozen different directions. But this particular articulation makes no distinction
between illegal immigrants, political refugees, or Mexican-American citizens. In this sense, the drone system
radically homogenizes these identities into a single cluster of racialized information that is used for remotecontrolled processes of control and harm. Bodies below become things to track, monitor, apprehend, and kill,
while the pilot and other allies on the network remain differentiated and proximate, at least culturally if not
physically. In the case of the use of military drones for precision killing, the practical action of firing a Hellfire missile is translated and transformed
by the informational system into a computerized checklist of things to do. As one journalist writes concerning US Air Force drones, Now, pilots say, it
takes up to 17 stepsincluding entering data into a pull-down windowto fire a missile (Drew, 2009). In this respect, as Kevin Haggerty (2006) has
pointed out, the speed and mobility of informatized warfare is perforce slowed by attendant complex systems of control, which is a generalizable finding
that presents an important caution against overdetermined conclusions about inevitable increases in the velocity of war technologies. But this step-by-
simple to operate but, the challenge is taking all the information available and fusing it into something thats usable and then practicing and exercising
the constraint or the lethal power to either preserve life or to prosecute an attack. And that is where the challenge really is, honing that warrior spirit
technologically advanced countries (Beier, 2003). Of course, claims to technological sophistication are always relative ones that can invite hubris on the
part of those parties presuming superiority. This was revealed when it was discovered in 2009 that Iraqi insurgents had accessed unencrypted video
footage from US Predator drones (Gorman et al., 2009). This example, while embarrassing for US military officials, illustrates a paradox in the
construction of the enemy other. Insurgents were apparently presumed too backward and unsophisticated to tap unen- crypted signals broadcasted by
the USA. By intercepting these signals with apparent ease using $26 off-the-shelf software (Gorman et al., 2009) and storing the feeds on laptop
computers, the enemy effectively elevated its own symbolic legitimacy as civilized peo- ples, in large part because in the West technological
achievement and ability are often equated with civilization (Adas, 1989). The enemy moreover demonstrated its agency and its refusal to become a
legible and docile object for western control. People
who are aware of adversarial monitoring from the skies also engage
in tactics to evade the drone stare. Specifically, subjects of drone surveillance have tried to be stealthier and
camouflage themselves better than they have in the past. In the North Waziristan region of Pakistan where drone surveillance and
violence has been heavily concentrated, the standard ways in which militants have traditionally traveled, slept, and communicated has been significantly
altered by the aerial gaze of UAVs, according to some local sources (Perlez and Shah, 2010). Combatants have allegedly abandoned sat- ellite phones
and large gatherings in favor of communicating by courier and moving stealthily in small groups while also establishing hide-outs in mountainside
tunnels and relying more on civilian-looking transportation as opposed to all-terrain vehicles (Perlez and Shah, 2010 ).
This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to this anthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger
and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Dalys version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side
(Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is
located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US
inner city to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter
inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and
individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of small
wars and invisible genocides (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes,
The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are
into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the
courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues.
capable of reducing
duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues
for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But
we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal
times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of genocide into spaces and corners of everyday life where
we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative
behavior by ordinary good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California,
or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the small wars and invisible
These are
view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein
genocides to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City.
invisible
observed
the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore
taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieus partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including
the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of normal social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so
forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression,
Similarly, Basaglias notion of peacetime crimes - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes
are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or
the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on illegal aliens versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the
Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace
possible. Internal stability is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of
professionally applied strangle-holds. Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of
domestic peace possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret
Cherokee Trail of Tears.
by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally,
the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has
taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public
consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners
in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the normative socializing experience for ethnic minority youth
in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end
capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less
dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal
acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include,
therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A
constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamins view of late modern history as a chronic state of emergency (Taussig,
Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically
critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other total
institutions. Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of
the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the
common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor,
and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to pseudo- speciation as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social
groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of
. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures
mass violence
and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe
powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food
to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what
Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by symbolic violence, the violence that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls
terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes. Bourdieu
(1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of
culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies rneconnaissance as the
prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu
escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-violence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While
power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is
more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes
(Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the
point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question:
What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by
perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions
from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military.
They harbor the early warning signs (Charney 1991), the priming (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the
genocidal continuum (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways
from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable social parasites (the nursing home elderly, welfare
queens,
undocumented
immigrants,
drug addicts)
to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies
of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
Thus, to
turn back to my argument concerning air power, what we find is that a form of technology which has been
understood too readily and too easily in military terms is better understood through the lens of police power.
This is not war becoming police and neither is it the idea that war is being reduced to police (as though war is
somehow something bigger, better, more substantial than police). Neither is it a small wars affair. My argument is that, understood in
terms of the fabrication of order, this particular technology has always needed to be understood through a war
police nexus. In what remains of this paper I would like to try and strengthen this argument by using it to try and make sense of perhaps the
fundamental issue in contemporary air power: drones. Conversely, I would like to use the contemporary
development of drone technology to help restate my argument. Victory through air power As is well known, the air power used in
the war on terror has increasingly been operated through drone technology. The US Department of Defenses UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) inventory
grew from 167 in 2002 to 7000 in 2010 (Hearing before the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, 2011, pages 2 and 75). Between
2001 and 2008 the hours of surveillance coverage for US Central Command encompassing Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen rose by 1431% as a
result of the developing drone technology; in 2010 the US Air Force projected that the combined flight hours of all its drones would exceed 250000
hours, exceeding in one year the total number of hours from 1995 to 2007 (Turse and Engelhardt, 2012, page 37), while in the UK the Reaper UAV
reached a landmark figure of 20 000 flying hours in 2011 (Ministry of Defence, 2011). At the same time, news about drones is now constant, as more and
more states (now around fifty) operate them. Drones
also occupy a key space in debates about the new virtuous warat
the heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary,
actualize violence from a distance ... with no or minimal casualties (Der Derian, 2001, page xv, emphasis in the original)and, as a
consequence, so too does anger about them among activists and critical thinkers. One feature of this anger seems to be that the drones are unmanned,
and thus a new step in the technology of military distancing or risk-transfer warfare. This claim has been made so frequently that a complete list of
references would be pointless, so let Eric Hobsbawms more general point stand in here: one of the features of the age of extremes, notes Hobsbawm,
is the new impersonality of warfare, which turned killing and maiming into the remote consequence of pushing a button or moving a lever. Technology
made its victims invisible, as people eviscerated by bayonets, or seen through the sights of firearms, could not be. One of Hobsbawms main examples
is, unsurprisingly, air power: Far below the aerial bombers were not people about to be burned an eviscerated, but targets ... the greatest cruelties of
our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision (1994, page 50). The impersonal cruelty of remote killing and unmanned technology
seems to be the essence of one aspect of the criticism of drones: bombings and assassinations by a piece of equipment far removed from any human
operator. From a critical perspective, this seems a rather naive thing to be angry about, either in terms of the conflicts of world history or in terms of
technological possibility, since maximising lethality while reducing the risk to a states own combatants is inherent to the logic of all military technological
advance. The
other major concern people have about drones is that they now patrol the skies not just in the lands of
the whole planet, and not just in war zones but in civilian areas. Thus one finds
that they now fly over cities engaged in police operations, from managing emergencies caused by natural
disasters to spying on foreign drug cartels, fighting crime, conducting border control operations, and general
surveillance (Wall and Monahan, 2011, page 240). In the US, following a 2003 decision by the Federal Aviation Authority
to grant license to UAVs to fly over American civilian airspace, more and more American states now work with
drones, and a Congressional Research Service report noted in 2010 that recent UAV modification is part of an
ongoing push by some policymakers and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] to both expand CBPs UAV
resources and open domestic airspace for UAV operations (Haddal and Gertler, 2010, page 1). In the UK a number of police
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan but of
forces have trialled the use of drones, over 120 companies have been given blanket permission to fly small drones within the UK for surveillance
purposes, and the UK ASTRAEA programme aims to enable the routine use of UAS [Unmanned Aircraft Systems] in all classes of airspace without the
and Afghanistan during 2007 and 2008, missiles were fired on only 244 missions (Turse and Engelhardt, 2012, page 149; Wall and Monahan, 2011,
page 242). Their key feature is that they are disposable, a feature highlighted by the smaller and smaller UAVs, dropped from aircraft, fired into the air by
their main
function which is not to bomb or assassinate but to gatherthat is, to constructknowledge. This explains the
surveillance-oriented names for almost all the different dronesGlobal Hawk, Dragon Eye, Desert Hawk, Gorgon Stare (after the
creature in Greek mythology whose main power resided in the eye), Watchkeeperand goes some way to also explaining why they are
spoken of by the state less as killing machines and more in terms of a range of other abilities, such as recognizing
and categorizing humans and human-made objects, identifying movements, interpreting footprints, and distinguishing different kinds
of tracks on the earths surface. Moreover, and more pressingly, we need to understand that from the wider historical perspective of air
power there are no civilian areas and there are no civilians; the only logic is a police logic. As soon as air
power was created the issue was: what does this do to civilian space? And, essentially, the answer has been:
it destroys it. Air power thus likewise destroys the concept of the civilian. This was the major theme of the air power literature of the 1920s, found
hand, catapult, or slingshot (Blackmore, 2005, pages 130131; Singer, 2009, pages 116120). This disposability is a reflection of
in the work of Mitchell, Seversky, Fuller, and all the others, but the analysis provided in The Command of the Air by Giulio Douhet, first published in 1921,
expanded in 1927, and perhaps the first definitive account of the influence of air power on world history, is representative: the art of aerial warfare, notes
Douhet, is the art of destroying cities, of attacking civilians, of terrorising the population. In the future, war will be waged essentially against the unarmed
populations of the cities and great industrial centres. There
drone is permanent police presence across the territory. Unmanned aircraft have just revolutionized our ability
to provide a constant stare against our enemy, said a senior US military official. Using the all-seeing eye, you
will find out who is important in a network, where they live, where they get their support from, where their
friends are (cited in Barnes, 2009). Much as this might be important geopolitically, with drones being capable of maintaining
nonstop surveillance of vast swathes of land and sea for so long as the technology and fuel supplies allow, it is also nothing less than the
states dream of a perpetual police presence across the territory (Neocleous, 2000). And it is a police presence
encapsulated by the process of colonisation, captured in the army document StrikeStar 2025 which speaks of the
permanent presence of UAVs in the sky as a form of air occupation (Carmichael et al, 1996, page viii). Drones have
been described as the perfect technology for democratic warfare, combining as they do a certain utilitarian
character with an appealing risk-transfer (Sauer and Schoring, 2012), but perhaps we need to think of them equally as the
perfect technology of liberal police. When in 1943 Disney sought to popularise the idea of victory through air power, the company probably
had little idea just quite what this victory might mean, beyond the defeat of Japan. But if there is a victory through air power to be had
on the part of the state it is surely not merely the defeat of a military enemy but the victory of perpetual police.
