Simon+and+Kevin

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YA YEET

= Fusion centers 1AC (sorry for formatting. ) =

The System
Contention 1 is the system: This year’s resolution provides the perfect opportunity to justify a political action centered on the discussion of RACE as surveillance mechanisms funded by the federal government and carried out by local law enforcement agents have disproportionately targeted public dissent of racialized injustice. We offer a TOPICAL discursive performance to speak out through the 1AC and start our protest with White supremacy is the UNAMED political system that guides the modern world. It is not seen as political yet serves as the background against which other systems we see as political are highlighted. What is needed is a GLOBAL THEORETICAL framework for situating discussion of race and white racism that CHALLENGE white political philosophy. We must recognize the POLITICAL SYSTEM of WHITE SUPREMACY // White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history -the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people- is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic diversity racking the academy; both demographically and conceptually, it is one of the "whitest" of the humanities. Blacks, for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers in North American universities-a hundred or so people out of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer Latino, Asian American, and Native American philosophers! Surely this underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explanation, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demographic advantage of numbers, there are of course far more female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philosophers (though still not proportionate to women's percentage of the population), and they have made far greater progress in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African American philosophers who do work in moral and political theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable from that of their white peers or to focus on local issues (affirmative action, the black "underclass") or historical figures (W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggressively engage the broader debate. What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situating discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challenging the assumptions of white political philosophy, which would correspond to feminist theorists' articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism ( or, as I will argue, global white supremacy ) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities , benefits and burdens, rights and duties. The notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for contractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times.//
 * Mills, 97 **--Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University(Charles W., Racial Contract, p. 1)//AK//

// The Hidden Racial system makes itself violently felt through the organs of systemic surveillance // //Racial equality victories are BITTERSWEET with “SILENT COVENANTS” that disguise the pernicious disease of white supremacy with the cloak of race neutrality while criminal justice policies justify EXCESSIVE SURVEILLANCE in the name of crime control that really serves the ongoing exclusion of Blacks from civic life and the PERSISTENT CONDEMNATION of Blackness.// // Heitzeg 15 ( Nancy A. Professor of Sociology & Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity at St. Catherine University. “On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law” Hamline University's School of Law's Journal of Public Law and Policy Volume 36 Issue 1 Article 3 http://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=jplp 7/18/15// // The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board // of Education of Topeka, Kansas //(1954) is often used as the benchmark for chronicling the start of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 39 The Court’s unanimous rejection of// Plessy’s //“separate but equal” provided a new Federal framework with which to challenge Jim Crow segregation on the state and local levels. It offered the back drop for the Montgomery bus boycott, the resistance in Birmingham, Bloody Sunday, the voter registration drives of Freedom Summer, and ultimately, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Right Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the 24th Amendment to the Constitution.40While there was hope again that the law itself could be pressed into the service of racial equality, those victories now seem bittersweet. Bell argues that the Brown decision and the ensuing Federal legislation were “silent covenants” of interest-convergence, where “perceived self-interest of whites rather than the racial injustices suffered by Blacks have been the major motivation in racial-remediation policies .” 41 Judge Robert L. Carter, one of the attorneys who argued Brown goes further, “. . .__the fundamental vice was not legally enforced racial segregation__ itself; __this was a mere by- product, a symptom of the greater and more pernicious disease -white supremacy.”__42 Legally supported segregation __was uprooted without dislodging either white supremacy or anti-Blackness,__ now cloaked in race-neutral rhetoric of “color-blindness”. The “color-blind” Constitution and the race-neutral requirement of Federal Civil Rights legislation now serves as convenient cover for the persistence of institutionalized racism. Racially coded but race-neutral rhetoric is widely used __in debates over__ welfare reform, affirmative action, and particularly “law and order” __criminal justice policy;__ 43 in all these cases, the coded racial sub-text reads clearly, __and__ the resultant policies, while purportedly “race neutral,” have resulted in disproportionate harm to people of color, especially African Americans .// While race is now widely the text/subtext of political debate, systemic racism still remains largely absent from either political discourse or policy debates of all sorts//, including those __related to criminal injustice.__ In the Post-Civil Rights Era, there has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and legal systems to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, police terror, extreme segregation, a brutal and biased death penalty, and neo-slave labor via incarceration all in the name of “crime control .” 44 “Law and order” criminal justice policies are all guided by thinly coded appeals to white fears of high crime neighborhoods, “crack epidemics,” gang proliferation, juvenile super – predators, urban unrest, school violence, and more. In all these case, the sub-text reads clearly — fear of brown and especially Black people. As before, __law, policing and punishment are central to the ongoing exclusion of Blacks from civic life__. Post slavery, the criminalizing narrative was a cultural feature of on-going efforts at oppression; from convict lease/plantain prison farms to the contemporary prison industrial complex the control of black bodies for profit has been furthered by the criminal justice system. “Slave Codes” become Black Codes __and__ now Black Codes become gang legislation, three-strikes and the War on Drugs in __the persistent condemnation of Blackness.__ 46 As before, the criminal legal system is the primary mechanism for undoing the promised protections of Federal Civil Rights legislation and constitutes again, the major affront to the fulfillment of the 13th, 14th and 25th Amendments. The U nited S tates has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a population of 2.3 million behind bars that constitutes 25% of the world’s prisoners. 47 The increased rate of incarceration can be traced to the War on Drugs and the rise of lengthy mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes and other felonies. These policies have proliferated, not in response to crime rate or any empirical data that indicates their effectiveness, due to newfound sources of profit for prisons. 48 As Brewer and Heitzeg (2008) observe: 45 The prison industrial complex is a self-perpetuating machine where the vast profits (e.g. cheap labor, private and public supply and construction contracts, job creation, continued media profits from exaggerated crime reporting and crime/punishment as entertainment) and perceived political benefits (e.g. reduced unemployment rates, “get tough on crime” and public safety rhetoric, funding increases for police, and criminal justice system agencies and professionals) lead to policies that are additionally designed to insure an endless supply of “clients” for the criminal justice system ( e.g . enhanced police presence in poor neighborhoods and communities of color; racial profiling ; decreased funding for public education combined with zero-tolerance policies and increased rates of expulsion for students of color; increased rates of adult certification for juvenile offenders; mandatory minimum and “three-strikes” sentencing; draconian conditions of incarceration and a reduction of prison services that contribute to the likelihood of “recidivism”; “collateral consequences”-such as felony disenfranchisement, prohibitions on welfare receipt, public housing, gun ownership, voting and political participation, employment- that nearly guarantee continued participation in “crime” and return to the prison industrial complex following initial release.) The 13th Amendment claim of abolition remains unfulfilled, as the neo- slavery of the prison industrial complex becomes the current vehicle for controlling Black bodies for political and economic gain. The trend towards mass incarceration is marred by racial disparity. While 1 in 35 adults is under correctional supervision and 1 in every 100 adults is in prison, 1 in every 36 Latino adults , 1 in every 15 black men, 1 in every 100 black women, and 1 in 9 black 49 men ages 20 to 34 are incarcerated. 50 Despite no statistic differences in rates of offending, approximately 50% of all prisoners are black, 30% are white, and 20% are Latino ;.51 These disparities are indicative of differential enforcement practices rather than an differences in criminal participation. This is particularly true of drug crimes, which account for the bulk of the increased prison population. Even though Blacks and whites use and sell drugs comparable rates, African Americans are anywhere from 3 to 10 times more likely to be arrested, and additionally likely to receive harsher sentences than their white counterparts. // //52// // Racism must rejected in every instance as a decision rule // // Memmi 2k - MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165// // The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without int0ermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.” fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. //

// This means that within the political calculations of policy justifications our REVOLUTIONARY stance against racial injustice should prevail // // WE EMBRACE THE CONCEPT OF “REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE” TO REDEFINE THE IMPACT CALCULUS TO EVALUATE THE DEBATE //

//**NEWTON ****co-founder of the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense ****1973 **// //Huey-PhD University of California, Santa Cruz; “Revolutionary Suicide”; // //Penguin Edition with Introduction written by Frederika Newton 2009; pp. 2-6 // // To understand revolutionary suicide it is first necessary to have an idea of reactionary suicide, for the two are very different. Dr. Hendin was describing reactionary suicide: the reaction of a man who takes his own life in response to social conditions that overwhelm him and condemn him to helplessness. The young Black men in his study had been deprived of human dignity, crushed by oppressive forces, and denied their right to live as proud and free human beings. A section in Dostoevsky’s// Crime and Punishment //provides a good analogy. One of the characters, Marmeladov, a very poor man, argues that poverty is not a vice. In poverty, he says, a man can attain the innate nobility of soul that is not possible in beggary; for while society may drive the poor man out with a stick, the beggar will be swept out with a broom. Why? Because the beggar is totally demeaned, his dignity lost. Finally, bereft of self-respect, immobilized by fear and despair, he sinks into self-murder. This is reactionary suicide. Connected to reactionary suicide, although even more painful and degrading, is a spiritual death that has been the experience of millions of Black people in the United States. This death is found everywhere today in the Black community. Its victims have ceased to fight the forms of oppression that drink their blood.The common attitude has long been: What’s the use? If a man rises up against a power as great as the United States, he will not survive. Believing this, many Blacks have been driven to a death of the spirit rather than of the flesh, lapsing into lives of quiet desperation. Yet all the while, in the heart of every Black, there is the hope that life will somehow change in the future. I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide.Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them.Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all-Black and white alike -ill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect. Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick. Che Guevara said that to a revolutionary death is the reality and victory the dream. Because the revolutionary lives so dangerously, his survival is a miracle. Bakunin, who spoke for the most militant wing of the First International, made a similar statement in his// Revolutionary Catechism//. To him, the first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life. When Fidel Castro and his small band were in Mexico preparing for the Cuban Revolution, many of the comrades had little understanding of Bakunin’s rule. A few hours before they set sail, Fidel went from man to man asking who should be notified in case of death. Only then did the deadly seriousness of the revolution hit home. Their struggle was no longer romantic. The scene had been exciting and animated; but when the simple, overwhelming question of death arose, everyone fell silent. Many so-called revolutionaries in this country, Black and white, are not prepared to accept this reality. The Black Panthers are not suicidal; neither do we romanticize the consequences of revolution in our lifetime. Other so-called revolutionaries cling to an illusion that they might have their revolution and die of old age. That cannot be. I do not expect to live through our revolution, and most serious comrades probably share my realism. Therefore, the expression “revolution in our lifetime” means something different to me than it does to other people who use it. I think the revolution will grow in my lifetime, but I do not expect to enjoy its fruits. That would be a contradiction. The reality will be grimmer. I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism, reactionary inter-communalism-reactionary suicide. The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact, especially the Black revolutionaries in America, whose lives are in constant danger from the evils of a colonial society. Considering how we must live, it is not hard to accept the concept of revolutionary suicide. In this we are different from white radicals. They are not faced with genocide. The greater, more immediate problem is the survival of the entire world. If the world does not change, all its people will be threatened by the greed, exploitation, and violence of the power structure in the American empire. The handwriting is on the wall. The United States is jeopardizing its own existence and the existence of all humanity. If Americans knew the disasters that lay ahead, they would transform this society tomorrow for their own preservation. The Black Panther Party is in the vanguard of the revolution that seeks to relieve this country of its crushing burden of guilt. We are determined to establish true equality and the means of creative work. Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese- any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force-are suicidal. Also, if the Black Panthers symbolize the suicidal trend among Blacks, then the whole Third World is suicidal, because the Third World fully intends to resist and overcome the ruling class of the United States.If scholars wish to carry their analysis further, they must come to terms with that four-fifths of the world which is bent on wiping out the power of the empire. In those terms the Third World would be transformed from suicidal to homicidal, although homicide is the unlawful taking of life, and the third World is involved only in defense. Is the coin then turned? Is the government of the United States suicidal? I think so. With this redefinition, the term “revolutionary suicide” is not as simplistic as it might seem initially. In coining the phrase, I took two knowns and combined them to make an unknown, a neoteric phrase in which the word “suicide” into an idea that has different dimensions and meanings, applicable to a new and complex situation. My prison experience is a good example of revolutionary suicide in action, for prison is a microcosm of the outside world. From the beginning of my sentence I defied the authorities by refusing to cooperate; a result, I was confined to “lock-up,” a solitary cell. As the months passed and I remained steadfast, they came to regard my behavior as suicidal. I was told that I would crack and break under the strain. I did not break, nor did I retreat from my position. I grew strong. If I had submitted to their exploitation and done their will, it would have killed my spirit and condemned me to a living death. To cooperate in prison meant reactionary suicide to me. While solitary confinement can be physically and mentally destructive, my actions were taken with an understanding of the risk. I had to suffer through a certain situation; by doing so, my resistance told them that I rejected all they stood for. Even though my struggle might have harmed my health, even killed me, I looked upon it as a way of raising the consciousness of the other inmates, as a contribution to the ongoing revolution. Only resistance can destroy the pressures that cause reactionary suicide. The concept of revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic. On the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope-reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring about change. Above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death and his life as one piece. Chairman Mao says that death comes to all us, but it varies in its significance: to die for the reactionary is lighter than a feather; to die for the revolution is heavier than Mount Tai.

