The New York Times has an article today that is worth a read on the distribution of Homeland Security Grants to states. The basic topics are pretty familiar, so it doesn't bear saying too much about it (but read the full text after the jump). A couple notes that resonate with various work we have done in the past.

• As was true with civil defense, local officials are looking to find ways to use these funds to deal with problems that they face on a routine basis. So there are some interesting concepts emerging like "all-crimes" programs (a complement to all-hazards).

• There is a clear normative conflict -- of the type that Lyle, Dale, and others have analyzed in public health-health security discussions, and that Andy and I summarize in the new biosecurity volume -- between the way that central officials think about threats and the way that local officials do. Local officials here seem to have something like a classic cost-benefit approach in thinking about crime, as opposed to an orientation to catastrophic terrorism. No doubt, as is the case in public health, one could trace a tradition of approaching crime that emphasizes archival statistics and a "maximization" logic in the allocation of resources that comes into conflict with "existential threat" thinking.

• There is a concern with a creep in the mission. Typical: Catastrophic events keep not happening, so it is hard to stay focused on them. It is easier, notably, in a military in which all you *do* is think about such threats. But harder when you are a local agency spending 99% of your time on other things that seem more pressing, and that are now being starved for funds due to the downturn in local government revenues.

 

 

 

 

 

May 26, 2008

States Chafing at U.S. Focus on Terrorism

By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID JOHNSTON

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s. “I.E.D.’s? As in Iraq I.E.D.’s?” Ms. Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. “There was no new intelligence about this,” she said. “It just came out of nowhere.” More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities. “I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the importance of keeping this nation safe,” said Col. Dean Esserman, the police chief in Providence, R.I. “But I also live every day as a police chief in an American city where violence every day is not foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the neighborhoods.” The demand for plans to guard against improvised explosives is being cited by state and local officials as the latest example that their concerns are not being heard, and that federal officials continue to push them to spend money on a terrorism threat that is often vague. Some $23 billion in domestic security financing has flowed to the states from the federal government since the Sept. 11 attacks, but authorities in many states and cities say they have seen little or no intelligence that Al Qaeda, or any of its potential homegrown offshoots, has concrete plans for an attack. Local officials do not dismiss the terrorist threat, but many are trying to retool counterterrorism programs so that they focus more directly on combating gun violence, narcotics trafficking and gangs — while arguing that these programs, too, should qualify for federal financing, on the theory that terrorists may engage in criminal activity as a precursor to an attack. Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, said in an interview that his department had tried to be flexible to accommodate local needs. “We have not been highly restrictive,” Mr. Chertoff said. But he said the department’s programs were never meant to assist local law enforcement agencies in their day-to-day policing. The requirements of the Homeland Security programs had helped strengthen the country against an attack, Mr. Chertoff said, expressing concern about shifting money to other law enforcement problems from counterterrorism. “If we drop the barrier and start to lose focus,” he said, “we will make it easier to have successful attacks here.” Local officials have long groused that Homeland Security grants seemed mismatched with local needs and that the agency’s requirements failed to recognize regional differences. After Hurricane Katrina struck Gulf Coast states in 2005, federal authorities demanded that cities come up with evacuation plans, even on the West Coast where earthquakes, not hurricanes, are a threat. Most of the $23 billion in federal grants has been spent shoring up local efforts to prevent, prepare for and ferret out a possible attack. Because official post-9/11 critiques found huge gaps in communication and coordination, billions of dollars have been spent linking federal law enforcement and intelligence authorities to the country’s more than 750,000 police officers, sheriffs and highway patrol officers. Many Homeland Security-financed “fusion centers,” designed to collect and analyze data to deter terrorist attacks, have evolved into what are known as “all-crimes” or “all-hazards” operations, branching out from terrorism to focus on violent crime and natural disasters. Intelligence officials assert that Al Qaeda remains intent on striking inside the United States. The Seattle chief of police, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said, “If the law enforcement focus at the local level is only on counterterrorism, you will be unable as a local entity to sustain it unless you are an all-crimes operation, and you may be missing some very significant issues that could be related to terrorism.” Chief Kerlikowske is president of a group of police chiefs from major cities who said in a report last week that local governments were being forced to spend increasingly scarce resources because, they say, Homeland Security did not pay for all the costs. “Most local governments move law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence programs down on the priority list because their municipality has not yet been directly affected by an attack,” the report said. Seattle has experienced its own terrorism scares since 9/11, after photographs of the Space Needle were recovered in 2002 from suspected Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan. The city had another jolt last year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation sought the public’s help in locating two men “exhibiting unusual behavior” on a ferry. Neither episode proved an actual threat. In the case of this year’s focus on improvised explosives, the main killer of American troops in Iraq, Homeland Security officials say the attention to the domestic threat stems from a classified strategy that President Bush approved last year that is designed to help the country to deter and defeat I.E.D.’s before terrorists can detonate them here. The administration is completing a plan to assign specific training, prevention and response duties to several federal agencies, including the F.B.I. and Homeland Security, the officials said. But they also said that state advisers misunderstood the financing guidelines, and that states could also meet the requirement by improving their overall preparedness against a range of undefined terrorist threats. State officials say the federal government issued the grant requirement without providing any new information pointing to the danger of bomb threats in the United States — an approach they said underscored the glaring disconnect between how states and the federal government view the terrorist threat. “I.E.D. detection, protection, and prevention is an important issue, and we all need to be looking at that,” Matthew Bettenhausen, California’s homeland security director, said in a telephone interview. But, he said of the grant requirement: “It’s another thing to be so prescriptive; that came as a surprise to many of us states.” Maj. Gen. Tod M. Bunting, the homeland security director for Kansas, said Washington ran the risk of raising undue public alarm by prescribing such a large part of the grant to bomb prevention. “A federal cookie-cutter mandate doesn’t work on every state,” said General Bunting, who is also the state’s adjutant general. Leesa Berens Morrison, Arizona’s homeland security director, said the new federal guidance “absolutely surprised us,” and said state officials were scrambling to comply. In Massachusetts, Ms. Kayyem regarded a potential grant this year of $20 million in federal homeland security money as too important to pass up, even though she said that technically one-quarter of it had to be spent on I.E.D.’s to qualify for the money. So, Massachusetts officials wrote a creative proposal, pledging to upgrade bomb squads in many of the state’s 351 cities and towns. It also proposed buying new hazardous-material suits, radios to communicate between law enforcement agencies and explosive-detection devices. But Ms. Kayyem acknowledged that much of the equipment was chosen to serve double duty. Hazmat suits could be useful in the event of a bombing, but would be even more help with accidents that state officials regarded as much more probable, like chemical spills on the Massachusetts Turnpike. The grant was approved by federal authorities, but Mr. Chertoff warned: “There are times when you get so far away from the core purpose that it’s hard to justify the grant money.” In one effort to crack down on what Mr. Chertoff referred to as “mission creep,” Homeland Security officials last year imposed restrictions on use of a heavy truck by the police in Providence, R.I. The truck had been bought with federal counterterrorism money, based on a plan that it be used to haul a patrol boat used for port security. But when the Police Department began to use the truck instead to pull a horse trailer, federal authorities sought to draw the line, relenting only after local officials protested in a phone call with Washington, said local and federal officials.

