Vital Systems Security

I’m posting this here as well as at the bio-nano blog, since it is a nice point of overlap…

Dupont, the chemical giant, has put its peanut butter in the chocolate belong to Environmental Defense, the environmental action NGO. Or did ED’s chocolate end up in DuPont’s peanut butter? In any case they have teamed up to produce a “NanoRisk Framework” that combines techniques risk analysis and product development to help companies monitor the production of new nanomaterials. It is, at first sight, a surprising partnership, but as it turns out, I guess ED is known for “finding the ways that work” as their website puts it. It is also another example of the desire to bring a public into being, as the framework is publicly distributed, and available for comment until March 30th. It’s a nice document too– the kind of thing that isn’t normally freely available on a website…

Homeland Security Watch, a blog run by CSIS-type Washington policy analysts, should be added to our radar. A recent post announced the publication of a Congressional Research Service report on Homeland Security’s application of “risk-based” grant distribution. The author of the post described Congressional concern with the application of risk analysis to ‘vital systems security’ problems: “Terrorism offers neither the trend lines nor the depth of historical data (thank goodness) needed to design a reliable methodology that risk assessment demands in other cases, such as hurricanes or car accidents.” While I haven’t had a chance to read it, the full report can be found here.

I have been looking a bit into the problem of enactment and war games. In so doing, a couple of interesting links came up, including to a couple first-order practitioners of war gaming, James F. Dunnigan and Kenneth Watman and to an article by James Der Derian at the Watson Institute that is worth a read. In our article on “Distributed Preparedness” Andy and I put forward the idea that imaginative enactment is one of the key techniques of a future oriented (rather than archive-oriented) form of knowledge about collective life. The war game story is clearly an important part of the genealogy of imaginative enactment. Civil defense was one point of transfer from military to civilian affairs. Certainly there are others.

As an aside, Der Derian’s website is very much worth checking out as an effort to produce some online space for security discussions.

I don’t recall whether this has come across our screen before, but this seems to be a center for risk related analytic work and critical social science at LSE. It includes some of the folks in the risk discussions (Beck, Ericson) as well as more technocratic types. Lots of working papers…worth a scan. The seminars look to be on the technical side; I was particularly drawn to one on participatory risk mapping. Also the research fellowships may be of interest to some.