Vital Systems Security

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.

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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, Read the rest of this entry »

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, Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.