discipline or imprison not just abandoned and criminalised communities, but all state subjects. The essay suggests that an alternative vision of connectivity and solidarity
an enemy of the state goes on trial, and on 24 January 2011, the Indian Associa- tion for Womens Studies annual conference in Wardha, Maha rashtra, was disrupted
by state anti-terrorism forces checking IDs and citing the Foreigners Act to crack down on the non-registration of four foreign nationals, who happened to be from
What is it about our present condition that allows so-called democratic regimes to
act with impunity in the global arena to kill, imprison and deploy multiple forms of intimidation and violence in the
name of a war on terror and the security and protection of the nation? How might we comprehend these imperial democracies3 and organise
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.2
resistance across borders, resistance that demystifies and challenges the violent, authoritarian governmentalities mobilised by these militarised landscapes? Women and
Saliba, Sidhwa and Tamez, quoted in the epigraph, are some of the urgencies that motivate this essay. I began thinking about securitised regimes and anatomies of
violence after hearing about the building of a mega-security wall along the South Texas-Mexico border, and the struggles of immigrant activists and the Lipan Apache
Womens Defense (LAW Defense) organisation to halt this explicitly imperialist partition project. What seemed obvious was the use of unjust, militarised state practices
similar to those used in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, using the pretext of the war on terror to mobilise simultaneous discourses of Islamophobia and nativism.
And yet, the struggles of LAW Defense, even the building of the mega- security wall in East Texas, were almost completely absent from public discussion in the media and
in left/feminist circles. While US imperial projects are not new, the post-11 September 2001 glo- bal formation and operation of securitised states, anchored within the
rhetoric of protectionism and the war on terror, and accompanied by militarised, neoliberal corporate ambitions, is a phenomenon that deserves critical feminist
attention. In this essay, I examine three securitised regimes the US, Israel, and India and three specific geopolitical sites the US- Mexico border struggles around
immigration and cross-border indigenous rights in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas; Israels rule over the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and
Gaza; and Indias military rule in the disputed Kashmir Valley as zones of normalised violence. At these sites, neoliberal and militarised state and imperial practices are
often sustained by development, peacekeeping and humanitarian projects, thus illuminating the new contours of securitised states that function as imperial
democracies.4 Each site encodes genealogies, memories, and traumas of colonial occupation, partition, and violence in the building of the nation what Sidhwa calls
the demand for blood when the earth is divided. And in each of these geopolitical sites at territo- rial borders, civilians are subjected to militarised violence anchored
in the production of reactionary gender identities and dominant and subordinate (often racialised) masculinities. These three sites constitute occupied, disputed
territories with violent colonial histories, and together they illustrate a new/old global order of militarised violence engendered by neoliberal economic priorities. Since
the early 1990s, with Indias shift to neoliberal economic and political policies, ties among the US, Israel and India were forged through the vision of the regimes in power
at that time George W Bush and the neoconservatives, Ariel Sharon and Likud, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Hindu Right. As Rupal Oza (2007: 9)
the geo- political triad of the US, Israel and India share a vision of threat and security
based on Islam and Muslims as the common enemy, cemented through close and ongoing economic and military alli- ances. While the us vs them
suggests, since the early 1990s,
ideologies of securitised states justify borders, walls, and regimes of incarceration in the name of protection of the homeland, it is the connectivity and commona lity of
analysis and vision of justice between peoples across borders that feminists and anti-partition activists have that inspires my reflections. A comparative analysis of the
wars, and walls (symbolic and material) that constitute the securitised regimes, and colonial/ imperial ventures of the US, India and Israel, reveals the ideo- logical
operation of discourses of democracy within overtly militarised, securitised nation states, and suggests that the mili- tarisation of cultures is deeply linked to neoliberal
capitalist val- ues and the normalisation of what Zillah Eisenstein (2007: 17) and Arundhati Roy (2004: 42) have called imperial democracy. Needless to say,
militarisation always involves masculinisation and heterosexualisation as linked state projects, and
neoliberal economic arrangements are predicated on gendered and racial- ised divisions of labour and constructions of
subjectivities, thus
necessitating a feminist critique. Neo-liberalism, Militarisation and Feminist Critique War is on the global agenda precisely because the new
phase of capi- talist expansionism requires the destruction of any economic activity not subordinated to the logic of accumulation, and this is necessarily a violent
process. Corporate capital cannot extend its reach over the planets resources from the fields to the seas and forests to peoples la- bour, and our very genetic pools
without generating an intense resist- ance worldwide. Moreover, it is in the nature of the present capitalist crisis that no mediations are possible, and that development
examined these gen- dered colonial rescue narratives within histories of 18th and 19th century colonialism, and in their current reincarnation in the US wars. Feminist
scholars have also provided incisive critiques of neoliberalism, militarisation, and the gendered violence of secu- ritised states (see essays in Sutton et al 2008). This
radical scholarship and the globalisation of national security regimes indicates an urgent need for nuanced, comparative theorisations of empire as the basis for antiimperialist and anti- capitalist struggles. National security states or securitised regimes typically use connected strategies of militarisation, criminalisation and incarceration to exercise control over particular populations, thus remaking individual subjectivities and public cultures. As femi- nist philosopher Iris Young (2003) argues,
security states mobi- lise a particular gendered logic of masculinist protection in relation to women and
children a logic that underwrites the appeal to protection and security of the nation, and expects obedience and loyalty at home (patriotism). At the same
time, the state wages war against internal and external enemies. In the case of the US, Young claims, it is this
logic that legitimates authoritarian power in the domestic arena, and justifies aggression outside its borders.
The militarisation of everyday life is the hallmark of neoliberal empires and national security states in our times (Enloe 2007). As Federici suggests, the expansion of
neoliberal market econo- mies is inextricably tied to new forms of inequality, disenfran- chisement and violence. Susan Comfort (2011) argues that the current imperialist
warfare economy
necessitates militarised conditions of labour control, racist profiling and sexual violence. Militarised forces are often required to police and control cheap female labour
as in the maquiladoras across the US-Mexico border, and in factories in South Korea. Neoliberal policies of outsourcing and privatisation characterise both war zones and
domestic landscapes. Outsourcing the war in Iraq through priva- tising security forces (such as Blackwater USA, now Xe Services) as well as support services (food,
laundry, sanitation) to south and south-east Asian men consolidates the racialised hegemonic and subordinate masculinities necessary to the US imperial project (Barker
dominant national masculinities of the US military (manning up) are re-established in relation to the
subordinate, almost feminised masculinities of south and south-east Asian men engaged in traditional womens work. While the US
2009). So the
depends on and polices low-wage migrant labour in Iraq as well as the US-Mexico border, it is south and south-east Asian subcontractors who bear the costs in Iraq while
indigenous Mexican peasants bear the costs in Arizona and Texas. Similarly, militarised masculinites are mobilised in Kashmir through the figures of paramilitary and
special ops troops operating as vigi- lantes, army men in mafia networks, surrendered militants work- ing as police informers and young men involved in extortion
rackets for the military (Duschinski 2010). The conjuncture of neoliberalism and the national security apparatus that is, the increase in state expenditure in domains of
their respective domestic landscapes. The US invests in a fast- growing, privatised prison industrial complex within its own borders, while consolidating post-invasion
regimes of torture and collective punishment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similar questions need to be posed in relation to the democracies of Israel and India. After 11
the state mobilises a masculinist securitised ideology based not on defence of the
on coercion that requires neither participation or consent from its citizens (Lutz 2002). This gen- dered
ideology is anchored in militarised masculinities (or mus- cular militarism) and in patriarchal ideologies of protection
and security that require obedience and consent from citizens. Rosemary Hennessy (2011) claims that profit-making
regimes capitalise on the dispossession of certain subjects, and that this dispossession registers on the body (see also Brennan 2003).
