Distancing Dissent in Times of Exception: Delegation and Digitalization of Protest Movements in the Context of the Resistance against the Patriot Act.

Conceived as a contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of the state of exception as well as to the discussion about the conception of the possibilities of desecuritization, this paper, based on the case of the United States after 9/11, aims at explaining the strategies adopted by dissenters. This paper will draw on the literature on securitization, social movement, power, domination and resistance, as well as electronic surveillance.The weeks that followed the attacks of 9/11 saw the adoption by the US Congress of a multiplicity of measures aiming at facilitating the fight against the terrorist threats. These measures, although leading to potential infringements on civil liberties, were adopted rather unanimously and with an obvious lack of debate. Incapable and/or unwilling to oppose the political will of the Executive branch, Congress had ceased to be the arena were political dissent about security matters could be voiced. It thus had to find other arenas to host it and emerge directly from the citizens.Nonetheless, the picture of the resistance deployed against these measures in the following months and even years depict an image quite different from the one expected. Indeed, dissent about security policies has taken diverse forms privileging distance between the citizens and the target of their actions, thus demonstrating the learning process involved in social movement strategy based on previous experiences of failure and success, as well as on context. This paper will present a set of factors that could justify the adoption of such a strategy by insisting on contextual reasons (competition of social movements of protest, unity in times of crisis, technicality of the measures opposed, possibility to resist locally) as well as longer term processes (development of surveillance techniques, evolution of police handling of protest demonstrations).We will explain that this strategy coupled with the tools allowed by the professionalization of social movement organizations led to local symbolic victories as well as nation-wide legal successes in courts.Eventually, this paper will develop a theoretical modelization to conceive the possibility for a progressive desecuritization of the national security policy regarding the handling of the terrorist threat, based on a reflexion on time. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]