***Welfare Surveillance AFF***
--NUDI Chicago Scholars--
1AC
Contention One - Inherency
NSA surveillance disproportionately marginalizes impoverished groups and
communities. Those seen as “like” objects due to their consumption of government
resources are then closely tracked and subordinated.
Eubanks 14
(Virginia. The author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age and co-
editor with Alethia Jones and Barbara Smith of Ain’tGonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement
Building with Barbara Smith. She teaches in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the
University at Albany, SUNY, and is a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. “Want to Predict the Future
of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities”. The American Prospect.
.
Accessed 7/13/15
.)
Counterintuitive as it may seem,
we are targeted for digital surveillance as groups and communities
,
not as individuals
. Big Brother is watching us, not you.
The NSA looks for
what they call
“pattern of
life
,” homing in on networks of people associated with a target. But networks of association are not
random, and
who we know online is affected by offline forms of residential, educational, and
occupational segregation
. This year,
for example
, UC San Diego sociologist Kevin Lewis found that online
dating leads to fewer interracial connections, compared to offline ways of meeting. Pepper Miller has
reported that sometimes,
Americans will temporarily block white Facebook friends so that they can
have “open, honest discussions” about race with black friends. Because of the persistence of
segregation in our offline and online lives, algorithms and search strings that filter big data looking for
patterns,
that begin as neutral code
, nevertheless end up producing race, class, and gender-specific
results
.
Groups of “like” subjects are then targeted for different, and often unequal, forms of
supervision, discipline and surveillance, with marginalized communities singled out for more
aggressive scrutiny
. Welfare recipients like Dorothy are more vulnerable to surveillance because they are
members of a group that is seen as an appropriate target for intrusive programs.
Persistent stereotypes
of poor women, especially women of color, as inherently suspicious, fraudulent, and wasteful provide
ideological support for invasive welfare programs that track their financial and social behavior
.
Immigrant communities are more likely to be the site of biometric data collection than native-born
communities because they have less political power to resist it.
As panicked as mainstream America is
about the government collecting cellphone meta-data, imagine the hue and cry if police officers scanned
the fingerprints of white, middle-class Americans on the street, as has happened to day laborers in Los
Angeles, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Marginalized people are in the dubious
position of being both on the cutting edge of surveillance
, and stuck in its backwaters. Some forms of