Hennessy argues that the ideological creation of femininity as subordination is one form of such dispossession . In the
Texas- Mexico borderlands, the West Bank and Gaza, and the Kashmir Valley, dispossession of particular subjects (women, the poor, the indigenous,
migrants, Muslims, and the like) involves the social control and legal dispossession (or social death) through justified forms of
surveillance and violence at multiple levels. The political economy of securitised states is focused fundamentally
on the permanent abandonment of certain captive populations (Gordon 2006) who are marked as threats to the
neoliberal order. Here militarised capitalism is enshrined within securitised states, and works in concert with fundamentalist Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and
September 2001, in all three geopolitical contexts,
nation but
Christian social movements to produce a surge of reactionary neoliberal gender identities. For instance, Rebecca Dingos (2004) work on neoliberalism and the Christian
Right in the US shows how the rhetoric of crisis and national security col- lapses the market, individualism, pro-family and conservative religious ethics, with the nation
philosopher Teresa Brennan argues that neoliberal conditions create a bio-deregulation of the body (2003: 24). She suggests that the material effects of neoliberal
globalisation can be read as a biopolitics where a lack of time and a life rhythm of rushing and insecurity affects marginalised bodies in concrete ways. A deregulated
body goes without enough sleep, rest and proper food in a culture that privileges immediate profit over long-term sustainability (Brennan 2003: 20, 32). Similarly, I sug-
occurs within
securitised regimes
condemned. Interestingly, the walls in Palestine and at the South Texas-Mexico border share designers, builders, and profiteers (Platt 2011).
Since its founding in 1776, the US has engaged in military conflict for 187 of its 233 years. And the US had troops in
the field for all but six years in the 20th century, and every year in the 21st century. Similarly, Israel and India have been engaged in wars since their founding in 1946
These are warrior states, and war and militarised cultures have been (invisibly)
interwoven into the very fabric of state governance and everyday life. Thus, in all three national contexts, societies are
and 1947 respectively.
imbued with and dependent on the logic of military institutions in ways that permeate economic priorities, government
policies, popular culture, language, educational systems, and na- tional values and identities (Enloe 2007).
n225
a drone must necessarily fly (1) unreasonably close to private property; (2) in violation of an applicable airspace regulation or law; or (3) in a manner that
of this Rule, sense-enhancing technology generally encompasses any tool, method, technology, or software that artificially increases, expands, and/or
improves an individual's ability to hear, see, smell, or perceive. [*376] For the purposes of this Rule, "in general public use" means that a particular
sense-enhancing technology can be bought or sold on the open market in the United States without significant governmental restriction. Examples of
significant governmental restriction include minimum age limitations, limitations on who can purchase or possess such technology, mandatory licensure
and mandatory registration. Rule
5: Private Property Trespass Restrictions A drone may only enter a home, place of business, or
enclosed private structure without a warrant when an imminent danger to life exists, and only if the drone's
operation is critical to preventing or mitigating danger to life. Rule 6: Data Collection Restrictions Information or data
obtained by a drone may not be retained and stored for more than thirty days unless the government holds
probable cause that the information or data contains evidence of a felony or is relevant to an ongoing
investigation or trial. Information or data obtained by a drone may not be intentionally distributed or shared with any
unauthorized person or entity, unless approved by law. Information or data obtained by a drone in violation of any of the above Rules may not be used
as evidence in a court of law or adjudicative proceeding against any individual or entity. Individuals hold a private right of action to sue for an injunction
against separate and repeated violations of the above Rules.
And, warrants are key to check militarization of domestic space accountability guarantees transparency &
limits the scope of acceptable drone operations.
Bauer, 2013 (Max, JD @ Boston College Attorney at White & Associates, Domestic Drone Surveillance
Usage: Threats and Opportunities for Regulation, ACLU Briefing Paper, Online:
https://privacysos.org/domestic_drones)
History shows that our response to threats to our physical safety mustn't involve programs or policies that
diminish our core rights. Two centuries ago, during a time of great national insecurity, the War of 1812, the Constitutions primary author,
President James Madison, took virtually no steps to diminish civil liberties. Madison's approach did not lead to the nations demise. [56] With the rise
of domestic drones as a cherry on top of an already sprawling surveillance state, America is headed in the
opposite direction. But there is time yet to ensure the technology doesn't trample all over our rights. If mass
drone surveillance is inescapable, warrant and data collection reporting requirements will provide a critical
check against government abuses. Justice Brandeis has written, Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social
and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient
policeman. [57] Domestic drones can monitor individuals almost constantly; its therefore essential to have
sunlight shine upon their operators, to monitor their actions. The publicity necessary to hold their operations
accountable to the public requires transparency and accountability. [58] Drone usage will continue to expand and
may not stop even at infrared camera surveillance and biometric data acquisition. The Guardians Glenn Greenwald has cautioned that although
domestic drones may currently be limited to those outfitted only with surveillance equipment, given the
increasing militarization of domestic law enforcement, the time may come soon when domestic drones are
weaponized. [59] But even short of that futuristic nightmare, drone surveillance already poses a new threat to
liberty at home. As our Fourth Amendment search protection diminishes with the progress of technology, [60]
legislative initiatives and public outcry may be the only way to protect the right to privacy in the age of domestic
drones.
Scholars of rhetoric and performance have opened important terrains in the study of immigration and borders pertaining to subjects such as citizenship,
media representation, and migrant identity (Cisneros, (Re)Bordering the Civic imaginary; DeChaine, Bordering the Civic i maginary; McKinnon; o no
and Sloop; Shi). Though a number of scholars in other academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences
context of everyday militarization coupled with the rhetoric of security has obfuscated an urgent need to
focus on the devastation of border militarization on border crossers and communities specifically, and privacy and civil liberties more
generally. Gordon Mitchell suggests that rhetoric scholars who study social movements should also enable movement with their work. This chapter will
demonstrate the
need for border rhetoric scholars to turn the discourse of security toward a discourse of militarization in the
hopes of making a civic intervention into the broader national debate. If more people understood how militarization
works and the careful way that the rhetoric of security disguises its material impacts, it is likely that the US
government would be forced to be more accountable to its people, and rhetoric scholars should lead this charge. I begin this
argument by first defining militarization and briefly tracing the increase in border militarization, specifically on the US-Mexico border since the mid- to
late 1 980s. Next, I outline the severity of the consequences such militarization has had for border communities and border crossers, and what this
means for residents of the United States more broadly. I then argue why the language of militarization is so crucial through a brief analysis of Secure
Border Initiative Monthly, or SBI Monthly, produced by the Secure Border initiative (SB i ) Program Management o ff ice (PM o ) and designed to
provide news and information on the SB i and the now- defunct SB i net, two major programs of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to
Drone Stare
[MBM]
immigration laws grew extensively during the decade following 9/11. Thousands of new agents were hired
by Homeland Security and have been deployed throughout the country; there are now 20,700 border agents, double the number since 2004
(Napolitano 2011 ). They are not just assigned to the territorial borders, but now even bus and train commuters between cities in the east and
Midwest have grown accustomed to being asked for proof of citizenship by the Border Patrol at train stops and bus stops in what has
essentially become an internal document check (Bernstein 2010 ). Moreover, in places far from any border, international students are
routinely detained for interrogation (Woodward 2011 ). In addition, private citizens have organized into anti-immigration and
vigilante groups, such as the Minutemen who watch out for migrants without police oversight serving as a sort of citizendetective form of surveillance reminiscent of Orwells 1984 (Vaughan-Williams 2008 ). Coupled with the remote sensing of the Virtual Border, where
military grade equipment, including both American and Mexican unmanned drones, patrol and survey the border region 24/7,
this could be called the securitization of everyday life (see selections in Bajc and de Lint 2011 ) on the border and beyond. As a
result of the implementation of government policies that conflate immigration with terrorism, life on the border
has been profoundly changed.