Plan
Thus We demand that The United States federal government should substantially curtail its surveillance performed through fusion centers

The demmand
Contention 2 is the demand THE FBI IS CURRENTLY IN VIOLATION OF ITS OWN CODE TO INVESTIGATE COLOR OF LAW VIOLATIONS AND IS INSTEAD PROHIBITING THE EXERCISE OF FIRST AMENDMENT PROTEST CREATING A CHILLING EFFECT ON GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATIONS’ MOBILIZATION STEPHAN writer, artist, activist, and organizer in NYC  2k15 “The FBI’s Response To Another Killer Cop Set Free? More Surveillance of Protestors; May 24; FBI gives ominous press conference detailing their monitoring of #BlackLivesMatter; ALTERNET.ORG [] The FBI's Response To Another Killer Cop Set Free? More Surveillance of Protestors FBI gives ominous press conference detailing their monitoring of #BlackLivesMatter. On Thursday, FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano gave a [|**__press conference__**] about how his agency was preparing for the soon-to-be announced verdict for Michael Brelo, the white Cleveland Police Officer charged with two counts of voluntary homicide for shooting 49 bullets at two unarmed black victims, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, at least two of which were fatal shots for each victim and many of which were fired as he stood on the hood of their car. However, Giuliano mentioned nothing about the details of this case or how the FBI may be mandated to investigate the state agents involved depending on the outcome. Instead, he mentioned other activities in which the FBI was engaged in the lead up to the Brelo verdict that are far outside of the FBI’s mandates, and possibly in violation of those mandates, against U.S. citizens engaged in First Amendment activity. The FBI is charged with investigating [|**__Color of Law violations__**] to “prevent abuse of authority” by “law enforcement officers and other officials like judges.” In November of last year, the Department of Justice [|**__announced__**] that it had found the Cleveland Police Department guilty of “a pattern or practice of unreasonable and unnecessary use of force.” Considering this, one would think the FBI should have been preparing an investigation into Color of Law violations by Officer Brelo and Judge John O’Donnell, who yesterday announced his decision that Officer Brelo was guilty of no crime, before that verdict was announced. After all, police departments cannot establish patterns or practices of unreasonable and unnecessary use of force without the entire criminal justice system being complicit in such behavior. If the FBI had any such plan, Guiliano didn’t mention it at his press conference. What he did mention was that the FBI has been tracking the movements of people protesting these types of miscarriages of justice around the country, and that if the FBI became aware of any of those protesters going to Cleveland, they would tell the Cleveland Police : When asked about local law enforcement's concerns over protesters coming to Cleveland, Giuliano said, "It's outsiders who tend to stir the pot. If we have that intel we pass it directly on to the PD, we have worked with Ferguson. We've worked with Baltimore and we will work with the Cleveland PD on that very thing. That's what we bring to the game.” The fact that the FBI is tracking U.S. Citizens engaged in First Amendment activity is problematic, outside of their mandate, and possibly a violation of the law. Furthermore, the methods with which the FBI has lately been caught tracking U.S. Citizens, from warrantless wiretaps, to tracking devices on vehicles, to Stingray cellphone towers and planes have been ruled unconstitutional by an increasing number of courts. Most concerning was an additional piece of information that Giuliano provided without solicitation: Giuliano added that the FBI will be a significant support role for security when the [Republican National Convention] comes to Cleveland: "I feel very good that this will be a well protected event. I believe Cleveland will be very well prepared.” In addition to the widespread monitoring of #BlackLivesMatter, it appears the FBI has admitted to using these infiltration measures as a sort of testing ground for the upcoming Republican National Convention next year. Again, despite the throw-away assertions about how the FBI respects "lawful first amendment activity" (it's unclear what**un**lawful first amendment activity would be), their ethos is clear: prevent unrest at all costs and assuring Cleveland's largely white power classes that everything will be business as usual regardless of how many killer cops go free. It is now [|**__well documented__**] that the FBI embedded an informant named Brandon Darby in activist networks across the country in the lead up to the 2007 Republican National Convention in Michigan to gather intel on, and track the movements of, protesters : Mr. Darby carried out a thorough surveillance operation that dated back to at least 18 months before the Republican gathering…provided descriptions of meetings with the defendants and dozens of other people in Austin, Minneapolis and St. Paul. He wore recording devices at times, including a transmitter embedded in his belt during the convention. He also went to Minnesota with Mr. Crowder four months before the Republican gathering and gave detailed narratives to law enforcement authorities of several meetings they had with activists from New York, San Francisco, Montana and other places. Since then, within activist communities it has been considered a given that the FBI embeds informants within local organization in the run-up to large events such as the RNC, and leaves them in place long after these events have left town to collect information and to disrupt organizing efforts in other, more damaging ways. The chilling effect that spying has on First Amendment activity is hard to overstate. People who worked closely with Brandon Darby said that, “The emerging truth about Darby’s malicious involvement in our communities is heart-breaking and utterly ground-shattering.” The revelation that Darby was a federal informant sent shockwaves through activists circles across the country, not just because he had worked with many groups in various cities, but because it made the idea that other activists with whom we work may be informants, provocateurs, or undercovers that much more real. After the 2004 RNC was held in NYC, many activists believed that others activists were informants who were involved in protests exclusively to gather information and disrupt. Those who have been deeply involved in activism in NYC since then know that this created a toxic environment for organizing that was, at times, completely debilitating. By planting one confirmed informant and thousands of other seeds of doubt, the FBI effectively limited the ability of activists to peaceably gather and work with those with whom they would otherwise organize, severely restricting the power to plan effective political speech, a crucial component of a healthy democracy. This brings us to the last mandate that the FBI failed to fulfill and likely violated in their preparations for the Brelo verdict and the 2015 RNC as outlined by Giuliano: the FBI has a [|**__mandate__**] to “protect civil rights.” In this case, that would mean actively protecting citizens rights to travel between cities with the intent of engaging in First Amendment activity, not tracking their movements by legally dubious means that have a chilling effect on the First Amendment and conveying those movements to a police force that the Department of Justice has found guilty of a pattern or practice of unreasonable and unnecessary use of force. Anyone traveling to Cleveland to protest the Brelo verdict is seeking to gather in public space to reproach the government for civil rights grievances. For the FBI to interfere with civic act through their information-gathering techniques and by passing that information to police forces that cannot be trusted to use it without infringing on people’s First Amendment rights is a clear violation of the FBI’s own mandate. Had the FBI wanted to help keep the peace after the Brelo verdict, they could have lived up to their own mandates to publicly investigate the Cleveland criminal justice system for its Color of Law violations and to protect the people’s right to protest those violations against a proven, unnecessarily violent police force. THIS IS PARTICULARLY TRUE OF BLACK BODIES: THE FBI DISSEMINATES INFORMATION TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT ON BLACK ACTIVISTS DENYING THEIR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO PEACEFUL PROTEST WHICH REVEALS A LONG HISTORY OF ANTI-BLACK STATE VIOLENCE MOORE Senior Editor @ MIC and co-managing editor of the Feminist Wire  2k15 Darnell-; “Why Some Black Activist Believe They Are Being Watched by the Government; June <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">[] The home of activist Patrisse Cullors was raided twice last year by law enforcement in Los Angeles. During one raid, officers told Cullors they were looking for a suspect who had allegedly fled in the direction of her house. But neither time did Cullors believe the officers had a strong rationale for invading her home. Instead, Cullors told //Mic//, she believed the raids were devised by police in response to the public campaigning of [|Dignity and Power Now], a grassroots organization Cullors founded that advocates on behalf of incarcerated people in Los Angeles. She also believes similar surveillance methods are used to monitor many black activists today. "Surveillance is a huge part of the state's role. Surveillance has been used for a very long time, but some of the means, like social media account monitoring, are new," Cullors, who is also a cofounder of [|Black Lives Matter], told//Mic//. "Local enforcement surveils by tracking the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which allows law enforcement to show up at actions before they begin." //Mic// has reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department for comment. Recent statements by FBI deputy director Mark F. Giuliano may give credence assumptions like Cullors that black activists are being watched. During a press conference on May 21 prior to the acquittal of Michael Brelo, a white Cleveland police officer involved in the shooting death of two unarmed black people, Giuliano [|addressed] the potential for continued [|protests] in response to the verdict. "It's outsiders who tend to stir the pot," Giuliano said. "If we have that intel we pass it directly on to the [Cleveland Police Department]. We have worked with Ferguson, we've worked with Baltimore and we will work with the Cleveland PD on that very thing. That's what we bring to the game." //Mic// has reached out to the FBI's Office of Public Affairs for comment. **A history of black surveillance:** The "game" Giuliano is referencing — namely, the intricate workings of what some law enforcement units, like New York Police Department, [|**__employ__**] in response to counterterrorism and protests — is not novel. Black movements have historically been watched by the state, and black activists have long been surveilled in response to their organizing. Half a century ago, J. Edgar Hoover used his powers as the FBI director to [|spy on]black activists; as part of the counterterrorism [|COINTELPRO] program in the 1960s and '70s, the FBI tapped phones and embedded spies in organizations and movements, including the Black Panthers. It is also now well-known that Martin Luther King, Jr. was [|extensively monitored]by the FBI. "American history explodes with examples of state surveillance of black people and black activism," Harvard University historian Tim McCarthy told //Mic//. "From the [|**__Fugitive Slave Law__**] and prohibitions on abolitionist 'propaganda' to black codes and wiretapping and the militarization of the police, the state has always employed diverse mechanisms of control in a deliberate effort to derail the long black freedom struggle. "Even the notion of U.S. citizenship itself has been a site of policing based principally on race, from the birth of the nation to the age of Obama." FBI files on black activists like [|James Baldwin], [|Lorraine Hansberry], [|Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)], [|Lucille Clifton], [|W.E.B DuBois] and [|Louise Thompson Patterson] have recently been made public, as part of the FB Eyes Digital Archive. But despite the [|**__preponderance of evidence__**] regarding state [|**__surveillance of activists__**] in the past, it can be difficult to prove the existence of actions many activists assume are taking place in the present. Potentially supporting their claims, however, are current surveillance protocols of security firms and local police departments. In March, for example, the[| //Intercept//] obtained documents revealing that security members at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, monitored local Black Lives Matter activists by using a fake Facebook account to "befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge." Mall of America has previously [|declined to comment] on the Facebook monitoring. //Mic// has reached out to Mall of America's public affairs department for comment. While unconfirmed, measures that some activists assume are currently taking place, such as using activists as informants in movements, have been reported before. The [|**//__New York Times__//**] reported the FBI used an Austin-based activist as an informant to provide details about potential protests leading up to the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota, for example, though the FBI has yet to confirm or deny the allegation. **Personal stories:** Some activists across the country, such as Ash-Lee Henderson, a black organizer from Tennessee, have personal testimonies of surveillance. Last year, Henderson participated in a series of direct actions in her hometown of Chattanooga led by [|Concerned Citizens for Justice], a grassroots organization that fights for black liberation and an end to police crimes, criminalization and mass incarceration. The actions were designed to bring attention to various forms of state-sanctioned violence, including police abuse, affecting black people across the country. Henderson was arrested while participating in a protest on the National Day of Protest to End Police Brutality in October 2014. After her arrest, she recalled learning about a private Facebook group created by police officers in Tennessee and those supportive of police called "Police Lives Matter." "Police and their family members were constantly making threats and mean-spirited jokes [aimed at activists] on their page," Henderson told //Mic//. She said one police officer made a meme of her, which meant her image had been shared among other officers and that they would now know her by name and likeness. She obtained another meme of a different image of herself shortly after, and became more convinced that activists were being watched. Henderson suspects she'd been targeted for speaking publicly about police abuse — a suspicion exacerbated by a series of events following her arrest. "During a day of action in December, my mother and 3-year-old niece were followed by the police from our church to my house (about a 30-minute drive), because they were in my car." Henderson said she believed "the police were attempting to see where our next action was. In the month of December alone, members of our leadership team were pulled over and harassed by police officers at least once a week in two different states." The Chattanooga Police Department told //Mic//, "While we do not routinely follow specific hashtags, we do review all forms of publicly available information when current or anticipated events warrant it. We will continue to make every attempt to stay informed of potential exercises of free speech in an effort to supply activists, marchers, organizers and citizens with a safe environment to express their views." **Interference:** The public must consider the long history of state surveillance and suppression of black movements as a specific problem of anti-black state violence and racial profiling. At stake is the extent to which state surveillance measures, whether they mean social media monitoring or following specific activists' actions, violate activists' [|**__First Amendment Rights__**], particularly the right to peacefully protest. Keegan Stephan [|writes] at //AlterNet//, "For the FBI to interfere with civic act- through their information-gathering techniques and by passing that information to police forces that cannot be trusted to use it without infringing on people's First Amendment rights is a clear violation of the FBI's own mandate." Despite potential surveillance, activists are determined to continue their work. Their continued quest for liberation should encourage contemporary activists following their example. "These allegations will not curtail the movement and only provide further evidence of the embedded institutional inequities," Monica Dennis, an organizer with Black Lives Matter in New York City, told //Mic//. "Furthermore, our movements are rooted in the black radical traditions of resilience and creative resistance which simply means we are capable of quickly adapting and shifting despite external efforts to disrupt our organizing." The FBI’s surveillance structures are designed to cement structural racism—predictive policing disproportionately targets black people and depends upon racial profiling—the media’s focus on the white side of the story causes black injustice to remain invisible. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 8pt;">Malkia Amala-co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, a national network of 175 organizations working to ensure media access, rights, and representation for marginalized communities; //Black America’s State of Surveillance//; THE PROGRESSIVE; April; [] THANKS JP; DB LOVES YA Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didn’t get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. My mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mother’s visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. It’s time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answer—it may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: “2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology that would’ve been unheard of even a few years ago.” Predictive policing, also known as “Total Information Awareness,” is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to “preempt” crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is “Broken Windows.” This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimes—like selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling—indiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices. As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Bratton’s aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which //the FBI has now rolled out as a national system,// to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used “suspicious activity reports”—described as “official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody who’s ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true //. Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to racial and religious profiling—it relies on it//. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the //dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color.// One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by//Wired//in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as “a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, it’s a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century. We can help black lives matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers. Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only those that ain’t been heard yet. Let’s birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century create equity and justice for all—so all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more. - See more at: [|http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance#sthash.5PHCKHgM.dpuf] FEDERAL SURVEILLANCE AGAINST PROTEST GROUPS IS LARGELY STRUCTURED WITHIN FUSION CENTERS ACLU 7 – American Civil Liberties Union, a national, non-profit organization dedicated to upholding constitutional rights, over 500,000 members, and a legal assistance provider. (ACLU, “What’s wrong with Fusion Centers?” 