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During my trip to Finland last year I met a graduate student named Antti Silvast who is working on electricity and regulation, with many themes that intersect ours. A central concern in his work is how different norms -- security, efficiency, social welfare -- are being incorporated in regimes of regulation. Interestingly, the work also has a distinctive "federal" dimension, concerning the relationship between EU regulation and country-level regulation. Also interesting tie-ins with themes around reflexive modernization (although as Antti pointed out to me when I was in Finland, one has to be a little careful with such language in European debates, due to the reception of Beck). Antti has a good position for observation with direct contact with many of those on the Finnish side making policy and regulatory standards in this area. What follows is a short description he sent of his own work.

The Finnish Energy Market Authority (EMV) have released their new guidelines on regulation of electricity distribution operators. The regulation in Finland has thus far only concerned the prices and revenues of electricity distribution operators. But now, EMV are introducing two new aspects to regulation: from 2008, the regulation of technical and social quality of electricity distribution and possibly from 2012, the regulation of customer service of the electricity distribution operators. Before commenting on this change, a short review of the reasoning behind regulation is necessary. The electricity markets in Finland were liberalised in Finland in 1995, whence electricity distribution and electricity selling were separated as services. The Finnish energy market law has arguments that resemble those from the EU’s directive concerning internal market in electricity (2003/54/EC): liberalised models of infrastructure provision should result in efficiency gains, price reductions, higher standard of service and increased competitiveness between electricity utilities. However, this does not mean full-blown competitive markets. Rather, due to “shortcomings in the functioning of the market” (2003/54/EC), e.g. possible discriminatory tariffs or market dominance of distribution companies who still have regional monopoly, the markets are regulated. This is to ensure “non-discrimination, effective competition and efficient functioning of the market” (2003/54/EC, article 23). The first wave of regulation took form of monitoring the prices and revenues of electricity distribution operators. But this, as a report from Council of European Energy Regulators notes [link: http://www.ceer- eu.org/portal/page/portal/CEER_HOME/CEER_PUBLICATIONS/CEER_DOCUMENTS/2005/CE ER_3RDBR-QOES_2005-12-06.PDF], poses the problem that the distribution operators simply increase their revenues by lowering their expenses, e.g. by reducing workforce. Thus, the second wave of regulation is taking more technical and social viewpoint: regulating the actual and perceived quality of electricity distribution and in the future, possibly also customer service standards. I am interested in the Luhmannian theory of macro-level differentiation of society. From this perspective, regulation could introduce new codes to communicate about electricity distribution. First wave of regulation observed just markets. The second wave promises to observe markets and technical quality, security, customer perceptions and welfare, perhaps even ethics - the EU directive 2003/54/EC actually mentions “protection of the rights of the vulnerable customers” as part of EU internal markets. However, in the new regulation propositions in Finland all codes are still “translated” to costs, prices and quantitative meters: e.g. the perceived customers costs of electricity interruptions, the number of interruptions for worst-served customers or the average times for answering customer calls. Luhmann has noted that calculation of costs has a warning function. It renders the future present and reveals the negative aspects of actions: once costs have been calculated, one acts only if the advantages appear to outweigh the disadvantages. This is one way to mitigate future threats. But as another trend of risk-consciousness, the electricity distributors and security experts in Finland are taking interest in extremely improbable occurrences like large-scale blackouts. One can well anticipate that at some point, the quantitative approach of regulation will conflict with the latter, very imaginative trend.