The internal enforcement of
As surveillance and military devices, drones offer a prism for theorizing the technological politics of warfare and
governance. This prism reveals some violent articulations of US imperialism and nationalism, the translation of
bodies into targets for remote monitoring and destruction, and the insidious application of militarized systems
and rationalities to domestic territories and populations. In this article, we analyzed the deployment of drones primarily within two different liminal securityscapes: warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and borderzones and urban areas in the USA. While we readily acknowledge profound variation and diversity both within and across these securityscapes, extant resonances and dissonances, especially with the use of drones, reveal broader patterns in forms of state operations. Notably, the drone stare depends upon pro- cesses that seek to
through systems of verticality, but rather than mirror reality below in some positivistic way, the drone assemblage executes socio-technical codes that objectify others while blurring all iden- tities within the
Some of these blurred identities include insurgent and civilian, criminal and undocumented migrant,
remotely located pilot and front-line soldier. Not only does the use of military drones destabilize identities and their representations in both combat and borderzones,
but conceptual categories as well are subjected to homogenization of radical difference as borders are
refashioned as combat zones and combat zones are construed as ontological borders between us and them,
apparatus.
or civiliza- tion and barbarism. UAV surveillance practices furthermore reveal a primary, unstable fault line with sur- veillance in risk societies: exact identification and targeted control of individuals is
sub- ordinated to imperatives of preemptive risk management of populations and groups. Individualizing and differentiating surveillance is still highly valued, of course; it just gives way toor is subsumed
actuarial
forms of surveillance seek precision within certain homogenizing parameters. In the case of UAVs, this arrangement may
increase instances of state crimes such as the direct or indirect killing of innocents, which can occur through
drone missile attacks or through the further militarization of dangerous borderzones.
bypractical needs and expediencies which may appear to be rational and technocratic but are nonetheless infused with prejudicial understand- ings and evaluations of subjects. Thus,
Total War
UAVs are potentially extremely powerful surveillance tools, and that power, like all government power, needs to
be subject to checks and balances. Like any tool, UAVs have the potential to be used for good or ill. If we can set some good
privacy ground rules, our society can enjoy the benefits of this technology without having to worry about its
darker potentials. We impose regulations on what law enforcement can do all the time, for example allowing law
enforcement to take a thermal image of someones home only when they get a warrant. We need to impose rules, limits and
regulations on UAVs as well in order to preserve the privacy Americans have always expected and enjoyed. The
ACLU recommends at a minimum the following core measures be enacted to ensure that this happens: Usage
restrictions. UAVs should be subject to strict regulation to ensure that their use does not eviscerate the privacy that Americans have
traditionally enjoyed and rightly expect. Innocent Americans should not have to worry that their activities will be scrutinized by drones. To this end, the
use of drones should be prohibited for indiscriminate mass surveillance, for example, or for spying based on
First Amendment-protected activities. In general, drones should not be deployed except: o where there are specific
and articulable grounds to believe that the drone will collect evidence relating to a specific instance of criminal
wrongdoing or, if the drone will intrude upon reasonable expectations of privacy, where the government has obtained a warrant
based on probable cause; or o where there is a geographically confined, time-limited emergency situation in
which particular individuals lives are at risk, such as a fire, hostage crisis, or person lost in the wilderness; or o for reasonable non-law
enforcement purposes by non-law enforcement agencies, where privacy will not be substantially affected, such as geological inspections or
environmental surveys, and where the surveillance will not be used for secondary law enforcement purposes. Image retention restrictions.
Images
of identifiable individuals captured by aerial surveillance technologies should not be retained or shared unless there is
reasonable suspicion that the images contain evidence of criminal activity or are relevant to an ongoing investigation or pending criminal trial.
In addition, EPIC has testified before congressional committees on drone privacy issues. In July 2012, Amie Stepanovich, Director of EPICs Domestic
Surveillance Project, testified before the House Committee on Homeland Securitys Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management on the
unique threats of drones and the lack of legal oversight. [106] EPIC stated that there
the profit-motive of government drone contractors can create problematic incentives that could
the government outsources law enforcement functionssuch as the private ownership of
stoplight cameras[109]private companies are motivated to track the crimes that are the most profitable rather than
threaten privacy. When
the crimes that are the most dangerous. Punishing petty infractions such, as jay-walking, littering, and smoking in undesignated areas does not warrant
dragnet surveillance of all public behavior. The proliferation of private drones could also have legal implications that make government surveillance more
pervasive. For instance, if
a drone producer offered cloud storage for information captured by private drones, that
information could potentially be collected by the government without a warrant. And under some approaches to Fourth
Amendment law, increased drone use by the public could mean that individuals have a reduced expectation of privacy with regard to government drone
could be valuable to advertisers and data brokers, and the technical capacity for such surveillance exists today. Commercial data collectors may soon
have the capacity to continuously track the movements of individuals in public spaces just as they now track online activity. Both Google and Facebook
have recently acquired drone companies, raising concern that the companies may further expand their surveillance activities into the physical world.
[111] Regulation of private drone use must be crafted with a recognition that drones not only make possible new types of crime, but make it much easier
to commit others. Just as problems of stalking have become more prolific in the online context, a jealous ex or a grudge-holding competitor could deploy
his personal drone to follow someone throughout her day without leaving his desk. Offenses like stalking, harassment, blackmail, and invasions of
privacy could be committed more easily, covertly, and anonymously with the use of drones. Law enforcement will need to adopt strategies to counter this
trend. In short, drones make it easier for citizens to invade each others privacy, both in ways that current laws recognize and in others that it does not.
IX. Recommendations Legislation
on drone use by law enforcement should ensure that all drone surveillance
requires a warrant or a narrowly tailored emergency exception. Laws should also create data retention limits for
information collected by drones and minimization for information collected outside the scope of the warrant. Government
access to third party drone data should also require a warrant, so that the government cannot avoid obtaining warrants by collecting drone surveillance
data from the private sector. Federal
agencies must be transparent and held accountable for their domestic use of
drones. Agencies should provide clarity around the data collected, how it is used, and how long it is retained.
Local and state agencies should provide similarly information to the public whether they are using drones directly or indirectly through federal agencies.
All law enforcement agencies should publicly disclose the scope and purpose of the missions it performs. Courts
must adapt constitutional jurisprudence to properly address modern technology. The fact that it is now feasible to cheaply perform surveillance on an
individual or entire area of individuals should not mean that these actions are constitutional. Particularly when surveillance is conducted on the property
of another, or in areas where people would have an expectation of privacy or at least an expectation that they will not be subject to covert observation
and recording, sanctions should be imposed. Lawmakers
cognizant of the fact that there are numerous legitimate uses for drone technology, including public safety and emergency response.. As such, laws
Solvency
A2: Loopholes
Comprehensive restrictions and warrants are key to ensure law enforcement flexibility
as well as privacy the aff is a nail in the coffin for abuse of drone tech.
Yang 2014 [Douglas, J.D., Boston University School of Law, 2014 | BIG BROTHER'S GROWN WINGS:
THE DOMESTIC PROLIFERATION OF DRONE SURVEILLANCE AND THE LAW'S RESPONSE, The Boston
University Public Interest Law Journal| 23 B.U. Pub. Int. L.J. 343]
Rule 1: Warrantless Drone Use Rule 1 embodies the desire of both federal and state legislatures to exclude certain
situations from the burden of a warrant requirement. n228 Common examples of non-law enforcement operations include, but are not
limited to, land surveying, n229 weather and climate observation and scientific research, n230 wildlife management and protection, n231 and search and
rescue missions. n232 In addition to Rule 1's exemption of non-law enforcement uses of drones, Rule 1 also exempts situations where a high risk of
terrorist attack or imminent danger to life or property exists. This specific provision finds its inspiration in Virginia's [*377] warrant exception that allows
drone use for responses to Amber Alerts, n233 Senior Alerts, n234 and search-and-rescue missions." n235 While the Fourth Amendment covers all
government intrusions of privacy, government activity that does not involve criminal investigation tends to involve "a less hostile intrusion than the typical
policeman's search for the fruits and instrumentalities of crime." n236 Moreover, drones can be a potent tool to assist in searching for missing persons and
in police emergencies, much in the same way that police helicopters and aircraft currently provide aerial support, albeit at a much higher cost and with
less flexibility. n237 Rule 1 reflects a desire by federal and state legislative proposals to exempt exigent circumstances from restrictions on drone use. n238
Thus, where a law enforcement agency believes that a particular area, event, or situation poses a high risk of attack by terrorists; or that there is an
imminent and articulable threat to a specific person's life or property, substantial legal obstacles should not hamper that agency. Rule
1's first
paragraph is a compromise measure that allows the government to promptly respond to urgent situations,
while ensuring that the government, and particularly law enforcement agencies, adhere to the privacy protections of the
Rule by demonstrating that probable cause of a high risk of terrorist attack existed or that an imminent danger to life or property existed at the time and
general location of the drone's operation. n239 [*378] b. Rule 2: Maximum Duration Restriction In light of the Supreme Court's concern that
modern technology allows for extreme durations of monitoring, n240 and considering various legislative proposals that explicitly restrict the lengths of time
a drone can operate, n241 there
is a need to draw a line at which a drone's actions shift from being mere observation to
an offensive "search" that requires warrant protection. As Justice Sotomayor noted in Jones, the low economic costs of
modern surveillance "evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: 'limited police resources and
community hostility.'" n242 As a result, government surveillance proliferates and the public feels a chill over "associational and
expressive freedoms." n243 This chilling effect is exacerbated by the voluminous amounts of information modern
surveillance can obtain on the subject being tracked, n244 as well as the fact that drones are capable of flying much longer than manned aircraft.
