"If this post becomes greyed out than it's obvious that I've hit a nerve"
Or it could be just a reasonable reaction to a conspiracy theory presented with absolutely zero evidence.
Rather than intelligence agency involvement, who are unlikely to care about debating formats, I find it far more credible that some students are just lazy, and would therefore prefer to rattle off nonsense or memorized text too fast to follow than actually do the hard work of persuading the judges with arguments they can understand.
I do wonder why the judges let them get away with it, though. I'd personally just fail whoever tried anything remotely like that.
My guess is that the judges led the way here, with a well-intentioned but ultimately destructve desire for a scoring system that is ostensibly objective, repeatable and free of any cultural bias, but at the cost of depending on gameable proxies as a substitute for meaningful values. Once such a system is put in place, the incentives will drive behavior towards extreme gamesmanship, while at the same time driving away anyone preferring real debate.
I further suspect that, at least within high-school debate, pressure from parents, in the form of a minority incessantly and agressively arguing against the judges, played a part in the desire for 'objective' measures.
Update: here's a relevant quote - note the emphasis on the number of arguments, in light of the fact that it is easier to increase your count by adding another argument than it is to increase your count by adding another argument that specifically refutes one made by the other side:
We developed a situation where one team decided, "I'm going to present eight arguments," and the other team talked slower and only answered six of them, and the judge says, "Well, you didn't answer two of these arguments so you lost the debate because you didn't answer those arguments." So the other team said, "We need to answer all eight of those arguments," and they started to talk faster. And the other team said, "Well, we'll present 10 arguments," and then they answered 12. It escalated to a point that, in some instances, has gone way too far.
Or it could be just a reasonable reaction to a conspiracy theory presented with absolutely zero evidence.
Rather than intelligence agency involvement, who are unlikely to care about debating formats, I find it far more credible that some students are just lazy, and would therefore prefer to rattle off nonsense or memorized text too fast to follow than actually do the hard work of persuading the judges with arguments they can understand.
I do wonder why the judges let them get away with it, though. I'd personally just fail whoever tried anything remotely like that.