2007, [| https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/privacy/fusioncenter_20071212.pdf)//RP] One problem with fusion centers is that they exist in a no-man’s land between the feder- al government and the states, where policy and oversight is often uncertain and open to manipulation. There appears to be at least some conscious effort to circumvent public oversight by obscuring who is really in charge of these fusion centers and what laws apply to them. In struggling to answer the seemingly simple question of who is in charge of fusion centers at a recent congressional hearing, a Department of Homeland Security official could only offer that “fusion centers are in charge of fusion centers.”16 One ana- lyst reportedly described his fusion center as the “wild west,” where officials were free to “use a variety of technologies before ‘politics’ catches up and limits options.”17 Federal involvement in the centers continues to grow. Most fusion centers developed as an extension of existing law enforcement intelligence units and as a result they have sometimes been described as “state police intelligence units on steroids.”18 But exactly who is providing those steroids is key to determining who will control them in the future. Fusion centers are still primarily staffed and funded by state authorities, but: The federal government is playing an essential role in the development and net- working of fusion centers by providing financial assistance, sponsoring security clearances, and providing personnel, guidance and training.19 The FBI has over 200 agents and analysts assigned to 36 fusion centers and plans to increase this commitment in the future.20 As of December 2006, the DHS alone has provided over $380 million in federal funds to support fusion centers.21 At least one fusion center, the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center (MCAC), was initiated and led by federal authorities and was only recently turned over to the control of state officials. Thirty percent of ostensibly state-controlled fusion centers are physically located within federal agency workspace.22 Federal authorities are happy to reap the benefits of working with the fusion centers without officially taking ownership. Fusion center supporters argue that the federal gov- ernment can use the “800,000 plus law enforcement officers across the country” to “function as the ‘eyes and ears’ of an extended national security community .”23 Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, while denying that the federal government had any intention of controlling fusion centers, declared that “what we want to do is not create a single [fusion center], but a network of [centers] all across the country.” 24 FEDERAL FUNDING IS KEY TO FUSION CENTERS FUNCTIONING AT THE HEART OF DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">The plan SOLVES as fusion centers have generated controversy over loss of privacy and the chill of free expression due to OVERREACH that is based on clever legal strategies to avoid extant strictures on information sharing that CIRCUMVENT traditional accountability measures. The BLAME GAME between Federal and State law enforcement has allowed Congress to fund FUSION CENTERS to the tune of 500 million in federal grants Citron et al. 11 [Danielle Keats, professor at University of Maryland school of Law, Frank Pasquale, professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, “Network Accountability for the Domestic Intelligence Apparatus”, http://goo.gl/Edpe8k, Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 62, 1442, 2011] MG A new domestic intelligence network has made vast amounts of data available to federal and state agencies and law enforcement officials. //The network is anchored by "fusion centers," novel sites of intergovernmental collaboration that generate and share intelligence and information//. Several fusion centers have generated controversy for engaging in extraordinary measures that place citizens on watch lists, invade citizens' privacy , and chill free expression. In addition to eroding civil liberties, fusion center overreach has resulted in wasted resources without concomitant gains in security. While many scholars have assumed that this network represents a trade-off between security and civil liberties, our study of fusion centers suggests these goals are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. Too often, fusion centers' structure has been based on clever legal strategies for avoiding extant strictures on information sharing, rather than on objective analysis of terror threats. The "information sharing environment" created by fusion centers has short-circuited traditional modes of agency accountability. Our twentieth-century model of agency accountability cannot meaningfully address twenty-first-century agency coordination. A new concept of accountability - "network accountability" - is needed to address the shortcomings of fusion centers. Network accountability has technical, legal, and institutional dimensions. Technical standards can render data exchange between agencies in the network better subject to review. Legal redress mechanisms can speed the correction of inaccurate or inappropriate information. A robust strategy is necessary to institutionalize these aspects of network accountability. Nevertheless, domestic intelligence is daily generated and shared. [|__n5__] Federal agencies, including the DHS , gather information in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials in what Congress has deemed the "information sharing environment" ("ISE"). [|n6] The ISE is essentially a network, with hubs known as "fusion centers" whose federal and state analysts gather and share data and intelligence on a wide range of threats. The network's architects have assured congressional panels, journalists, and concerned citizens that interagency communications accord with relevant laws and that information gathering is targeted and focused. [|n7] They claim that fusion centers raise few new privacy concerns, [|n8] and that any privacy problems are well in hand. [|n9] They reason that any [*1444] given fusion center employee must simply follow the privacy and civil liberties policy of his or her employer - be it a local, state, or national agency.[|n10] DHS and local fusion center leaders claim their network only menaces criminals and terrorists, not ordinary citizens. [|n11] Unfortunately, a critical mass of abuses and failures at fusion centers over the past few years makes it impossible to accept these assurances at face value. Fusion centers facilitate a domestic intelligence network that collapses traditional distinctions between law enforcement and foreign wars, between federal and state authorities, and between government surveillance and corporate data practices. By operating at the seams of state and federal laws, they circumvent traditional accountability measures. Inadequate oversight of fusion centers has led to significant infringements on civil liberties. Years after they were initiated, advocates of fusion centers have failed to give more than a cursory account of the benefits they provide. Were fusion center abuses consistently associated with anti-terror accomplishments, the new ISE might pose a tragic, yet necessary, choice between security and liberty. However, a critical mass of cases, explored in detail in Part I, suggests that the lack of oversight of fusion centers is both eroding civil liberties and wasting resources. Consider two recent cases. In 2008, Minnesota law enforcement, working with the state's fusion center, engaged in intelligence-led policing to identify potential threats to the upcoming Republican National Convention ("RNC"). [|__n12__] Police deployed infiltrators to report on political groups and tapped into various groups' information exchanges. [|n13] The fusion center spent more than 1000 hours analyzing potential threats to the RNC. [|n14] A fusion center report, distributed to more than 1300 law enforcement officers, identified bottled water, first-aid supplies, computers, and pamphlets as potential evidence of threats. [|n15] Another report warned law enforcement that demonstrators would "collect and stockpile items at various locations ... . Anything that seems out of place [*1445] for its location could indicate the stockpiling of supplies to be used against first responders." [|n16] Because the fusion center had advised police to be on the lookout for feces and urine that protestors might attempt to throw during clashes on the street, police pulled over a bus after noticing that it contained two five-gallon buckets in the rear. [|n17] What they found was chicken feed, notfeces. [|n18] Days later, at the convention, police arrested 800 people: Most of the charges were dropped or downgraded once prosecutors reviewed the police allegations and activity. [|n19]//Ginned up to confront a phantom terror threat, the fusion center-led operations did little more than disrupt a peaceful political protest//. Fusion center overreach is not limited to Minnesota or notable events like those involving RNC. Over a nineteen-month period in 2004 and 2005, Maryland state police conducted surveillance of human rights groups, peace activists, and death penalty opponents. [|n20] As a result, fifty-three nonviolent political activists were classified as "terrorists ," including two Catholic nuns and a Democratic candidate for local office. [|n21] A Maryland fusion center shared the erroneous terrorist classifications with federal drug enforcement and terrorist databases, as well as with the National Security Administration (NSA). [|n22] The ISE has yet to provide a systematic redress mechanism to remove misinformation from databases spread throughout the networked environment or to address the stigma that can result from misclassifications. Had the ACLU of Maryland not fortuitously discovered the fusion center's activities in connection with an open records request, the political activists might have remained on these watch lists. In response to these and other similar incidents, Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, argued that fusion centers conceive the business of gathering and sharing intelligence as "synonymous with monitoring and disparaging political dissent and association protected by the First Amendment." [|n23] A fusion center official confirmed Fein's concern by noting: [*1446] You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act. [|n24] If a domestic intelligence agency conducted such outrageous surveillance of innocent political activists, ordinary institutions of oversight familiar from administrative law - such as judicial review and cost-benefit analysis - could directly address the problem. [|n25] Yet misdirected surveillance remains a concern, because it is unclear who exactly is responsible for these abuses - state and local police or federal funders of fusion centers? The structure of the ISE poses important new challenges to administrative law, a body of law built to address actions of individual agencies rather than the interactions of a network of agencies. Since it focuses on individual agencies, traditional administrative law is ill-equipped to assure a network's accountability. Participants in fusion centers have often attempted to shift blame for their shortcomings. DHS officials insist that state and local authorities are ultimately responsible for fusion center activities, even as they distribute grants and guidelines that shape fusion center activity. [|__n26__] As state and municipal budgets contract due to declining tax revenues and fiscal retrenchment, local officials may feel pressed to feed information and find threats in order to maintain the flow of federal funding. There are many reasons to worry about the types of influence and information exchange this relationship betokens. Unlike centralized programs to which the privacy and civil liberties community could rapidly respond,fusion centers are diffuse and difficult to monitor. More a network than an institution, fusion centers have so far evaded oversight from watchdogs focused on traditional law enforcement institutions. [|__n27__] This Article examines the new ISE, in which privacy invasions, chilled speech, and costly distractions from core intelligence missions increasingly emanate from dysfunctional transactions within networks of agencies rather than from any particular entity acting unilaterally. We argue that basic administrative law principles of due process should apply just as forcefully to agency interactions as they do to agency actions. Certain exchanges of information between agencies should be monitored, even in a general environment of openness and collaboration. [*1447] The argument proceeds as follows: Part I offers a comprehensive description of fusion centers, based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources and litigation materials. Part II critiques the current operations of fusion centers, concluding that the centers have eroded privacy and civil liberties without concomitant gains in security. Fortunately, officials at the DHS (the main agency funding fusion centers) have begun to realize the scope of these problems, as we describe in Part III.A. They are even beginning to recognize one of the central arguments of this piece: that liberty and security are mutually reinforcing, because nearly all the problematic abuses at fusion centers are distractions from their central anti-crime and anti-terror missions. However, there are still critical shortcomings in DHS oversight of fusion centers, as we demonstrate in III.B: The agency is trying to apply a twentieth-century model of agency accountability to twenty-first-century interagency coordination. The solution, we argue in Part IV, is network accountability: technical and legal standards that render interactions between the parts of the ISE subject to review and correction. [|n28] We advance protocols for auditing fusion center activities, including "write-once, read-many" technology and data integrity standards. Legal redress mechanisms for inaccurate or inappropriate targeting can be built on this foundation of data. Finally, in Part V, we promote standards of interagency governance designed to hold the ISE accountable. Without objective performance standards, fusion centers may consume an ever larger share of our security and law enforcement budget without demonstrating their worth. Advances in interagency governance in other fields suggest new paths for network accountability in the context of fusion centers. As they are presently run, fusion centers all but guarantee further inclusion of innocents on watch lists and wasteful investigation of activists with no connections to crime or terrorism. [|n29] Fusion centers' actions inconvenience both civilians and law enforcers, unfairly tarnish reputations, and deter legitimate dissent. In this Article, we propose a framework for identifying and preventing future abuses. Principles of open government inform our analysis throughout. A policy of de facto total information awareness by the government should be complemented [*1448] by increasing accountability - specifically, the network accountability we define and defend in this Article. I. Domestic Surveillance Partnerships: Fusion Centers and Beyond After 9/11, policymakers argued that government agencies could have prevented the attacks if they had "connected the dots" by synthesizing and analyzing available information. [|n30] Accused of incompetence, officials defended themselves by arguing that law prevented cooperation among domestic law enforcement officials and military and foreign intelligence personnel. [|n31] In response, Congress established an "information sharing environment" that would anticipate threats and improve the exchange of "terrorism information" among all levels of government, tribal entities, and the private sector. [|n32] To orchestrate the ISE, the Department of Homeland Security, along with the Department of Justice (DOJ), coordinates with state, local, and regional fusion centers to share, access, and collaborate on terrorism-related information. [|n33] According to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, fusion centers play a crucial role in "analyzing intelligence ... sharing information, getting information out, and receiving information from" the public and private sectors. [|__n34__] This Part describes the central role that fusion centers play in our domestic surveillance apparatus. [*1449] A. Fusion Center O0perations State and federal law enforcement rarely shared information and intelligence before 9/11. [|__n35__] Since then, //Congress has allocated over $ 500 million in grants to fusion centers to encourage collaboration//. [|n36] Fusion centers "co-locate under one roof" representatives of state and federal agencies to "collect and share" information and intelligence. [|n37]Although states and localities run fusion centers, the federal government provides additional analysts, often from the DHS, //the FBI//, the National Guard, and the Coast Guard.[|n38] Private entities have close ties with fusion centers as well. In DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's view, private firms "need to be prepared and trained and co-located" at fusion centers. [|n39] Increasingly, this has meant that private firms send employees to work at fusion centers. [|n40] A Boeing intelligence analyst, for instance, is employed full-time at the Washington Joint Analytical Center ("WJAC"). [|n41] Boeing enjoys "real-time access to information from the fusion centers," while the center obtains Boeing's "mature intelligence capabilities." [|n42] According to a [*1450] Boeing executive, the company hopes "to set an example of how private owners of critical infrastructure can get involved in such centers to generate and receive criminal and anti-terrorism intelligence." [|n43] Starbucks, Amazon, and Alaska Airlines have expressed interest in placing analysts at the WJAC. [|n44] B. Core Functions Originally conceived as part of the country's anti-terrorism efforts, fusion centers now typically devote themselves to the detection and prevention of "all hazards, all crimes, all threats." [|__n45__] Their central functions involve intelligence gathering and information sharing. Fusion centers produce operational and strategic intelligence. [|n46] In their operational role, they generate analyses on particular suspects or crimes. [|n47] In their strategic role, fusion centers use predictive data-mining tools that search datasets to identify crime trends and patterns. [|n48] For example, the Dallas fusion center analyzes "vast quantities of information" to "understand crime patterns and identify individuals and locations that represent the highest threat to the community." [|n49] [*1451] Fusion centers' guiding principle is "the more data, the better." [|n50] As fusion center officials note, "There is never ever enough information ... . That's what post-9/11 is about." [|n51] To that end, fusion centers access public-and private-sector databases of traffic tickets, property records, identity-theft reports, drivers' license listings, immigration records, tax information, public-health data, criminal justice sources, car rentals, credit reports, postal and shipping services, utility bills, gaming, insurance claims, data-broker dossiers, and the like. [|n52] Fusion centers mine information posted online [|n53] and footage from video cameras installed by law enforcement, transportation, and corporate security departments. [|n54] For instance, the Port of Long Beach's fusion center analyzes real-time videos from public and private cameras deployed at truck sites, warehouses, and rail corridors. [|n55] An Arizona fusion center hopes to use "facial recognition technology" so that fusion centers can analyze surveillance tapes. [|n56] Fusion centers assess tips from citizens [|n57] and suspicious activity reports ("SARs"). [|n58] Without guidelines, and with rampant abuse occurring, the only remaining option is to defund Fusion Centers. ACLU no date but cites 20 12 – American Civil Liberties Union, a national, non-profit organization dedicated to upholding constitutional rights, over 500,000 members, and a legal assistance provider. (ACLU, “More About Fusion Centers,” 2012, [] Fusion centers are also the focal point for growing [|suspicious activity reporting] programs that encourage public reporting of innocuous everyday activities. The Colorado Information and Analysis Center even [|produced] a fear-mongering public service announcement asking the public to report innocuous behaviors such as photography, note-taking, drawing and collecting money for charity as "warning signs" of terrorism. The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute published a [|survey] of fusion center employees in September 2012, which characterized suspicious activity reports as “white noise” that impeded effective intelligence analysis. There is some good news, however. The 2010 DHS Homeland Security Grant Program established a [|requirement] that fusion centers certify that privacy and civil liberties protections are in place in order to use DHS grant funds. This is the first time DHS has acknowledged its authority to regulate fusion center activities and it coincides with the [|establishment] of a new DHS Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office to oversee DHS support to fusion centers. While these are only small steps, they are important advances toward establishing an effective governance and oversight structure over fusion centers. But reforms are not taking place fast enough and fusion centers and the risks they pose only continue to grow. In October 2012, the Senate Homeland Security Committee Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a highly critical [|report] on fusion centers, revealing that public officials’ claims about their effectiveness were not accurate, that federal funds designated for fusion centers were not properly accounted for, and that intelligence analysts and reports officers lacked sufficient training and often produced reports that infringed on civil rights. In response, the conservative Heritage Foundation called for [|cutting back] the number of fusion centers. With ample evidence of abuse, the time has come for Congress and your local government representatives to act by cutting off funds to fusion centers that do not have a narrowly-tailored law enforcement mission, strict guidelines to protect Americans’ privacy, and independent oversight to prevent abuse.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">CYRIL ****<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 8pt;">founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice ****<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">2k15 **