n245
Current drones, such as the Global Observer, have the ability to survey 280,000 square miles, at an altitude invisible to the naked eye, for days at a
time. n246 Even if drone surveillance is inherently covert and often unnoticeable to the target, a chilling effect remains, for "the simple fact that the state
has the power to monitor the private activities of property owners at its whim violates a reasonable privacy interest. If anything, surveillance may be even
more invidious when it is surreptitiously conducted." n247 Put together, the lower police costs and higher societal costs of long-term surveillance demand
additional scrutiny. n248 Thus far, five of the nine justices who presided over Jones believe that these societal costs are so large that long-term
surveillance may encroach on [*379] the public's reasonable expectations of privacy. n249 Among the previously discussed legislative proposals, n250 the
congressional bill "PAPA" and North Dakota's Bill 1373 are forerunners in the discussion surrounding restrict drone operation duration. n251 PAPA, for
example, prohibits any warrant-authorized drone operation that exceeds forty-eight hours. n252 Bill 1373 does not go as far as PAPA in creating such a
bright-line rule, but does require warrants for drone surveillance operations to state "the maximum period for which the unmanned aircraft system will
operate in each flight." n253 Despite the forward thinking of these legislative proposals, neither addresses the heart of the matter: warrantless drone
surveillance. Rule
privacy protections that go beyond what the Constitution provides, legislators should not adopt allencompassing restrictions that prevent drones from conducting valid and rational police work that airplanes
and helicopters legally perform everyday. Thus, to better combat unreasonable and unpalatable invasions on privacy, courts and
legislatures should look to the limits of surveillance on private property, as Rule 3 does. Rule 3 seeks to protect private individuals' privacy while
balancing the state's need to compete "in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." n261 By using the terms, "unreasonably," and "close
proximity," Rule 3 allows for a combination of a Jones-ian property right analysis and Katz's "reasonable expectation of privacy" test to determine
whether a drone's operation [*381] violates societal notions of privacy. n262 Allowing
Rule 4: SenseEnhancing Technology Restrictions Rule 4 essentially functions as a clarified adaptation of the Supreme Court's opinion in Kyllo, which held
Jones and Katz approaches to provide a comprehensive inquiry into a drone's actions and its effect on a person's privacy. d.
that the government may not use a drone's "sense-enhancing technology," such as an infrared camera, to observe the home's interior without a warrant.
n274
Kyllo stands for the proposition that the government may not seek refuge under the "open view" doctrine in circumstances where it applies senseenhancing technology without a warrant; n275 onboard surveillance equipment that is not within the general public's reach ostensibly renders the drone's
observations as "searches" under the Fourth Amendment. n276 The takeaway from Kyllo is that the Supreme Court seeks to prevent the government
[*383] from divulging intimate details that it could not have previously attained without committing physical trespass and without using technology to
which the general public has not been sufficiently acquainted to. n277 Rule 4 tracks Kyllo's ruling by explicitly restricting "sense enhancing" technology that
is not in general public use - since Kyllo appears to exempt from its holding any "sense enhancing technology" that is "in general public use," n278 so too
does Rule 4. The term, "in general public use" in Rule 4 can be misleading because of its inherent vagueness and indefinite boundaries. Because the
Supreme Court in Kyllo failed to define its meaning, n279 Rule 4 applies its own definition of "in general public use": "in general public use" means a
particular sense-enhancing technology can be bought or sold on the open market in the United States without significant governmental restriction. This
definition conforms to the phrase's "plain meaning, case precedent ... [and] dictionary meaning." n280 Equipped with this description of "in general public
use," courts would not ask whether the surveillance target actually used that particular technology, but whether someone could purchase that technology
without significant governmental restriction. As mentioned in the Rule, examples of significant governmental restriction include mandatory licensure and
mandatory registration. While
Rule 4 explicitly restricts the use of sense-enhancing technology, it does not place a
comprehensive prohibition on such technology. The Rule only insulates private property, such as homes, private businesses, and
vehicles, from the revealing power of sense-enhancing technology. This conscious limitation finds its impetus in the Supreme
Court's established jurisprudence on surveillance of the home, n281 curtilage, n282 the open field, n283 and commercial property. n284
Because the Supreme Court and the States have displayed a greater [*384] concern of government surveillance that targets homes and other private
property, n285 Rule 4 answers such concerns with a near-blanket ban on the government's use of non-public, sense-enhancing technology to peer into an
individual's dwelling or home, or a private business's place of business, without a warrant. As it pertains to private property, Rule 4 restricts the
government to "seeing what may be seen 'from a public vantage point where [they have] a right to be.'" n286 e. Rule
5: Private Property
Trespass Restrictions As manufacturers produce smaller n287 and quieter n288 drones, restrictions on drone surveillance must account for just such
a development. Fortunately, the Fourth Amendment already speaks to physical invasions of private property, n289 and thus Rule 5 is a reaffirmation of the
Supreme Court's line of opinions that afford increased Fourth Amendment protections for the home and other private property. n290 The Supreme Court
has indicated, over the course of numerous opinions, that the Fourth Amendment provides enhanced protection inside the home. n291 Both within and
beyond the legal landscape, homes occupy a unique and longstanding position of sanctity, "a tradition reflected in the wording of the Fourth Amendment
itself, in the earlier history of search and seizure law, and in ancillary doctrines such as the crime of burglary." n292 As a matter of law, [*385] "physical
entry of the home [is] the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed." n293 Under the "reasonable expectation of privacy"
test, the home is "for most purposes, a place where [an individual] expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the [open
view] of outsiders are not 'protected' because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited." n294 Not to be left out, the states also share the
Supreme Court's view that the home enjoys greater protection from the Fourth Amendment. Specifically, Wisconsin and Idaho have enacted drone laws
that provide significantly heightened protection of the home and other private property. n295 Given this line of judicial and legislative intent to affirm special
privacy protections for the home, n296 Rule
5 generally prohibits warrantless drone entry into the home or any other
enclosed private structure. Despite its near-total restriction on drone use, Rule 5 also allows one exception: the
operation of a drone in furtherance of a mission that resolves, or will help resolve, a situation that involves an
imminent danger to life. This exception tracks the Supreme Court's acceptance that in certain exigent circumstances, such as when police
officers respond to an emergency n297 or when delaying an investigation to seek a warrant would endanger lives, n298 a warrant is not required. n299
Notably, besides the "imminent danger to life" exception, Rule 5 is not concerned with whether a government agency is operating a drone in the course
of a criminal investigation or for any other purpose. Thus, even if a drone satisfies the conditions of Rule 1, that drone may not enter a home or other
enclosed private structure if it does not meet Rule 5's "imminent danger to life" exception. f. Rule 6: Data Collection Restrictions Rule 6 is
an outgrowth of the various state and federal proposals that substantially limit a drone's ability to serve as a dragnet tool for government surveillance. n300
While the Fourth Amendment does not explicitly prohibit dragnet [*386] searches, "the Supreme Court has insisted that 'to be reasonable under the
Fourth Amendment, a search ordinarily must be based on individualized suspicion of wrongdoing,' save in cases of 'special need' based on 'concerns
other than crime detection.'" n301 Massive,
Thus, by
restricting a drone's ability to capture and store superfluous information, Rule 6 prevents the unlimited
proliferation of information gathering and dissemination, and the privacy threat that data dragnets pose. n307
circumventing the intent of the Fourth Amendment through the use of an unfiltered and unchecked information gathering operation.
States are taking notice and considering regulation. According to the National Conference of State Legislators,
more than 20 states have passed laws related to drones. Some limit law enforcements use of drones or other
unmanned aircraft. For example, in Idaho, a law signed in 2013 provides that, except for emergencies for
safety, search-and-rescue or controlled substance investigations, no person or agency may use a drone to
conduct surveillance of private property without a warrant. Tennessee has a similar law known as the Freedom from
Unwarranted Surveillance Act. The law allows aggrieved individuals the right to sue law enforcement agencies in civil court for violations. It also provides
that no data collected on an individual, home or areas other than the target that justified deployment may be used, copied or disclosed for any purpose,
and that such data must be deleted within 24 hours of collection. The
The corporeal politics of space, place, and identity are powerfully inflected by technological systems of remote
surveillance and violence. This is especially evident with drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which the US and other
governments have been deploying with greater frequency across a diverse range of territories (CNN, 2010; Lewis, 2010). Drones have garnered recent media attention as
remote-controlled, kill-at- a-distance technologies, which allow soldier pilots stationed potentially thousands of miles away to collect military intelligence, identify targets, and
In addition to being used in warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and northern Pakistan, UAV systems are
being used for managing emergencies caused by natural disasters (Dean, 2007), spying on foreign drug cartels (Padgett, 2009), finding
criminal activity in urban and rural areas (Lewis, 2010; Public Intelligence, 2010), and conducting border control operations
(Walters and Weber, 2010). While drones appear to affirm the primacy of visual modalities of surveillance, their underlying rationalities are more
nuanced and problematic. As complex technological systems, drones are both predicated upon and productive of an actuarial form of
surveillance. They are employed to amass data about risk probabilities and then manage populations or eliminate
network nodes considered to exceed acceptable risk thresholds. In part, drones are forms of surveillance in keeping with the precepts of
categorical suspicion and social sorting that define other contemporary surveillance systems (Gandy, 1993; Murakami
fire missiles at suspected enemies.