Chronical of Higher Education, Tuesday, March 13, 2007 Anthropologists Discuss Where to Draw Ethical Lines in Dealing With National-Security Agencies By DAVID GLENN American military and intelligence agencies have increasingly been turning to anthropologists and other social scientists for "cultural knowledge" about actual and potential adversaries. But many anthropologists are deeply anxious about offering such assistance, fearing, among other things, that their insights might be used simply to help torture and kill people more effectively. At a panel discussion that was Webcast from Brown University on Monday afternoon, several members of a temporary committee of the American Anthropological Association discussed how and where the discipline should draw ethical lines when anthropologists engage with national-security agencies. (An archive of the Webcast should be available later this week.) "How do we balance the costs? What potential damage is done to our reputation as scholars, as a discipline, when we do engage?" asked Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College and a member of the committee. The committee, which is formally known as the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology With the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities, was created last year, and it has been asked to provide recommendations to the association by the end of 2007. The panel is meeting this week, largely in private, at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Ms. Fluehr-Lobban cited the danger that all anthropologists might come under suspicion if some anthropologists were known to be employees of national-security agencies. All scholars doing fieldwork in certain countries might find it more difficult to develop relationships with people who provide cultural information, and they might all be at higher risk of being arrested for espionage, she suggested. "When you say 'CIA,' when you say 'military,' flags go up," she said. But Ms. Fluehr-Lobban also said that it might be worthwhile for anthropologists to bring their expertise on "cultural complexity" to national-security agencies, where such insights are sometimes lacking. Indeed, Ms. Fluehr-Lobban's husband, Richard Lobban, who has done fieldwork in Sudan for nearly 40 years, spoke from the audience about his reluctant decision to lecture occasionally at the Naval War College after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Despite his dislike of the military, Mr. Lobban said, he had decided that Osama bin Laden was "a much greater evil." Mr. Lobban is also a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College. One topic that came up repeatedly was the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, a pilot project that began in 2004, in which the CIA and other intelligence agencies paid for graduate education for scholars in certain scientific and social-science subfields, in exchange for a commitment to work for the agencies for a certain period of time. The recipients were not required to disclose to their professors or their fellow students that they are intelligence analysts in training (The Chronicle, March 25, 2005). The program, Ms. Fluehr-Lobban said, raises a number of questions about informed consent. Another contested topic was the journalist Seymour Hersh's assertion, in an article published in The New Yorker in 2004, that the American soldiers who sexually humiliated prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were inspired directly or indirectly by The Arab Mind, a 1973 book by the late anthropologist Raphael Patai. One committee member, Laura A. McNamara, an anthropologist employed by the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories who studies decision making among nuclear scientists there, said there was no strong evidence linking Mr. Patai's book to the Abu Ghraib torture, and warned her fellow panelists that "we need to be cautious about ruining our credibility with false accusations." Ms. McNamara is one of two committee members who are working closely with national security agencies. In a recent essay, she argued that too many conversations about anthropologists and the military tend to "recycle the same issues" about secrecy and informed consent. Anthropologists who work with military and security issues today, she wrote, often face different, more subtle ethical challenges than did Vietnam-era social scientists. In a comment from the audience, James Der Derian, the director of the Watson Institute's Global Security Program, asked whether there was a danger that the anthropology association would "become ethically pure but intellectually impoverished." Mr. Der Derian suggested that even if anthropologists tried to keep their hands pure, military and intelligence agencies would turn elsewhere to seek information about the cultures of their nations' adversaries. "Who's going to rush in where anthropologists fear to tread?" he asked. In a telephone interview on Sunday, Alan H. Goodman, the association's president, said he did not expect the committee to reach any conclusions during this week's meeting. "I don't expect anything to be resolved," he said. "We want this to be very open. This is our first real chance to talk to each other." Mr. Goodman, who is a professor of anthropology at Hampshire College, added that the committee's work was part of a larger conversation about the rise of "applied anthropology," in which scholars are employed by corporations, public agencies, or nonprofit organizations. The association needs to think about "the increased degree to which anthropologists are working for corporations that want some control over the dissemination of results," he said. "And that's related to what this committee will discuss. Is working with intelligence agencies really just a continuation of the same types of things that one might be doing for a corporation, or is there really something special about working in intelligence that makes it entirely different?"

April 6 - 7, 2007 - New York City

This workshop will bring together researchers working on the current conjuncture of health, the life sciences and national security, both in the United States and transnationally. This conjuncture has been shaped by a number of recent events and processes, including: an emphasis on "emerging infectious disease" as a national and global security problem, beginning in the 1990s; technical developments in the life sciences that have dramatically increased the manipulability of living organisms; the global dissemination of knowledge about the capacity to produce dangerous pathogens; a growing concern about the dangers of bioterrorism, especially following the attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax letters; a series of food safety crises in Europe, including BSE and foot-and-mouth disease; and current concerns about the possibility of a pandemic of avian influenza.

These events and processes raise a number of issues for critical social scientific reflection: How is uncertain risk being managed by experts in fields related to biosecurity? How are existing fields such as public health and the life sciences being reinflected by the new concern with biosecurity threats? What vision of collective security informs the practices of actors in these areas? The workshop will involve close discussions of pre-circulated papers, based on empirical research into specific domains of contestation around biosecurity. Possible topics include: conflicts between public health and national security needs in developing disease surveillance systems; problems in developing vaccination policies for novel biosecurity threats; how to bring together life scientists and security officials in developing regulatory policies for emerging fields of technical development; efforts to reshape agricultural practices in the face of new threats to the food supply. Workshop participants come from anthropology, history, geography, and international affairs, and work on North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The event is aimed toward producing a closely interwoven set of papers for an edited volume that will be a timely intervention into current debates over approaches to newly perceived security threats. We anticipate a group of 10 - 12 participants for a day and a half event on April 6 - 7 in New York City.