Eric Schmitt reported from Boston, Phoenix and Topeka, Kan.; and David Johnston from Washington.

In her recent book Just One Child, anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh traces the origins of China's infamous 'one child policy' to a group of defense scientists who specialized in cybernetics and 'control theory'. Her book is unabashedly both an analytic project and a criticism of the roots of the policy, that is to say, she begins from the claim that the 'one child policy' is an ethical bad and uses her analysis to discover what led to such unethical policy. Her claim that missile scientists were at the route of the policy, in other words, is a denunciation of a particular application of 'natural science' in government policy. First, I will tell a little bit of her story, which is incredibly interesting in its resonances with some of the topics we have been following in VSS. Then, I want to show how the perspective we have developed in the VSS research collaboration can productively engage as well as put in perspective her denunciation of cybernetic planning. As she tells it, the problem of 'population' first became a fundamental aspect of PRC planning in the mid-1970s. As the anti-intellectualism of the Cultural Revolution was winding down, a number of social scientists began to collect moderate amounts of data regarding national population numbers. Prior to this, there were only estimates: a classic statement, often repeated, was that China's population was 'around 800 million'. So a few sociologists begin to construct population as a problem, and argue that some form of population control should be implemented. But, Greenhalgh argues, the social sciences had been massively discredited and dispersed; only natural science, and most importantly, defense or weapons science had been actively supported. In the late 1970s, one Song Jian, cybernetician working on missile logistics and control, became interested in the problem of China's population. Song became interested in population control primarily through interactions with the Club of Rome and its claim that global human population was reaching ecological limits of sustainability. Notably, in the Club of Rome publication The Limits to Growth used cybernetic techniques and control theory in order to make projections of population growth. Song adapted these techniques, and employed his own expertise, developing a number of simulations and projections (using early, and at the time rare in China, computers) which projected an imminent population crisis. Greenhalgh argues that it was this epistemological reframing that led to the policies of 'only one child' (rather than a more moderate policy entitled 'later, longer, fewer'). For Greenhalgh, this was a misapplication of a natural (and military-oriented) science onto the object of the human population. As she puts it, “their specialty was control theory, an engineering approach to controlling the behavior of machines—not humans” (125). Two critical engagements I think our VSS collaboration can make with this argument. First, this was certainly not unique to China. As we have shown in a number of papers and blog posts, the migration of military logistics, techniques, and technologies to previously 'social' fields is extensive and longstanding (see, for example, Collier and Lakoff 'On Vital Systems Security'; Lakoff, 'The Generic Bio-Threat'; my own working paper, 'Pathogens and the Strategy of Preparedness'). Moreover, cybernetics (or cybernetics-like systems thinking) we have tracked (particularly in Brian and Onur's work; also Collier, 'Enacting Catastrophe') as it is applied first to the threat of nuclear attacks, then increasingly to other 'social' fields such as energy systems or labor. See also Stephen's recent blog entry on the use of cybernetics in Allende's socialist Chile. A second point is that we might question placing cybernetics firmly within 'natural science' against 'human science' or 'social science'. The cases above show how, in the US, cybernetic techniques were applied both to social and 'natural' objects. From what I understand, there is nothing about cybernetic techniques that (any more than statistical techniques) determines whether its objects are humans or missiles. What may be significant, however, is the form it gives to those objects; that is to say, whereas statistics and probability were fundamental to the emergence of 'the social' as an object of government (see Rabinow, French Modern), cybernetics gives human social activity another form. As I think we have argued in VSS throughout, this doesn't call for denunciation out of hand but engagement with the limits and possibilities of such thinking.