Wood et al., 2006; Lyon, 2007; Monahan, 2010). Drones may perform pre- dominately in the discursive register of automated precision and positive identification of known
threats, but in practice, these surveillance systems and their agents actively interpret ambiguous information that continuously defies exact matches or clear responses. In the
process, UAV
systems may force homogenization upon difference, thereby reducing variation to functional categories that
correspond to the needs and biases of the operators, not the targets, of surveillance. All surveillance and dataveillance
systems are prone to errors that have harsh ramifications for the subjects whose flawed data doubles haunt them (Haggerty and
Ericson, 2006). Drone-based surveillance systems are no exception, as witnessed by verified cases of collateral
damage caused by drone strikes (Bergen and Tiedemann, 2010). Drones also illustrate some key dynamics in the relationship
between surveillance and militarization. These devices are woven up in myths of technological superiority, objectivity,
and control that help support their adoption. By means of their supposed accuracy and precision, drone systems may
encourage the hostile targeting of threats in military settings while further inuring people to invisible monitoring
in domestic spheres. However, drones reveal important dissonances in militarization processes. The narrative of
rationalization is interrupted in telling waysby technological and human errors that kill innocent people, by emotional affect experienced by drone operators who may feel
closer to their targets than they would like, by innovative uses of camouflage and moni- toring of drone feeds by so-called enemies, and by media broadcasts of these and
With the federal government likely to permit more widespread use of drones, and the technology likely to
become ever more powerful, the question becomes: what role will drones play in American life? Based on
current trendstechnology development, law enforcement interest, political and industry pressure, and the
lack of legal safeguardsit is clear that drones pose a looming threat to Americans privacy. The reasons for
concern reach across a number of different dimensions: Mission creep. Even where UAVs are being
envisioned for search and rescue, fighting wildfires, and in dangerous tactical police operations, they are likely
to be quickly embraced by law enforcement around the nation for other, more controversial purposes. The police in Ogden, Utah
think that floating a surveillance blimp above their city will be a deterrent to crime when it is out and about.58 In
Houston, police suggested that drones could possibly be used for writing traffic tickets.59 The potential result is that they become
commonplace in American life.60 Tracking. The Justice Department currently claims the authority to monitor
Americans comings and goings using GPS tracking deviceswithout a warrant. Fleets of UAVs, interconnected and
augmented with analytics software, could enable the mass tracking of vehicles and pedestrians around a wide area. New uses. The use of
drones could also be expanded from surveillance to actual intervention in law enforcement situations on the ground. Airborne technologies
could be developed that could, for example, be used to control or dispel protesters (perhaps by deploying tear gas or other
technologies), stop a fleeing vehicle, or even deploy weapons.61 In addition, drones raise many of the same issues that pervasive
video surveillance brings in any context. For example: Chilling effects. What would be the effect on our public spaces, and
our society as a whole, if everyone felt the keen eye of the government on their backs whenever they ventured outdoors? Psychologists have
repeatedly found that people who are being observed tend to behave differently, and make different decisions, than
when they are not being watched. This effect is so great that a recent study found that merely hanging up posters of staring
human eyes is enough to significantly change peoples behavior.62 Voyeurism. Video surveillance is susceptible
to individual abuse, including voyeurism. In 2004, a couple making love on a dark nighttime rooftop balcony, where they had every reason
to expect they enjoyed privacy, were filmed for nearly four minutes by a New York police helicopter using night vision. This is the kind of abuse that could
become commonplace if drone technology enters widespread use. (Rather than apologize, NYPD officials flatly denied that this filming constituted an
abuse, telling a television reporter, this is what police in helicopters are supposed to do, check out people to make sure no one is doing anything
illegal).63 Discriminatory
targeting. The individuals operating surveillance systems bring to the job all their
existing prejudices and biases. In Great Britain, camera operators have been found to focus disproportionately
on people of color. According to a sociological study of how the systems were operated, Black people were between one-and-a-half and two-anda-half times more likely to be surveilled than one would expect from their presence in the population.64 Institutional abuse. In addition to
abuse by the inevitable bad apples within law enforcement, there is also the danger of institutional abuse.
Sometimes, bad policies are set at the top, and an entire law enforcement agency is turned toward abusive ends.
That is especially prone to happen in periods of social turmoil and intense political conflict. During the labor,
civil rights, and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 20th century, the FBI and other security agencies engaged
in systematic illegal behavior against those challenging the status quo. And once again today we are seeing an
upsurge in spying against peaceful political protesters across America.65 Automated enforcement. Drones are part of
a trend toward automated law enforcement, in which cameras and other technologies are used to mete out
justice with little or no human intervention. This trend raises a variety of concerns, such as the fact that computers lack the judgment to
fairly evaluate the circumstances surrounding a supposed violation, and may be susceptible to bugs and other software errors, or simply are not
programmed to fairly and properly encapsulate the state of the law as passed by legislatures.66
One point that is often made with regards to new surveillance technologies is that, while they may increase
government surveillance of individuals, they can also increase individuals ability to record the activities of
officials, which can serve as a check on their power.67 Too often, however, the authorities seek to increase their
surveillance over individuals (for example, by installing surveillance cameras throughout public spaces) while
restricting individuals ability to use that same technology as a check against their power (for example, by
attempting to prevent individuals from videotaping police68). Already, security experts have started expressing
concern that unmanned aircraft could be used for terrorism69which naturally raises the question: will individuals
be able to make use of the new technology for their own purposes, or will government seek a monopoly over
the new technology by citing fears of its use for terrorism?
A2: Terrorism DA
The DHS Inspector Generals report is an important addition to a growing library of governmental reports that
have exposed the fallacies, inefficiencies, and ineffectiveness of Homeland Securitys border drone program.
Together, these reports also reveal an alarming pattern of deception and delusion within Customs and Border
Protection and its Office of Air and Marine. The recent OIG report highlights the lack of transparency and accountability
within the border drone program a failing that has deepened as DHS has expanded the deployment of border drones since launching the
program in 2004. Yet, even in the wake of the scathing OIG report, there are no signs that CBP, DHS, Congress or the White
House is backing away from the dysfunctional and massively expensive drone program. The border drone program has
received favored treatment by Congress (both Democrats and Republicans) and the White House (both Bush and Obama), even as CBP has proved
unable to demonstrate that drones are effective instruments of border control. Widespread
subsidiary agencies, CBP and OAM. At least part of the problem at CBP/OAM is the absence of a clearly defined mission. Symptomatic of this problem
is the inability of DHS and CBP to define exactly what they mean by the terms homeland security and border security, as a January 2013 report by
Border control since 9/11 has been framed in terms of national security
and counterterrorism. This strategic shift has resulted in an overreliance on military tactics, strategies,
personnel and hardware, as well as military infrastructure, such as the military bases that host the border
drones. Yet the actual focus of border control is still apprehending unauthorized immigrants and seizing illegal
drugs, resulting in a mismatch between the stated strategic mission and the field (and air) operations.
the Congressional Research Service pointed out.
Police, intelligence, and security systems are imperfect. They process vast amounts of imperfect intelligence data and do not have
the resources to monitor all known suspects 24/7. The French authorities lost track of these extremists long enough for them to carry out their murderous
acts.
You cannot fix any of this by treating the entire population as suspects and then engaging in suspicionless,
Mass data collectors can dig deeply into anyones digital persona but
dont have the resources to do so with everyone. Surveillance of the entire population, the vast majority of whom are
innocent, leads to the diversion of limited intelligence resources in pursuit of huge numbers of false
leads . Terrorists are comparatively rare, so finding one is a needle-in-a-haystack problem. You dont make it easier by throwing more needleless hay
on the stack. It is statistically impossible for total population surveillance to be an effective tool for catching
terrorists. Even if your magic terrorist-catching machine has a false positive rate of 1 in 1,000and no security
technology comes anywhere near thisevery time you asked it for suspects in the U.K. it would flag 60,000
innocent people. Law enforcement and security services need to be able to move with the times, using modern digital technologies intelligently
blanket collection and processing of personal data.
and through targeted data preservationnot a mass surveillance regimeto engage in court-supervised technological surveillance of individuals whom
Mass surveillance
makes the job of the security services more difficult and the rest of us less secure.
they have reasonable cause to suspect. That is not, however, the same as building an infrastructure of mass surveillance.
Before the event, every bit of hay is potentially relevant. The most
Mass surveillance,
a false sense of security. It sounds great when you say youre monitoring every phone call in the United States. You can
put that in a PowerPoint. But, actually, you have no idea whats going on. By flooding the system with false positives, bigdata approaches to counterterrorism might actually make it harder to identify real terrorists before they act. Two years
before the Boston Marathon bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers alleged to have committed the attack, was assessed
by the citys Joint Terrorism Task Force. They determined that he was not a threat. This was one of about a
thousand assessments that the Boston J.T.T.F. conducted that year, a number that had nearly doubled in the previous two years,
company, told me that this image is wrong. We knew about these networks, he said, speaking of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
he continued, gives
according to the Boston F.B.I. As of 2013, the Justice Department has trained nearly three hundred thousand law-enforcement officers in how to file
suspicious-activity reports. In 2010, a central database held about three thousand of these reports; by 2012 it had grown to almost twenty-eight
thousand. The bigger haystack makes it harder to find the needle, Sensenbrenner told me. Thomas Drake, a former N.S.A. executive and whistleblower who has become one of the agencys most vocal critics, told me, If
warfare may prove to be the most enduring challenge for the FAA when it comes
to ensuring guidelines that will protect Americans adequately as drone technology makes its transition into
civilian life. Peter Singer is the director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at
Brookings Institute. He is the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. According to him, the primary
weakness of drone technology is many systems' dependence on GPS signals and remote operation. Even
military-grade drone technology can be co-opted, he said. In December 2011, the Iranian Army's electronic warfare unit brought down
an American drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, after it crossed into Iranian airspace. In Iraq in 2009, Iraqi insurgents were able to use $26 software to
intercept the video feeds of US Predator drones in a manner "akin to a criminal listening in on the police radio scanner," Singer told Truthout. Most
recently,
a research team at the University of Texas was able to demonstrate successfully the spoofing of a UAV
by creating false civil GPS signals that trick the drone's GPS receiver. "There aren't easy answers to these other than good
encryption requirements," Singer told Truthout in an email. The Texas research team hoped to demonstrate the dangers of spoofing early on in the FAA's
task to write the mandated rules for UAS integration in the national airspace, and the Department of Homeland Security invited the team to demonstrate
the spoofing in New Mexico. "Vulnerability
to jamming and spoofing depends highly on the design of the aircraft and
control systems and vary across differing architectures. Minimum system performance and design standards
developed for civil UAS designs will address these vulnerabilities," an FAA spokesman told Truthout. Whether minimum
standards for system performance will be enough to address the changing dynamic of cyber warfare, and for that
matter, technology, remains a question, but it's something the FAA and Homeland Security are examining as drone
technology becomes more widespread in the US.