The Framing
Predictions can never be accurate or a neutral science- psychological biases, statistics, and arbitrary connections allow infinite equally probable determinations It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business —people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables— are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones. “Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist —he teaches at Berkeley— and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate. Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys , who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices. Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.” People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “ Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’. The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong. Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error. The expert-prediction game is not much different. When television pundits make predictions, the more ingenious their forecasts the greater their cachet. An arresting new prediction means that the expert has discovered a set of interlocking causes that no one else has spotted, and that could lead to an outcome that the conventional wisdom is ignoring. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,” these experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, because long shots are their business. More serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious. Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan. Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes. We have no idea today how tomorrow’s invasion of a foreign land is going to go; after the invasion, we can actually persuade ourselves that we knew all along. The result seems inevitable, and therefore predictable. Tetlock found that, consistent with this asymmetry, experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock’s researchers, they sometimes became defensive. And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and y occurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less. The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one. It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says: Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess. A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out. Porush establishes the link between narrative-as-history and chaos theory by recognising that before chaos theory, a view of human experience based on the metaphor of the Butterfly Effect was ‘dismissed as pertinent only to the realm of accident, coincidence, kismet, and messy human affairs’.35 Now however, chaos theory suggests that unpredictable or nonlinear events are not only the product of human experience but are also a part of ‘reality’. Stephen H. Kellert contends that historical events can be seen to unfold as the Butterfly Effect suggests because history teems ‘with examples of small events that led to momentous and long-lasting changes in the course of human affairs .’36 Porush and Kellert share this belief with physicists like Marcelo Alonso and Gottfried Mayer-Kress. Alonso states that because ‘social systems are not linear, certain local fluctuations (inventions, discoveries, revolutions, wars, [and the] emergence of political leaders etc.) may result in major changes’ .37 Mayer-Kress also uses the Butterfly Effect as a historical metaphor to argue that nation states can be described as chaotic systems, and that in such systems small events such as terrorist bombings or minor military deployments can act as catalysts, resulting in all-out nuclear war .38 Chaos theory thus appears to have direct historiographical implications. One consequence of chaos for historiography is that a linear model of causality can no longer be used to determine the causes and effects of historical events. A postmodernist historiography demonstrates the ineffectiveness of linear causality, which cannot take into account the inherent discontinuity and indeterminism of historical events. A new historiography that relies on the techniques of literary criticism to achieve its deconstruction of historical narratives is developing. This postmodernist historiography takes nonlinear causality into account, and acknowledges that a single historical text cannot represent the whole of an event.39 Because of this, any piece of information within the text is considered to be significant, and no detail, however irrelevant or unimportant it appears, can be overlooked. A postmodern historiography accepts that detail within the historical text is crucial and tiny details or fragments of information may have great relevance and importance to the event being studied. William V. Spanos calls these details ‘minute particulars’, and argues that knowing the minute particulars of a historical event can make a difference to the analysis of that event.40 Ankersmit argues that the postmodernist historiographer must be ‘capable of linking a small, insignificant detail in one part of the work he investigates to an apparently unrelated detail in another part of that work’ in order to gain information and meaning out of a historical event recorded in a text or a series of texts.41 Empirical evidence is irrelevant- interpretations of history to fit current society wildly swing conclusions (William, business consultant, The Fortune Sellers, p. 199) //History does not repeat itself.// The evolution of society is continually new, novel, and full of surprises, with no recurring cycles. Wars, revolutions, trends, and movements are as different from one another as snowflakes. “One must expect that events of an intrinsically new character will emerge ,” wrote Popper. “ Every single event in social life can be said to be new, in a certain sense. It may be classified with other events; it may even resemble those events in certain aspects; but it will always be unique in a very definite way…Belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition .” Prioritize structural violence- Extinction has been the historical justification to maintaining the murderous status quo Omolade 84 (Barbara, sociologist and educator, dean at calvin college, women of color and the nuclear holocaust, WSQ v12 n2, LB) To raise these issues effectively, the movement for nuclear disarmament must overcome its reluctance to speak in terms of power, of institutional racism, and imperialist military terror. The issues of nuclear disarmament and peace have been mystified because they have been placed within a doomsday frame which separates these issues from other ones, saying, " ** How can we talk about struggles against racism, poverty, and exploitation when there will be no world after they drop the bombs ** ?" The struggle for peace cannot be separated from, nor considered more sacrosanct than, other struggles concerned with human life and change. In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of nuclear war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of African people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The same federal report also comments on the destruction of urban housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war, as well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course, for people of color the world over, starvation is already a common problem, when, for example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the housing of people of color throughout the world's urban areas is already blighted and inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the world as we knew it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it, and rebuld it in our, own image. The "death culture" we live in has convinced many to be more concerned with death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for "survival at any cost" than to struggle for liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts of war, nuclear holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools, our families, and our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We must fight as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in people's wars in China, in Cuba, in GuineaBissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and in countless daily encounters with landlords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are not abstractions, but the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of our people. Even if consequentialism is generally good, racism must be a moral side constraint – some immoral actions must never be allowed no matter what the consequences are <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Many people feel, without being able to say much more about it, that something has gone seriously wrong when certain measures are admitted into consideration in the first place. The fundamental mistake is made there, rather than at the point where the overall benefit of some monstrous measure is judged to outweigh its disadvantages <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">, and it is adopted. An account of absolutism might help us to understand this. If it is not allowable to //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">do // certain things <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">, such as killing unarmed prisoners or civilians, then no argument about what will happen if one does not do them can show that doing them would be all right <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. Absolutism does not, of course, require one to ignore the consequences of one’s acts. It operates as a limitation on utlitiarian reasoning, not as a substitute for it <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. An absolutist can be expected to try to maximize good and minimize evil, so long as this does not <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> require him to transgress an absolute prohibition <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> like that against murder. But when such a conflict occurs, the prohibition takes complete precedence over any consideration of consequences <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. Some of the results of this view are clear enough. It requires us to forgo certain potentially useful military measures, such as the slaughter of hostages and prisoners or indiscriminate attempts to reduce the enemy population by starvation, epidemic infectious diseases like anthrax and bubonic plague, or mass incineration. It means that we cannot deliberate on whether such measures are justified by the fact that they will avert still greater evils, for <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> as intentional measures they cannot be justified in terms of any consequences whatever <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. Someone <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> unfamiliar with the events of this century might imagine that utilitarian arguments <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">, or arguments of national interest, would suffice to deter measures of this sort. But it has become evident that such considerations are insufficient to prevent the adoption and employment of enormous antipopulation weapons once their use is considered a serious moral possibility. The same is true of the piecemeal wiping out of <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> rural civilian populations <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> in airborne antiguerrilla warfare. Once the door is opened to calculations of utility and national interest, the usual speculations about the future of freedom, peace, and economic prosperity can be brought to bear to ease the consciences of those responsible for a certain number of charred babies <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">.
 * MENAND 2005** (Louis, “Everybody’s an Expert,” The New Yorker, December 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1?currentPage=1)
 * Scenario planning is inherently flawed- random events throw predictions completely off course**
 * WARD 1996** (Brian, “The Chaos of History: Notes Towards a Postmodernist Historiography,” Limina, Vol 2, http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/previous/volumes_15/volume_2?f=73934)
 * SHERDEN 1998**
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Nagel 1979 **<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> (Thomas, Philosopher, Mortal Questions, p 58-59)

