Vital Systems Security

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.

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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.
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