A recent paper (Friedman and Lewis, 2014) postulates a scenario by which terrorists might seize nuclear materials in
Pakistan for fashioning a weapon. While jihadist sympathizers are known to have worked within the Pakistani nuclear establishment, there is little
to no evidence that terrorist groups in or outside the region are seriously trying to obtain a nuclear capability.
And Pakistan has been operating a uranium enrichment plant for its weapons program for nearly 30 years with no credible reports of diversion of HEU
from the plant. There is one stark example of a terrorist organization that actually started a nuclear effort: the Aum Shinrikyo group. At its peak, this
religious cult had a membership estimated in the tens of thousands spread over a variety of countries, including Japan; its members had scientific
expertise in many areas; and the group was well funded. Aum Shinrikyo obtained access to natural uranium supplies, but the nuclear weapon effort
stalled and was abandoned. The group was also interested in chemical weapons and did produce sarin nerve gas with which they attacked the Tokyo
highly organized
groups, designated appropriately as terrorist, that have acquired enough territory to enable them to operate in a
quasigovernmental fashion, like the Islamic State (IS)? Such organizations are certainly dangerous, but how would nuclear
terrorism fit in with a program for building and sustaining a new caliphate that would restore past glories of Islamic
society, especially since, like any organized government, the Islamic State would itself be vulnerable to nuclear attack? Building a new
Islamic state out of radioactive ashes is an unlikely ambition for such groups . However, now that it has become
subway system, killing 13 persons. AumShinrikyo is now a small organization under continuing close surveillance. What about
notorious, apocalyptic pronouncements in Western media may begin at any time, warning of the possible acquisition and use of nuclear weapons by IS.
Even if a terror group were to achieve technical nuclear proficiency, the time, money, and infrastructure needed
to build nuclear weapons creates significant risks of discovery that would put the group at risk of attack. Given the
ease of obtaining conventional explosives and the ability to deploy them, a terrorist group is unlikely to exchange a big part of its operational program to
Fear of nuclear weapons is rational, but its extension to terrorism has been a vehicle for fear-mongering that is unjustified
by available data. The debate on nuclear terrorism tends to distract from events that raise the risk of nuclear
war, the consequences of which would far exceed the results of terrorist attacks. And the historical record shows that the
war risk is real. The Cuban Missile Crisis and other confrontations have demonstrated that miscalculation, misinterpretation, and misinformation could
lead to a close call regarding nuclear war. Although there has been much commentary on the interest that Osama bin Laden, when he was alive,
reportedly expressed in obtaining nuclear weapons, evidence
K of DA Terror Talk
The use of surveillance technology has linked the management of immigrant
populations with the militarized discourse of the War on Terror.
Chvez, 12 [Karma R. Chvez, associate professor of rhetoric, politics and culture at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Ph.D. Arizona State University, 2007. M.A. University of Alabama, 2003. M.A. University of
Alabama, 2002. Border Interventions: The need to Shift from a Rhetoric of Security to a Rhetoric of
Militarization, 2012] [MBM]
Many scholars have commented on the way in which out-of-control bor-ders feature in anti-immigrant and
nativist discourse in order to bolster the need to regain control that has apparently only recently been lost (e.g.,
Chavez, Covering Immigration and Latino Threat; Brady, "Homoerotics of Immigration Control"). Such arguments appear in almost each SBI Monthly, and they are
often accompanied by language that links "illegal aliens" with terrorism. Each SBI Monthly extends two pages long, and other than an
occasional note from an SBI administrator, the different pieces in the newsletters do not list authors. The inaugural issue of the newsletter introduces Greg Giddens, the
understanding the problem. Those who wish to cause harm to the US must never be allowed to enter. We must protect our citizens, yet remain a welcoming nation" (SBI
Monthly 1. I). This
tension between exclusion and inclusion points to the way that border rhetorics more generally
remain fraught with contradictions, as a nation-state wishes to appear tolerant yet tough, without slipping into
isolationism and nativism. A similar statement ex-ists in the second newsletter, which introduces Dr. Kirk Evans, SBI net pro-gram manager. The introduction
quips that Evans helped with national security during the Cold War, and "will again assist the US in locating threats to homeland securityillegal
border crossers" (SBI Monthly i.2). The next paragraph reminds readers that the program will protect against "terrorists, narcotics, and illegal aliens." Both of
these statements link undocumented migrants with terrorism and harm to the United States. The putatively natural
linkage is likely intended to justify and normalize the actual militarization practices that the SBI will enact. The
same newsletter de-scribes how the contractor, Boeing, will aid in national security: "The Boeing SBI net team,
under the direction of CBP, will implement a system that notifies CBP of an illegal entry, classifies the entry (number of
aliens, armed, animal, etc.), provides a means to efficiently respond to the en-try, and brings the illegal entry to the appropriate law enforcement resolution" (SBI Monthly 1.2).
Such information essentially logs any movement on the border, which poses a potential threat to Native
American nations whose national borders span the US-Mexico border, animals that freely cross the border,
residents who live near both sides of the border, as well as undocumented crossers. Even with so many affected, because of
the emphasis on security, such initiatives can be publicly talked about and seem normal. Moreover, as the link between
terrorism and undocumented immigration is solidified, military-technologies seem more warranted in order to
increasingly help law-enforcement officials to regain control of the border. For instance, in talking about a piece of
technology called the Common Operating Picture, which is a camera and a key resource for maintaining
control, one newsletter offers the following hypothetical scenario of a breach of national security: A group of individuals has just entered the US
illegally and is on foot. As they make their way across the desert, they are picked up on radar. The radar sounds an alarm at a
nearby sector communications center. A Sector Enforcement Specialist identifies the location of the radar hit,
and then takes control of a camera in that area. Using the camera's remote capabilities, the Specialist zooms
in to get a visual on what triggered the radar. The Specialist identifies the group of illegal aliens. The Specialist
then notifies Border Patrol Agents in the vicinity through voice communications. The responding Agent is then relayed the coordinates of the illegal aliens
to their Mobile COP, displayed on their laptop computer mounted in their vehicle. The coordinates al-low the Agent the ability to understand where they are in proximity to the
the era of the War on Drugs typically relied on overt links between drug trafficking and undocumented
migration, the contemporary rhetoric of the SBI Monthly newsletters does not.
K of DA Terror Talk
The inflated threat of terrorism is used to stifle dissent justifying overbearing
surveillance policies and invasions.
Weiss, 2015 (Leonard, visiting scholar at Stanford Universitys Center for International Security and
Cooperation, On fear and nuclear terrorism, March 3, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Online:
http://thebulletin.org/2015/march/fear-and-nuclear-terrorism8072, kdf)
The rise of the national surveillance state. Lowering
the risk of terrorism, particularly the nuclear kind, is the quintessential reason
that the mandarins of the national security state have given for employing the most invasive national
surveillance system in history. Finding the needle in the haystack is how some describe the effort to discern terrorist plots from telephone
metadata and intercepted communications. But the haystack keeps expanding, and large elements of the American
population appear willing to allow significant encroachments on the constitutional protections provided by the
Fourth Amendment. The fear of terrorism has produced this change in the American psyche even though there
is no evidence that the collection of such data has resulted in the discovery of terrorist plots beyond
those found by traditional police and intelligence methods. It is doubtful that we shall soon (if ever) see a return to the
status quo ante regarding constitutional protections. This reduction in the freedom of Americans from the prying eyes of the
state is a major consequence of the hyping of terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism. This is exemplified by the blithe
conclusion in the previously referenced paper by Friedman and Lewis (2014), in which readers are advised to be more proactive in supporting our
governments actions to ameliorate potential risks. The National Security Agency should love this.