= Fugitivity Affirmative (Text incoming still working on it email me if you want to be sure this is the general gist) =

1AC Fugitivity
====The history of domestic surveillance is inseparable from the history of slavery. Lists of human cargo, plantation inventories, and diaries were used by masters to govern slaves, to impose domination onto unwilling bodies. Disciplinary power utilizing information technology such as slave patrols or wanted posters functioned to create a racially stratified security system, imposing a compulsory visibility upon the black body as communicated through the literacy of the White body—it is from this that contemporary policing and surveillance arises. Simone Browne, in 2012, explains that…==== Browne 2012 – PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; "Race and Surveillance" "Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies"; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 ~|~| NDW) According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to AND looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness".

Vote affirmative to endorse fugitivity.
====Fugitivity is not simply opposition to or transgression of the social but, rather, functions in a zone of indeterminacy that disrupts the relationship between knowledge and resistance—it is through this space of unintelligibility that blackness can find social life within social death. …==== Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2008 (Fred, "The Case of Blackness," Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 178-179, ProjectMUSE, IC)

**gender modified
I'll begin with a thought that doesn't come from any of these zones, though it's felt in them, strangely, since it posits the being of, and being in, these zones as an ensemble of specific impossibilities: As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [person]. For not only must the black man [person] be black; he [they] must be black in relation to the white man [person]. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [person] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [person].1 This passage, and the ontological (absence of) drama it represents, leads us to a set of fundamental questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between the exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? What's the relation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of discovering for ontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic, and philosophical derangements that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of life makes such discovery possible as well as necessary? Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a kind of non-completeness, if not absence, of a worldview. Perhaps that noncompleteness signals an originarily criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping—a certain reticence at the ongoing advent of the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept—or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing, taking and keeping—as epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity. Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential, anoriginal impurity—the flaw that accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations.2 What's at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.3 This exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives Fanon's work, his slow approach to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or posed in the break, in a certain intransitive evasion of crossing, in the wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaning—or, perhaps too "trans-literally," the (plain[-sung]) sense—of things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects.

The debate space is the academy where the fugitivity of the affirmatives hides in plain sight
====Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, and Harney, Singapore Management University professor, 2004 (Fred and Stefano, "The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses," Social Text, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, p. 101-102, ProjectMUSE, IC)==== "To the university I'll steal, and there I'll steal," to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

====Fugitivity arises out of the inadequacy of society in its attempts to calculate and enframe blackness—while blackness is constitutive of societal relations and is always-already criminal, it doesn't bar the creation of undercommon spaces of disorder====

Moten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2008 (Fred, "The Case of Blackness," Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 186-188, ProjectMUSE, IC)
So I'm interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things (which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and objects), the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constant—a destructive, healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the thing (Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be imputed, the impure, degraded, manufactured (in) human who moves only in response to inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same time, this dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction to Fanon's protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential. Indeed, as the ontological is moving within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood that what is now meant by ontological requires special elucidation. What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been (toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have had to have operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers diaspora as an open set—or as an openness disruptive of the very idea of set—of accumulative and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without origin, leavings that continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they constantly bespeak the previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose full implications will have never been fully explorable.12 What Fanon's pathontological refusal of blackness leaves unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced by the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem. As Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say, "Black(ness) is a country" (and a sex) (that is not one).13 Stolen life disorders positive value just as surely as it is not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction. So if we cannot simply give an account of things that, in the very fugitivity and impossibility that is the essence of their existence, resist accounting, how do we speak of the lived experience of the black? What limits are placed on such speaking when it comes from the position of the black, but also what constraints are placed on the very concept of lived experience, particularly in its relation to the black when black social life is interdicted? Note that the interdiction exists not only as a function of what might be broadly understood as policy but also as a function of an epistemological consensus broad enough to include Fanon, on the one hand, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on the other—encompassing formulations that might be said not only to characterize but also to initiate and continually re-initialize the philosophy of the human sciences. In other words, the notion that there is no black social life is part of a set of variations on a theme that include assertions of the irreducible pathology of black social life and the implication that (non-pathological) social life is what emerges by way of the exclusion of the black or, more precisely, of blackness. But what are we to make of the pathological here? What are the implications of a social life that, on the one hand, is not what it is and, on the other hand, is irreducible to what it is used for? This discordant echo of one of Theodor W. Adorno's most infamous assertions about jazz implies that black social life reconstitutes the music that is its phonographic.14 That music, which Miles Davis calls "social music," to which Adorno and Fanon gave only severe and partial hearing, is of interdicted black social life operating on frequencies that are disavowed—though they are also amplified—in the interplay of sociopathological and phenomenological description. How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality? Deeper still, what are we to make of the fact of a sociality that emerges when lived experience is distinguished from fact, in the fact of life that is implied in the very phenomenological gesture/analysis within which Fanon asserts black social life as, in all but the most minor ways, impossible? How is it that the off harmony of life, sociality, and blackness is the condition of possibility of the claim that there is no black social life? Does black life, in its irreducible and impossible sociality and precisely in what might be understood as its refusal of the status of social life that is refused it, constitute a fundamental danger—an excluded but immanent disruption—to social life? What will it have meant to embrace this matrix of im/possibility, to have spoken of and out of this suspension? What would it mean to dwell on or in minor social life? This set of questions is imposed upon us by Fanon. At the same time, and in a way that is articulated most clearly and famously by W. E. B. Du Bois, this set of questions is the position, which is also to say the problem, of blackness.