In "The Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle," legal theorist Cass Sunstein asks how to make regulatory decisions under conditions of uncertainty, in which probabilistic calculation cannot guide rational decision. He is especially interested in environmental issues such as climate change, but also links his argument to other catastrophic threats including avian flu and terrorism. Basically, he wants to show how the precautionary principle can be operationalized within a technocratic context guided by cost-benefit analysis. In his scheme, the rational application of such a principle would militate toward regulatory intervention in the present against the uncertain threat of a worst-case climate change scenario in the future. The argument is interesting for our purposes because it challenges the Beckian hypothesis that uncertain but potentially catastrophic threats are not amenable to the tools of technocratic calculation.

Here is an interesting research Project: Transformations in Global Public Health Surveillance. Principle Investigator(s): Eric Mykhalovskiy, Lorna Weir Co-Applicant(s): Barbara Godard HCTP/ICE Support: $7,958.50 (June 2006-May 2007) HCTP/ICE Themes: Places, Technologies Abstract With the emergence of the Internet and 24/7 global health news, radical transformations have occurred in the conditions for knowing and responding to global disease threats. The invention of online techniques for global public health surveillance has dramatically changed the time, space, action capacity and social organization of global infectious disease control. Online early warning alerts are global technologies of the new international public health care. The present proposal seeks to understand what led the World Health Organization (WHO) to decide in the mid-1990s that its previous system for reporting global infectious disease outbreaks was inadequate and to become interested in online detection systems, a move from what is called “passive” to “active” surveillance. In particular, this research seeks to understand the impact of the Surat (India) and Kikwit (Zaire) epidemics (1994 - 1995) on the WHO, which received international criticism for its handling of these events. Archival research at the WHO Archives during August 2006 will document how the system of infectious disease report used by the WHO from its inception until the early 1990s was problematized. This research will show how pressure for change was articulated inside the WHO. Collaboration with Prof. Barbara Godard, Professor of English and Avie Bennett Chair in Historical English Literature at York University (see attached CV in OGS format), enables this project to analyse cross-linguistic reporting in the two surveillance systems under investigation. We are particularly interested in developing a better understanding of the challenges and problems facing the new automated translation systems in current online early warning outbreak alert technologies. Preparation for archival research at the WHO Archives will begin in June 2006 with a review of online WHO documents. A research assistant will assist with this work as WHO online documentation is enormous. This project is completion research on a larger project dealing with the formation of new techniques of global public health surveillance in the mid-to late 1990s. Prof. Mykhalovskiy and I are interested in how global online outbreak detection was formed, how it works, and what its effects are. Previous interview research has taken place at The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), WHO, Pro-MED Mail and Factiva. Palgrave and Routledge have each offered us a book contract for this project.

Andy and I have just finished revisions on the paper we presented in Zurich last fall, on How Infrastructure Became a Security Problem. We got a couple reactions on it when we first submitted it, but would be very grateful for more reactions from the ARC network, as we are thinking about what to do with it next. The paper was prepared for a volume on Critical Infrastructure Protection, so we kept the analysis pretty low flying -- close to the practices. One of the questions that we are eager to push is how the story we tell relates to questions of biopolitics and reflexive modernization. Later this week I will post a paper I gave in Finland (but never had a chance to revise) called "Infrastructure and Reflexive Modernization" that deals with related themes at a somewhat more abstract level.

This week's New Yorker contains an interesting and useful article on a new surveillance system for detecting radioactive material--specifically, "dirty bombs". Stephen already posted on the unusual politics-Bush support for 'preparedness' rather than interdiction-here. But the infrastructure is already being put in place, and on a global scale. "The federal government has distributed more than fifteen hundred radiation detectors to overseas ports and border crossings, as well as to America’s northern and southern borders, domestic seaports, Coast Guard ships, airports, railways, mail facilities, and even some highway truck stops. More detectors are being distributed each month. NEST and the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintain a permanent team to respond to events in Washington and along the Northeast Corridor; a second team trained to dismantle nuclear weapons is based in Albuquerque, and eight other teams able to diagnose radioactive materials operate on continuous alert elsewhere in the country." Systems are already being distributed to foreign ports as wll, for example Sri Lanka. Of course, the same problems appear as in other surveillance systems: lots of false positives. "In the United States alone, the sensors generate more than a thousand radiation alarms on an average day, all of which must be investigated." Many scientists doubt that such a system could work or is cost-effective. Yet one surprising aspect is that the system is detecting all kinds of loose radioactive material that would otherwise remain invisible, almost like a "dual-use"! Similar things have been said about syndromic surveillance: the "false-positives" are sometimes real outbreaks of disease, just outbreaks that were previously undetected and typically considered unimportant. So there is an expansion of detection, which may or may not produce an expansion of intervention.