There is a tendency on the part of security policy advocates to hype security threats to obtain support for their
desired policy outcomes. They are free to do so in a democratic society, and most come by their advocacy through genuine conviction that a real security threat
is receiving insufficient attention. But there is now enough evidence of how such advocacy has been distorted for the
purpose of overcoming political opposition to policies stemming from ideology that careful public exposure and
examination of data on claimed threats should be part of any such debate. Until this happens, the most
appropriate attitude toward claimed threats of nuclear terrorism, especially when accompanied by advocacy of policies intruding on individual freedom, should
be one of skepticism. Interestingly, while all this attention to nuclear terrorism goes on, the United States and other nuclear nations have no problem promoting
the use of nuclear power and national nuclear programs (only for friends, of course) that end up creating more nuclear materials that can be used for weapons. The use of
civilian nuclear programs to disguise national weapon ambitions has been a hallmark of proliferation history ever since the Atoms for Peace program (Sokolski, 2001),
suggesting that the real nuclear threat resides where it always has resided-in national nuclear programs; but placing the threat where it properly belongs does not carry the
public-relations frisson currently attached to the word terrorism.
Politics DA
Of all the threats to privacy that we face today, why have drones caught the attention of the American public to
such a remarkable degree? One possibility is that theres something uniquely ominous about a robotic eye in
the sky. Many privacy invasions are abstract and invisibledata mining, for example, or the profiling of Internet users by online
advertisers. Drones, on the other hand, are concrete and real, and the threat requires no explanation. But they are
just the most visible example of a host of new surveillance technologies that have the potential to
fundamentally alter the balance of power between individuals and the state. Physically tailing a suspect requires teams of
police officers working 24/7, but now police can slap GPS devices on a suspects car and then sit in the station house tracking his movements on a
laptop. Now
that the wholesale surveillance of American life is becoming cheap and easy, legal protections are
all the more important. The drone issue has also gained momentum because the concern over it is bipartisan.
While Democrats get most of the credit for pushing back on national surveillance programs, it was the
Republican Partys 2012 platform that addressed domestic surveillance drones, stating that we support pending legislation to prevent
unwarranted or unreasonable governmental intrusion through the use of aerial surveillance. The ACLU of Virginia, for instance, teamed up
with one of the states most conservative lawmakers to introduce a drone regulation bill in the state House of
Delegates, while its Senate companion bill was introduced by a progressive. Floridas drone regulation legislation
is being almost entirely pushed by conservativesand in most states, the legislative efforts weve seen so far have
been conservative or bipartisan. Privacy issues are always less partisan than many other political questions,
but the support for action on drones from both left and right has been remarkable.
A2: Courts CP
UASs are potentially extremely powerful surveillance tools, and that power, like all governmental power, must
be subject to checks and balances. 179 At the same time, however, UASs can facilitate the following: the detection, investigation,
prevention and deterrence of crime; the safety of citizens and officers; the apprehension and prosecution of criminals; and the protection of the innocent.
180 Fostering
a responsible use for the domestic law enforcement UAS is extremely important in a society
where criminals themselves use increasingly sophisticated technology to evade detection and outwit police. 181
At the same time, the interests of the citizens must also be addressed: threats of mission creep, 182
suspicionless tracking of physical movement, voyeurism, and discrimination 183 weigh heavily on the public's mind. While the
Fourth Amendment may confine the judiciary's role in shaping the contours of anonymity in the public space,
the federal and state legislatures are free to implicate other constitutional values: the freedom of association,
speech, and travel.' 84 Likewise, the legislature is able to consider other widely shared values in a democratic
society by enacting legislation in accord with the proposed standard: "the enjoyment of anonymity and places of repose,
the absence of a pervasive police presence, and the absence of intensive official scrutiny except in response to suspicious conduct." 185 As Justice
Alito recently noted, "[i]n circumstances involving dramatic technological change, the best solution to privacy
concerns may be legislative. A legislative body is well situated to gauge changing public attitudes, to draw
detailed lines, and to balance privacy and public safety in a comprehensive way." 186 The following are remedies in which
an appropriate balance between surveillance and regulation needs can be met.
Perm Solvency
All branches have a responsibility to act on drones only legislation can enforce court
decisions and clarify grey areas on government surveillance.
Rotenberg & Brody, 2013 (Marc - president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and teaches
privacy law and open government at Georgetown University Law Center & David - the EPIC Appellate
Advocacy Fellow and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Protecting Privacy: The Role of the Courts and
Congress, Human Rights Magazine, 39:3, Online:
http://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2013_vol_39/may_2013_n2_privacy/
protecting_privacy_courts_congress.html)
Congress has a concurrent duty to protect privacy as well. It was the Courts decision in 1967 that set the course
for the modern right to privacy, but it was the congressional legislation the following year that gave meaning to
that right. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967); Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Pub. L. No. 90-351, 82 Stat. 197.
Congress needs to fill gaps in existing laws and establish clear guidance in areas unlikely to receive ample
adjudication. Specifically, Congress should enact warrant requirements for drone surveillance, persistent
location tracking, and the contents of all private electronic communications. Because of well-established exigency
exceptions, robust warrant requirements assure innocent parties that they are not being unduly watched without
compromising the effectiveness of law enforcement. And state legislatures need not wait for lawmakers in Washington to act.
Nowhere is the argument for state experimentation in the laboratories of democracy better exemplified than in this area of rapidly changing technology.
New State Ice v. Liebman, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting) (a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a
laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.). Forty years ago, Samuel Alito, then an undergraduate
at Princeton, wrote, The erosion of privacy, unlike war, economic bad times, or domestic unrest, does not jump to the citizens attention and cry out for
action. But by the time privacy is seriously compromised it is too late to clamor for reform. We must begin now to preserve privacy, and the first step is
for Americans to understand the threats to privacy we now face and the threats inherent in our technological society. Samuel Alito, Report of the
There are several problems with applying current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to drones. The factual
dynamics of Fourth Amendment cases contribute to the mishmash of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and
the increased complexity of drone technology will only contribute to the problems with applying either Fourth
Amendment search paradigm to drones. First, drones could generally avoid all Fourth Amendment violations
under the property-rights paradigm because they can fly on public thoroughfares, thereby avoiding a trespass. Second,
although the reasonable-expectation-ofprivacy test would provide the most workable test for an analysis of
drones, a person would often be unable to satisfy the tests subjective element, and courts have not yet
expounded an understandable theory for the objective element. Drones therefore face considerable challenges under the current
jurisprudence. A. Factual Dynamics of Fourth Amendment Cases Given its highly context-specific application, a significant feature of the
Fourth Amendment is the dynamic factual scenarios that are presented for court review.188 The government
often employs new instruments to investigate and prosecute criminals.189 Likewise, criminals often employ new instruments
to commit crimes and to evade police detection or capture.190 Ordinary citizens, however, may employ many of these same instruments to
accommodate their everyday conveniences and necessities. According to Professor Orin Kerr, this
Applying the Fourth Amendment to drones requires application of the threshold question: was there a search?
Again, this will depend on all the factors discussed abovethe area of the search, the technology used, and whether society would respect the targets
expectation of privacy in the place searched. If
a reviewing court concludes that the drone surveillance was not a search,
neither a warrant nor any degree of individualized suspicion would be required. If, however, the court concluded there was
a search, then a court would ask whether a warrant is required, if one of the exceptions apply, and what level of suspicion, if any, is necessary to uphold
the search. Unless
a meaningful distinction can be made between drone surveillance and more traditional forms
of government tracking, existing jurisprudence suggests that a reviewing court would likely uphold drone
surveillance conducted with no individualized suspicion when conducted for purposes other than strict law
enforcement. The Supreme Court has hesitated from interfering in what they see as the executives function in
protecting the health and safety of the American population. As Chief Justice Rehnquist noted in the Sitz, the Court
does not want to transfer from politically accountable officials to the courts the decision as to which among
reasonable alternative law enforcement techniques should be employed to deal with serious public danger....
[F]or purposes of Fourth Amendment analysis, the choice among such reasonable alternatives remains with
the governmental officials who have a unique understanding of, and a responsibility for, limited public
resources, including a finite number of police officers.121 The Court may defer to law enforcement officials in
the drone context also. There are countless instances where the government may seek to utilize drones for
health and safety purposes that go beyond mere law enforcement. These may include firefighting, search and rescue missions,
traffic safety enforcement, or environmental protection. If, on other hand, surveillance is conducted primarily to enforce the law, a warrant may be
in transit (commonly known as wiretapping),122 communications in storage such as e-mails,123 bank records,124 and health records,125 among a host
of other private information. Several measures have been introduced in the 113th Congress that would restrict the domestic use of drones, and establish
While the Supreme Court may have historically been able to act as political cover for the President and/or
Congress, that is not true in a world post-Bush v. Gore. The Court is seen today as a politicized body, and
especially now that we are in the era of the Roberts Court, with a Chief Justice hand picked by the President and approved by the Congress, it is
highly unlikely that Court action will not, at least to some extent, be blamed on and/or credited to the
President and Congress. The Court can still get away with a lot more than the elected branches since people don't understand the
technicalities of legal doctrine like they understand the actions of the elected branches; this is, in part, because the media does such a poor job of
Nevertheless, it is preposterous to argue that the Court is entirely insulated from politics, and
equally preposterous to argue that Bush and the Congress would not receive at least a large portion of the blame
for a Court ruling that, for whatever reason, received the attention of the public.
covering legal news.
A2: ASPEC
2AC
Counter-interpretation USFG is all three branches
Princeton University WordNet 1997, http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=united%20states,
accessed May 25, 2001
united states: 2: the executive and legislative and judicial branches of the federal government of the US