Moten 8 Fred, OG, Member of the Undercommons. "Black optimism/Black operation". PMLA, October 2008. Pgs. 1743–1747. PWoods.
My field is black studies. In that field, I'm trying to hoe the hard row of beautiful things. I try to study them and I also try to make them. Elizabeth Alexander says "look for color everywhere." For me, color + beauty = blackness which is not but nothing other than who, and deeper still, where I am. This shell, this inhabitation, this space, this garment—that I carry with me on the various stages of my flight from the conditions of its making—is a zone of chromatic saturation troubling any ascription of impoverishment of any kind however much it is of, which is to say in emergence from, poverty (which is, in turn, to say in emergence from or as an aesthetics or a poetics of poverty). The highly cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency, is the open secret that has been the preoccupation of black studies. But it must be said now—and I'll do so by way of a cool kind of accident that has been afforded us by the danger and saving power that is power point—that there is a strain of black studies that strains against black studies and its object, the critique of western civilization, precisely insofar as it disavows its aim (blackness or the thinking of blackness, which must be understood in what some not so strange combination of Nahum Chandler and Martin Heidegger might call its paraontological distinction from black people). There was a moment in Rebecca's presentation when the image of a black saxophonist (I think, but am not sure, that it was the great Chicago musician Fred Anderson) is given to us as a representative, or better yet a denizen (as opposed to citizen), of the "space of the imagination." What's cool here, and what is also precisely the kind of thing that makes practitioners of what might be called the new black studies really mad, is this racialization of the imagination which only comes fully into its own when it is seen in opposition, say, to that set of faces or folks who constituted what I know is just a part of Lauren's tradition of Marxist historiographical critique. That racialization has a long history and begins to get codified in a certain Kantian discourse, one in which the imagination is understood to "produce nothing but nonsense," a condition that requires that "its wings be severely clipped by the imagination." What I'm interested in, but which I can only give a bare outline of, is a two-fold black operation—one in which Kant moves toward something like a thinking of the imagination as blackness that fully recognizes the irreducible desire for this formative and deformative, necessarily supplemental necessity; one in which black studies ends up being unable to avoid a certain sense of itself as a Kantian, which is to say anti-Kantian and ante-Kantian, endeavor. The new black studies, or to be more precise, the old-new black studies, since every iteration has had this ambivalence at its heart, can't help but get pissed at the terrible irony of its irreducible Kantianness precisely because it works so justifiably hard at critiquing that racialization of the imagination and the racialized opposition of imagination (in its lawless, nonsense producing freedom) and critique that turns out to be the condition of possibility of the critical philosophical project. There is a voraciously instrumental anti-essentialism, powered in an intense and terrible way by good intentions, that is the intellectual platform from which black studies' disavowal of its object and aim is launched, even when that disavowal comes in something which also thinks itself to be moving in the direction of that object and aim. I'm trying to move by way of a kind of resistance to that anti-essentialism, one that requires a paleonymic relation to blackness; I'm trying to own a certain dispossession, the underprivilege of being-sentenced to this gift of constantly escaping and to standing in for the fugitivity (to echo Natahaniel Mackey, Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination) that is an irreducible property of life, persisting in and against every disciplinary technique while constituting and instantiating not just the thought but that actuality of the outside that is what/where blackness is—as space or spacing of the imagination, as condition of possibility and constant troubling of critique. It's annoying to perform what you oppose, but I just want you to know that I ain't mad. I loved these presentations, partly because I think they loved me or at least my space, but mostly because they were beautiful. I love Kant, too, by the way, though he doesn't love me, because I think he's beautiful too and, as you know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever. But even though I'm not mad, I'm not disavowing that strain of black studies that strains against the weight or burden, the refrain, the strain of being-imaginative and not-being-critical that is called blackness and that black people have had to carry. Black Studies strains against a burden that, even when it is thought musically, is inseparable from constraint. But my optimism, black optimism, is bound up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway black operations that have been thrust upon it. The burden, the constraint, is the aim, the paradoxically aleatory goal that animates escape in and the possibility of escape from. Here is one such black op—a specific, a capella instantiation of strain, of resistance to constraint and instrumentalization, of the propelling and constraining force of the refrain, that will allow me to get to a little something concerning the temporal paradox of, and the irruption of ecstatic temporality in, optimism, which is to say black optimism, which is to say blackness. I play this in appreciation for being in Chicago, which is everybody's sweet home, everybody's land of California, as Robert Johnson puts it. This is music from a Head Start program in Mississippi in the mid-sixties and as you all know Chicago is a city in Mississippi, Mississippi a (fugue) state of mind in Chicago. "Da Da Da Da," The Child Development Group of Mississippi, Smithsonian Folkways Records, FW02690 1967 The temporal paradox of optimism—that it is, on the one hand, necessarily futurial so that optimism is an attitude we take towards that which is to come; but that it is, on the other hand, in its proper Leibnizian formulation, an assertion not only of the necessity but also of the rightness and the essential timelessness of the always already existing, resonates in this recording. It is infused with that same impetus that drives a certain movement, in Monadology, from the immutability of monads to that enveloping of the moral world in the natural world that Leibniz calls, in Augustinian echo/revision, "the City of God." With respect to C. L. R. James and José (Muñoz), and a little respectful disrespect to Lee Edelman, these children are the voices of the future in the past, the voices of the future in our present. In this recording, this remainder, their fugitivity, remains, for me, in the intensity of their refrain, of their straining against constraint, cause for the optimism they perform. That optimism always lives, which is to say escapes, in the assertion of a right to refuse, which is, as Gayatri Spivak says, the first right: an instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ, to resist the regulative powers that resistance, that differing, call into being. To think resistance as originary is to say, in a sense, that we have what we need, that we can get there from here, that there's nothing wrong with us or even, in this regard, with here, even as it requires us still to think about why it is that difference calls the same, that resistance calls regulative power, into existence, thereby securing the vast, empty brutality that characterizes here and now. Nevertheless, however much I keep trouble in mind, and therefore, in the interest of making as much trouble as possible, I remain hopeful insofar as I will have been in this very collective negative tendency, this little school within and beneath school that we gather together to be. For a bunch of little whiles, this is our field (i.e., black studies), our commons or undercommons or underground or outskirts and it will remain so as long as it claims its fugitive proximity to blackness, which I will claim, with ridiculousness boldness, is the condition of possibility of politics.

We must accept fugtitivity to create a "space of acceptance" – this is the only way to escape the state's labels reflecting institutionalized racism
====Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, "Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State ",A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, May 2013 //SRSL)==== In her essay "Reflections of Being Buried Alive," Susan Rosenberg describes her first time entering the Lexington High Security Unit for Women—a small underground prison in Lexington, Kentucky, that held Rosenberg and other women involved in 1970s revolutionary movements from 1986 until 1988. Rosenberg, a white lesbian and member of a number of feminist and anti-racist revolutionary groups in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, writes: We stood at the electronically controlled metal gate under the eye of one of eleven security cameras, surrounded by unidentified men in business suits. We were wearing newly issued beige short sleeved shirts, culottes, and plastic slippers. We were in handcuffs. An unidentified man had ordered us placed in restraints while walking from one end of the basement to the other. The lights were neon fluorescent burning and bright, and everything was snow white—walls, floors, ceilings. There was no sound except the humming of the lights, and nothing stirred in the air. Being there at that gate looking down the cell block made my ears ring, and my breath quicken. 429 What is remarkable about Rosenberg's writing from Lexington is how her attention to the banality of the unit captures the ways torture and terror became inscribed in the ordinary. A white room. Plastic Slippers. Men in suits. The humming of lights. Eleven cameras. Dead air. Her ears rang and her breath was lost, not at the spectacle of it, but at its normality, its routineness, its technological perfection. The unimaginable violence of this new form of incarceration was cloaked in a new visual episteme. The unit was clean, quiet, modern, rational, and orderly. It helped inaugurate a variety of psychological and physical contortions of the human mind and body that are now so routine that they remain invisible in their banality. Addressing the logics behind the unit would necessitate an epistemology that could confront the rationality and mundaneness of modern terror. The Control Unit at Lexington embodied a new type of penal rationality that, once it was shut down in 1988 after Amnesty International declared it "deliberately and gratuitously oppressive," has spread to over 60 prisons across the country and the world.430 In these High Security Units (or Control Units)—what amount to prisons within prisons—thousands of people are held in solitary confinement and are subjected to extreme sensory deprivation for 23 hours a day, often indefinitely. The last forty years of neoliberal economics has not only witnessed the exponential growth the prison as system of racialized governance, but this period of economic restructuring has also seen the rise of a new method of containment and bodily incapacitation in the form of the control unit. Anti-racist, feminist, and queer activists in the 1970s and '80s were subjected to this new form of carceral state violence before it rose to dominance in the 1990s. We can turn to their writings as a critique of not only the broad contours of neoliberal-carceral state, but also the micro-politics of its operation as practiced in the control unit. In addition, the writings embody what I have been describing as a politics of anticipation—when Rosenberg looked down the cellblock, she saw something she couldn't yet describe— indeed, something prisoners continue to say is indescribable. She knew something was coming. And what she saw made her senses fail. Lexington set the stage for the expansion of the control unit as the prevailing domestic model of neoliberal containment and immobilization. But under the "war on terror," the control unit of the 1970s and '80s has since extended its reach transnationally. Scholars like Avery Gordon, Michelle Brown, Colin Dayan, and Caleb Smith have observed that the living death of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation at Guantánamo and elsewhere was first created in supermax prisons in the United States.431 This work opens up opportunities for considering the connections between the imprisonment of 1970s radicals and the detention of an unknown number of people in the carceral archipelago created under the "war on terror." Indeed, Ivan Greenberg has argued that the FBI's production of the domestic terrorist in the 1970s acted as the template for the creation of "the terrorist" in the "war on terror." In fact, it was during the 1970s that domestic terrorism first emerged as a major public policy and policing issue.432 The ways that the category of terrorism was shaped around groups like the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground created a legal apparatus and a set of discourses that would rise again in the U.S. government's response to the attacks of September 11th. What Rosenberg and other imprisoned radicals (who were often categorized as "terrorists") experienced thirty years ago set the conditions for a global prison regime driven by an imperial politics of "permanent abandonment."433 In this chapter, I examine the history of Lexington and the writings of the women detained there to consider the connections between the carceral politics of the neoliberal state and what has become a global prison regime under the "war on terror." An engagement with the gender and sexual politics of the control unit at Lexington can lead to a different understanding of the forms of power inaugurated at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Lexington is unique among the control units that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s because it was designed specifically for women and ended up holding a number of women who identified as lesbians. Focusing on Lexington as central to the emergence of the "space of exception" in Iraq and Guantánamo, as well as the neoliberal state, reveals a network of institutional, discursive, and affective connections that traverse space, time, race, gender, and sexuality. Such an investigation can make clear the relationship between the neoliberal-carceral state and the permanent warfare state, as well as the ways that these changing formations were built on the bodies contained within new formations of captivity. Activists and prisoners confronting the emergence of the neoliberal-carceral state anticipated the emergence of that formation; further, their writings reveal a critique of the forms of torture and terror constitutive of what Brown calls the "global prison-industrial complex."434

====Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and it's constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the world. Freedom isn't fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change. Such a "freedom" is utopian and fugitive====

====Tremblay-McGraw 10 – Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz "Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen's Writing" MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article) Oxford University Press [E.Smith]==== Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimming, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the "legacy gone missing" of "avant-garde practice by African-American women poets" (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call "enclosure" (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and "run" (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen's work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen's writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen's work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex "mixtery" of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen's attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen's work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen's work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen's "subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein's] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs" (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen's rare ("among recent avant-garde poets") revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen "constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice" (466). While Spahr asserts that "what has interested me about Mullen's work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing's pursuit of wild reading and autonomy- and identity-centered poetry's concerns with community building and alliance" (115), Cummings points out that "Mullen's work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly" (24). Surveying Mullen's body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings's assertion that Mullen self-consciously refl ects her work's synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen's writing is characterized by a productive tension between "enclosure" and "run," between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen's work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen's concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen's formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north. . . the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\ Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects these movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy of such movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the moment of "true freedom . . . at the point of [the slave's] deciding to escape and . . . journey." This quote suggests that freedom is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article "Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness," which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, "Death is better than slavery." This is a "recurring refrain in Jacobs's and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs's lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape" (82). For some, freedom means leaving one's family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how "captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe," Mullen notes that in Equiano's own discursive production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean "form of this Narrative." . . . In the pages of Equiano's prolifi c narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures. ("Gender" 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano "retrospectively this disruption of cultural continuity is figured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destiny—a destiny constructed out of the individual's unique interaction with chance and continually changing environments— rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed identity" (60). For some individuals fl ight and "cultural disruption" will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of open archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the "recyclopedias" of disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia in the title of Mullen's collection of three of her previous books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse, suggesting "to use again in the original form," and the taking of intractable "used" or "waste" material and making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullen's neologism clearly articulates a project that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and worthless "waste" materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullen's recyclopedia suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an original "use" (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical recycling of problematic materials to produce something new, something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the future. Mullen's recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from arrest and as a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the "used" or "waste" material. Mullen's recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up "vast possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion" (vi). Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses' bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. In the process, these discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies.

====As an educator you should affirm a space away from surveillance, fugitive knowledge—in short, a Dark Twisted Pedagogy. Our classroom model is one that envelops students in opportunities to speak back and re-envisage the lines they've heard thousands of times as poetics but never thought of as useful knowledge as their own guide to critical consciousness through fugitivity====

