Vital Systems Security

No time like this very second to point all you anthropology people (once again) to the debate about the role of your discipline in enlightening soldiers to the nuances and minutiae of cultures and cultural difference. As the debate about the army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) gets uglier, I thought this would be an appropriate time to link us to some the antagonists. In one obscure corner you will find the work of one Ann Marlowe, writer of - not kidding - such works as “The Book of Trouble: A Romance” and “How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z”, who has just published a scathing review of said HTS in the amusing slash scary Weekly Standard. (Dynamic link, so check it out fast!) In the Red, White and Blue corner, you will find the writing of a Mr. Dave Dilegge, editor of the curious and fascinating Small War Journal, who takes umbrage with Ms. Marlowe and hurls compelling counterpoints and blog daggers at her. And in the hipster corner, you will find the latest (rather blasé) blurb on the whole mess in the Danger Room. You will also find there links to Wired’s continuing coverage of this increasingly heated discussion. So glad my discipline of sociology is untouched by internal strife or critique of its methods and social utility.

All: I am happy to make another introduction to our little group. Benjamin Hickler is a student in the joint Med. Anthro program at UCSF. He comes to us via Paul’s seminar, and is now engaged in fieldwork. He recently sent me a description of his project — of very great interest — that I thought I would be great to share and discuss. Read on to see it!

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A fishy effort is underway by the LAPD’s counter-terrorism unit to map Muslim communities in the city. Drawing from census data, which does not capture religious affiliation of individuals or household, and other demographic information, the men and women in blue hope to be able to extrapolate the relevant information. It’s a curious VSS issue not least of which because of the interesting tactic police officials have begun taking in understanding and characterizing potential threats at the local level. Quoting from today’s LA Times article on the subject:

In outlining the program last week before a congressional committee, Deputy Police Chief Michael P. Downing, who heads the counter-terrorism operation, said the department’s plan was designed to minimize the radicalization of Muslims in Los Angeles. Instead of relying on experts, he said, the mapping would produce a “richer picture” of the community and guide future strategies.

“While this project will lay out geographic locations of many different Muslim populations around Los Angeles, we also intend to take a deeper look at their history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socioeconomic status and social interactions,” he said. “It is also our hope to identify communities, within the larger Muslim community which may be susceptible to violent ideologically based extremism and then use a full spectrum approach guided by intelligence-led strategy.”

So, in other words, poverty and isolation, coupled with more conservatively oriented mosques and a population under increasing scrutiny, should be able to produce a picture of the prototypical threatening Muslim - no doubt viewed as a kind of “vulnerability” within the larger societal fabric. The chief of police of the LAPD, William J. Bratton, had this to say in response to critics: “This is not . . . targeting or profiling… It is an effort to understand communities.” Hmm. I have absolutely no objection to law enforcement incorporating demographic and census data at the population level into their purview and techniques — I think it’s rather a long time in coming and quite necessary. However, I do object to couching the obvious targeting of one religious community in these terms, utilizing these techniques. Seems to me that a better way to gain a kind of seamless integration with - and entree to - the Muslim community would be to actually reach out to members of those communities, consistently, actively and visibly, along with every other (non-Muslim) community! Talk about a good dual use strategy!!

* * UPDATE - - NOVEMBER 15, 2007 * *

The LAPD just decided to cancel the surveillance program. My analysis was whacky, but the program — now DOA — was odious. Have a look at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-muslim15nov15,1,7941397.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

In our work on the genealogy of vital systems security, Stephen and I have noted the importance of “imaginative enactment” as a form of VSS knowledge-production. Among other things, imaginative enactment is a method for determining infrastructural vulnerabilities in the absence of archival data on the historical incidence of what are termed “low probability, high consequence” events – such as a virulent influenza pandemic, a dirty bomb attack on a major city, a catastrophic earthquake, etc. One form of imaginative enactment that I’ve been looking at is the scenario-based exercise. These are role-playing games in which decision makers are faced with an urgent crisis sparked by an event (a terrorist attack, an outbreak of an infectious disease, etc), take action to intervene, and watch the results of their interventions unfold. In this post, I want to begin to explore the structure and history of this type of imaginative enactment – which was originally developed in the 1950s at RAND (along with everything else), and called the “political exercise.”

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It’s hallucinatory Friday in VSS land — and that must mean DARPA. Wired has an article about a $1.3 million contract to Lockheed for an “Integrated Crises Early Warning System.” They are seeing this, it seems, as a kind of “situational awareness” — but one that has less to do with enemy positions and more with, well, the social. ” David Honey, who is the head of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office is quoted in the article as saying that “Commanders will always need to have an accurate picture of enemy positions, as well as friendly units and allies. But increasingly it’s social, cultural, political and economic information, foreign language capabilities and other clues – that are proving essential.” And who better for that than Lockheed?

Interestingly, the article points out, there is a history of similar efforts. For example, an integrated crisis warning system that was funded by the agency in the 1970s, and some other more recent efforts, including the ACUMEN (Anticipatory Culture-Based Modeling Environment) model, from which the diagram above is taken.

But actually it was something else in the article that really caught my eye. Wired makes a joke about “forecasting riots” — like the weather, ha ha. But in fact, as we have been finding out in our work on the Office of Emergency Preparedness, in the late 1960s and early 1970s it does seem that models of riots and models for things like natural hazards occupied a common space — or, more accurately, they were modeled using similar techniques. Hopefully we will have more to say about this when we start moving through the mountain of material that Onur and Brian brought back from the archives.

An interesting article in Time magazine on response to floods in Tabasco reports that the Mexican Government did an admirable job when compared to the response to Katrina in the United States. Among other things, it seems that the military was out in force two days before the worst of the flooding, and was constantly running rescue operations during the entire event — a stark contrast to New Orleans, where, as we know, getting military and national guard rescue into gear was problematic and slow.

One of the things I would like to do more on the blog is to introduce the work of various people we know and run into who are doing work related to vital systems security. I wanted to start by introducing a PhD student I met in Finland last year named Antti Silvast. Antti, who has a background in engineering, is working on the question of electric system reliability, particularly against the background of deregulation and increasing concerns about critical infrastructure protection. As will be immediately evident, Antti’s work is very much connected to concerns that have been central to the collaboration.

Read on for a description of Antti’s work that he sent along.

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Here is the GAO report on the US government’s ill-conceived attempt to fund the development of a second-generation vaccine for anthrax.