====Garcia, 13—Antero, Assistant Professor in the English department at Colorado State University, "Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy: Kanye West and the Lessons of Participatory Culture," Radical Teacher, no 97 (Fall 2013), http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher/article/view/38/22 —BR==== Over the fall of 2010, rapper Kanye West reimagined the way music was distributed. He did this by engaging in an online conversation with millions. For the greater part of that year, Kanye West was firmly present on the cultural radar. This was deliberate and done in a way that made his presence, his performances, and his music an ongoing conversation with his fans, with his past, and with a larger network of engaged online participants. Through demonstrating the affordances of participatory culture, West presents a framework for engagement and communication that critical educators can leverage even within the increasingly restrictive space of public education. Though the capitalist practices that led to his album spending more than six months on the Billboard 200 may not seem like the obvious place to search for liberatory educational pedagogy, I argue that the strategies developed and tested by West offer an important framework for guiding critical consciousness and fomenting action within our classrooms. As a Hip Hop fan and former music journalist, I often infused my classroom with beats and rhymes. Whether it was the first Lupe Fiasco album encouraging my students to consider the blend between Hip Hop and skateboarder social groups on my campus or formally utilizing classics like Grandmaster Flash‟s "The Message" and Dead Prez‟s "Police State" as starting points for literary and critical analysis, Hip Hop played a formative part in my teaching practice. For the eight years that I spent teaching English and ELL courses at a public school in South Central Los Angeles, my classroom breathed Hip Hop as well as music across genres to speak to the diverse youth population I worked with. Comprised of approximately 80% of my students identifying as Latino and 19% as Black and a dropout rate that rocketed above 60%, my school was characterized in the media by stereotypes of a failing school while my students exuded the passion to learn that showed me an optimism in transforming schools. Throughout this teaching time, I can see now how Kanye West‟s music acted as a through line in my classroom. On a year-round schedule, my first year teaching allowed me to bring in West‟s infamous 2005 declaration that "George Bush doesn‟t care about Black people" during a Hurricane Katrina relief telethon. Meanwhile West‟s singles filtered into my classroom as music played by students or analyzed for various writing assignments. At the time that West revolutionized media distribution and opportunities for pedagogical growth in 2010, I was working with ninth grade students and exploring how mobile devices like iPods could help connect urban youth with civically engaging movements beyond the classroom (Garcia, 2012a). Just in time to be heralded critically by music publications ranging from XXL to Rolling Stone, Kanye West's fifth solo album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released in the United States on November 22, 2010. However, even by the time the album leaked through file sharing networks and torrents online, weeks before the official release date, its music was anything but surprising. Via his own music label, G.O.O.D. (Getting Out Our Dreams), West leaked many of the tracks from his album as free downloads during the fall. A matter of a few clicks from his official website yielded more than snippets from the album. Releasing one song each week on "G.O.O.D. Fridays," responding to challenges and criticism from fans via Twitter, West sustained interest and anticipation throughout the world. In addition to a slew of tracks from the album including the lead single "Power," West released numerous tracks that were subsequently never officially included in the final album. Speculation of what would make the cut drove buzz around My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy rather than speculation about what kind of sound the album would take. By the end of 2010, fifteen different tracks were given away by West, including two of the lead singles from his album: a remix of "Power" and the cameo- filled "Monster." Through use of simple and public media tools like Twitter, West moved popular hip-hop models of marketing beyond traditional mixtape culture and illustrated how participatory culture can help foment profit as well as awareness and social organization. Moving Beyond the Mixtape As far as Hip Hop is concerned, the role of mixtapes is one that dates back to the early days of Hip Hop in the late 70s (Westhoff, 2011). Splicing together popular rap verses with unreleased Hip Hop beats, mixtapes were underground commodities traded and sold by the aficionados within an exclusive subculture. Though it has been years since mixtapes were widely distributed as actual cassettes, the concept is still the same; otherwise unreleased or un-cleared samples are released non- commercially. Like electronic music's prevalent use of "white label", unofficial releases (Reynolds, 1999), to help build interest in a track, Hip Hop has incorporated mixtapes as more than underground productions by individuals and part of a larger marketing and distribution ecology. Transitioning from tapes to CDs and now to direct Internet downloads, mixtapes are used by mainstream rappers to sustain interest between album releases. Lil‟ Wayne, for example, has benefited from a plethora of mixtape releases that have helped garner radio play and online reviews long before his albums are available for media consumers (Westhoff, 2011). No longer are mixtapes simply an extension of the listening experience for rap fans. Instead, they act as previews and major marketing ploys for Hip Hop artists. Additionally, because they are steeped in the history of Hip Hop, they may signal an artist‟s credibility for some rap fans. However, where the mixtape largely succeeded in previewing a forthcoming album and playing with the expected commercial limitations of what could be released, Kanye West takes the model and deconstructs it. The recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means responsiveness. Instead of the mishmash of 40-70 minutes of free music usually released on a mixtape, West slowly strings along track after track over months at a time, responding and changing his music as responses are blogged and status-updated. In one notable example, teen-idol Justin Bieber, upon hearing that Kanye liked his song "Runaway Love" tweeted, "@kanyewest it's not a so what moment for me. I'm 16 and a fan. I'm kinda hyped u are listening to my stuff. Thank u. Nice sunday morning" (Vilensky, 2010). Shortly afterwards, West responded to fomenting interest from online fans and released his remix of "Runaway Love" featuring both West and Wu Tang rapper Raekwon. In terms of his album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also built upon mixtape culture by reflecting the practice within the production of his album. The silly mashup of unexpected artists that is typically reserved for mixtapes became a centerpiece for the album: soft- crooning indie musician Justin Vernon of the band Bon Iver is featured prominently in the album's penultimate song, "Lost in the World;" Vernon‟s lilting voice is paired earnestly with Hip Hop verses. No longer a mixtape novelty, West builds upon accepted underground Hip Hop practices and subverts what is expected within commercial Hip Hop. Amplification and the Participatory Culture of G.O.O.D. Fridays Though the mixtape formula was popular in subverting official release dates, West moved from the singular verses and cobbled together mixes of unreleased music to a model that placed agency and music decisions in the hands of his fans. In short, Kanye West released music in ways that utilized the connected culture of social media to invigorate enthusiasm and to build camaraderie with a continually building fan base. Henry Jenkins et al. (2009) describe the ways media as "participatory culture" shift "the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement." Further, Jenkins et al. write, "Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways." West‟s G.O.O.D. Friday releases, in responding to and encouraging dialogue with his fans, indicate a mass media application of participatory culture for profit. However, the general tenets of participatory culture typically wrest control of media distribution from traditional mass media outlets in ways that empower teens fluent with the tools on their laptops and smartphones. The recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means responsiveness. It wasn‟t enough, for instance, for West to thank Bieber for the Twitter shout out. The voice (and the thousands that followed echoing wishes to see a collaboration between the two musical stars) encouraged participation, remix and playfulness. YouTube is rife with tributes and parodies of West‟s songs. From a version of his song "Monster" that pays tribute to the food at Taco Bell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnUKmk5Lz50) to one that is sung by Harry Potter‟s nemesis Voldermort (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA7leadDk9g), the digital tools online allow for new forms of participation and engagement. In my own research on how young people may be able to challenge existing power structures and dominant narratives via social tools, I have described the potential of participatory culture as an "amplifying" process (Garcia, 2012b). In the public, persistent spaces of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, for instance, comments youth make can be seen by anybody. However, within the educational world, the participatory culture of out-of-school time is frequently stifled by school and district policies that limit socialization (see Frey and Fisher, 2008). Further, like the central argument of this article: that a massively popular, wealthy rapper can provide meaningful pedagogical guidance for critical educators, I have also argued that the mainstream and profit-driven companies like MySpace and Facebook can build important socializing spaces for critical dialogue and student support (Garcia, 2008). Through reimagining his relationship with an audience of millions, West demonstrates ways to challenge traditional power structures─a model that can be forged within today's classrooms. A year before the Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and months before the Arab Spring more fully rolled across northern Africa, Kanye West demonstrated the possibilities of social media as tools for knowledge building and sustained interest. Though critical educators should rightfully challenge West‟s capitalistic intentions, the pragmatic lessons of utility and philosophy with social media should not be disregarded. To date, West's album has sold more than one million physical copies (Recording Industry Association of America, 2013). His follow up tour a year later, co-headlined by collaborator Jay-Z, was the highest grossing Hip Hop tour of 2011, making more than $48 million in ticket sales (Lewis, 2011). To consider West's popularity anything of an underground phenomenon would be ludicrous. It is important to recognize that West‟s lyrical content can lead to further disregard for the relevance of mainstream Hip Hop within the classroom. And the public persona that West plays up does little to convince critical educators to consider the possibilities that West represents. When West grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift to decry that Beyonce did not win a 2009 MTV Award, even President Obama called West a "jackass" (BBC 2009). To be clear, I do not apologize or account for West‟s actions. Instead, the focus on the rapper‟s ability to expand the world of Hip Hop and the possibilities for critical educators mean looking beyond these actions; West‟s resources for engagement and community building offer myriad tools to encourage challenging and critiquing his non-critical work. Toward a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy West's every step in releasing the album, from ludicrous twitter messages to on-air blowups to banned album artwork meant that there was not a day that I was unable to catch up with the latest in the Kanye-verse. In all of these updates Kanye evolved the Hip Hop mixtape to its proper participatory-culture configuration: it is an "always- on" amalgam of music, personality, and hype. The pervasive nature of Kanye‟s approach to marketing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is something educators can lift. How can we deconstruct classroom pedagogy to move beyond traditional application of emergent technologies? Is it really the best we can do to simply duplicate textbooks and textbook practices when equipping students with iPads and mobile devices? This is essentially reducing the possibilities of screen and interfaces to a glowing page. Likewise, pedagogy must incorporate the persistent "always-on" nature of West‟s approach. His persistence and personality are what helped transfer knowledge, interest, and passion for his work. Critical educators, qualms about West aside, must evaluate how this approach may be adopted for classroom use. Teachers should ask themselves, how is my practice pervasive? How does the work that I do in my classroom transform students' lives throughout the day? A year before the Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and months before the Arab Spring more fully rolled across northern Africa, Kanye West demonstrated the possibilities of social media as tools for knowledge building and sustained interest. I want to reiterate that what West accomplished was not some secret phenomenon. West made abundant profits from his efforts. At the same time West was mirroring widely adopted digital practices at a highly visible level: responding to tweets, sharing updates, hosting online Q&As and producing video and music content for others are all attributes of what youth can and do easily engage in while online. In essence, West‟s efforts mimic what young people regularly do on their own. He mimics the literacy and learning practices that take place outside the classroom. For educators, this is also an important reminder: classroom practices should mirror the real world settings that students will venture to after leaving our classrooms. Students are already experts in media production and West reminds us to bring in these outside skills. How can critical educators adjust their teaching practice in light of the work of Kanye West? Perhaps this may not seem the most astutely worded of education- related questions, but a necessary one nonetheless. West makes participating and communicating with fans fun, memorable, and engaging. Classrooms can leverage similar tools to get young people excited, in conversation, and networking globally around classroom content. To be clear, I am not advocating co-opting youth practices within a classroom. On the contrary, I am speaking about a large- scale effort to update the classroom into the kinds of networked ecologies that are utilized for interaction everywhere except for in schools. As Castells (2009) writes, "A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening its balance" (pp. 501-502). A Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy is one that envelops students in opportunities to engage with extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. It allows youth to speak back to the content and see work in dialogue. An instantiation of this pedagogy, despite the capitalistic intentions of its namesake, begins with "a dramatic reorganization of power relationships" (Castells, 2009, pp. 502) and funnels classroom agency toward youth. It begins with youth interest and quickly amplifies key concepts that resonate within a classroom and well beyond. Like West, this shift toward meaningful engagement is one that requires educators to remain attuned to the interests and cultural landmarks of youth culture as entre into dialogues about socially conscious curriculum. The corners of commercialism─video games, music videos on YouTube, series on MTV─are going to function as signals for how young people‟s attention is being drawn both outside of schools and in classrooms. Instead of merely challenging the messages, images, and intentions of these multimodal texts, this is a pedagogy that can use these as starting places for youth-oriented production. Youth can remix and speak back to dominant texts not solely as classroom exercises but as public statements to be shared in the same social networks that they utilize daily. In this sense My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy illustrates ways transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2013) and textual play can emerge fluidly with the many digital pathways enabled for youth. Transmedia, as described here, are media products that unfold across multiple platforms: a narrative may be told via movie productions, video game plotlines, comic books, and cartoons (as is the case with The Matrix series, for example). Instead of looking at a novel as a singular and definitive version of a text, the notion of transmedia allows youth literacies to demonstrate the text as a hub for building upon and collaboration. How can the canonical text taught in a classroom extend learning from the context of the Shakespearean era to contemporary social issues for youth. We can see burgeoning examples of this now: a quick search on Facebook and it is clear I can friend dozens of Holden Caulfields and Othellos and Katniss Everdeens: teachers and students alike are using today‟s tools to extend stories across various forms. These are not concepts presently being taught in teacher education programs and a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy calls for intentionality in this respect. West‟s album ends with the song "Who Will Survive in America," built primarily around an excerpt from a 1970 poem by Gil Scott Heron, "Comment #1." This finds West not only recontextualizing a critique of leftist organizing in the late sixties and seventies for the modern day but also continuing a dialogue between West‟s and Heron‟s work that extended across several albums; in 2005, West sampled a different Heron poem for his song "My Way Home"; Heron responded with a sample of West‟s "Flashing Lights" for his final album, I'm New Here in 2010. West builds upon, reinterprets, and engages in conversation with Heron‟s work. The narrative and melodic dialogue spreads across three albums and invites listeners to rethink the lyrics, music, and context for both works. It is a transformative work that challenges critical new literacies to build upon the notion of the "meme" as an educational possibility (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006). With memes helping describe quickly spreading, "viral", media across networks, literature on memes often credits Dawkins (1976) with imbuing the term as a unit that spreads cultural content over time. As not merely a delivery system of information, memes effectively write upon the world and change it. In their 1987 text, Freire and Macedo describe literacy as a process of reading the world and then reading the word. It is an order often lost in discussions of Freire‟s development of critical literacies: cultural, "worldly" experience imbue the process of reading texts. West illustrates how advances in technology allow the world to be written upon and the need for educators to renegotiate their pedagogical stance. "No one man should have all that power": The Contradictions of Kanye In the lead single off of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, "Power," West raps that "No one man should have all that power." It is a declaration that contributes to West‟s ongoing braggadocio. However, it is also a quote that is steeped in pedagogical meaning and historical precedent. A near word-for-word iteration of this quote was printed in 1957 in the Amsterdam News; a "stunned" police officer, noted about Malcolm X, "No one man should have that much power" (Marable, 2011, p. 128). It is likely that the quote was picked up by West in the 1992 Spike Lee directed biopic, X. This would not be the first time that Malcolm X is invoked in West‟s lyrics. In "Good Morning" West claims he‟s "like the fly Malcolm X buy any jeans necessary." Both invocations of the civil rights leader point back to the remixing and transmedia literacies that West demonstrates; they are necessary components of Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy. However, I want to also return to the line from "Power" and its implications both for reflecting on West and for classroom practice. As a self-critique, West's statement points to the problematic ways his performance of the Hip Hop genre upholds individuals and capitalism in boasts that separate fans through recognizable power structures. However, it is a model that West also challenges in content: the song "Power" was shared in multiple mixes before its profitable release on West's album with power and voice distributed (though not evenly) with his fans. From my own classroom experience, it is easy for critical educators to look at the realm of capitalism and disregard it wholesale; though I secretly indulged in West's music, I would deride it in discussions with my 11th graders. And yet, while the content is a problematic perpetuation of marketing practices, the approaches themselves speak to the ways students are engaging, interacting, and approaching informal learning. Approaching the challenging domain of capitalism with a lens of pragmatic optimism, West illustrates the potential of participatory media as enacted by for-profit companies and illustrates ways these can be harnessed for wholesale social transformation. Finally, in returning to West‟s lyric, "No one man should have all that power," it is important to notice that West distributes production, input, and narrative across various platforms with numerous points of input for others. It is a reflection of what radical educators classrooms can look like. The decentralization of the teacher as singular leader within the classroom is neither new nor revolutionary. However, in looking at the ways teacher- leaders, like West, can spark conversation, invite multimodal exploration, and direct connection with the community, the role of the teacher is not diminished as much as it is altered. Perhaps a problematic source for some, in terms of beginning a conversation of how critical pedagogy continues to shift in the 21st Century, Kanye West‟s work illustrates practices our students are engaged in everyday. His work functions as a provocation for a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the cultural shifts of participatory media. It is messy, problematic, and─in the liberatory possibilities it signals─beautiful. It is a pedagogy of hope for the digital age.

The affirmative is not responsible for the racist reactions of policy makers to the plan- moral responsibility should be incurred on the racist intervening actor not the ethical action <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Gewirth 1983(Alan, philosopher, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications, p 230-231) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">A third distinction is between respecting other persons and avoiding bad consequences. Respect for persons is an obligation so fundamental that it cannotbe overridden even to prevent evil consequences <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> from befalling some persons. If such prevention requires an action whereby respect is withheld from persons, then that action must not be performed, whatever the consequences <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. One of the difficulties with this important distinction is that it is unclear. May not respect be withheld from a person by failing to avert <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> from him some evil consequence? <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> How can Abrams be held to respect the thousands of innocent persons or their rights if he lets them die when he could have prevented this? The distinction also fails to provide for degrees of moral urgency. One fails to respect a person if one lies to him or steals from him; but sometimes the only way to prevent the death of one innocent person may be by stealing from or telling a lie to some other innocent person. In such a case, respect for onepersonmayleadto disrespect of a more serious kind from some other innocent person <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. 7. None of the above distinctions, then, serves its intended purpose of defending the absolutist against the consequentialist. They do not show that the son’s refusal to tortures his mother to death does not violate the other persons’ rights to life and that hes is not morally responsible for their deaths. Nevertheless, the distinctions can be supplemented in a way that does serve to establish these conclusions. The required supplementis provided by theprinciple of the intervening action <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. According to this principle, when there is a causal connectionbetweensome person <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> A’s performing someaction (or inaction) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">X and some other person <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">C’s incurring a certain harm <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> Z, A’s moral responsibility <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> for Z is removed if <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">, between X and Z, there intervenes some otheraction <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> Y of some person B who knows the relevant circumstances of his action and who intends to produce Z or show produces Z through recklessness. The reasonsfor this removal is that <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> B’s intervening action <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> Y is the more direct or proximate cause <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> of Z and <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">, unlike A’s action (or inaction), Y is the sufficientcondition <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> of Z as it actually occurs. An example of this principle may help to show its connection with the absolutist thesis. MartinLutherKing <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> Jr. was repeatedly toldthatbecausehe led demonstrationsin support of civil rights, he was morally responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> and that were shaking the American Republic to its foundations. By the principle of the intervening action, however, it was King’sopponents who were responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient conditions of the riots and injuries. King might also have replied that the Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had to be paid was the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of the other Americans to peace and order, the reply would be that these rights cannot justifiably be secured at the price of the rights of blacks <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">.