Vital Systems Security

The novel H1N1 virus has been elected the “virus of the year.” According to the journal Science, the pandemic was a “near miss.” As the authors of the short piece argue, the “H1N1 virus was less virulent than feared, but the next pandemic could be worse.” Prepare for the next pandemic is the message.

What kind of work is the trope of the Next Pandemic doing? Might it not be worth investigating the current pandemic first, before we jump to the next? Before we orient ourselves towards the near future, it might be necessary to first inhabit the recent past in some meaningful way. What, in fact, has just happened? Apparently, it is easier for experts to take responsibility for the future than for the past.

Just to remind ourselves:

1. Most experts predicted the emergence of an H5 virus. It was an H1 virus.

2. Most experts predicted that the pandemic would start off in South-East Asia. It turned out to be closer to home.

3. Most experts predicted that it would be a devastating event. WHO now calls it a “moderate” pandemic.

4. Most experts predicted serious consequences for critical infrastructure.

Good luck with the next predictions! Trust your expert!

CALL FOR PAPERS

Behemoth – A peer-reviewed journal published by the Akademie Verlag, Berlin

Special Issue: Epidemic Orders

In the past few years, epidemic events, both actual and virtual, have made a spectacular comeback. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases such as avian and swine flu have generated great anxiety the world over, resulting in a pervasive sense of vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty. A powerful spirit of urgency, based on a genuine concern for human health and well-being, overdetermined by a variety of scientific, political, and economic interests, engendered a real flurry of action. In the epic battle against germs, the biopolitical state mobilized material and symbolic resources at an unprecedented scale.

In the shadow of the emerging infectious disease threat, significant shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research have occurred. The aim of this special issue of Behemoth is to offer an initial set of diagnostic accounts. What are the domains in which fundamental shifts have occurred over the past few years? Who are the actors involved and what are the underlying logics animating these shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research? The key aim of this issue is to draw analytic attention to recent reconfigurations and to identify the kind of epidemic orders that are taking shape today at the heart of the biopolitical state.

Please send abstracts for this special issue of Behemoth to the editor Carlo Caduff (carlocaduff@access.uzh.ch) and to Kathrin Franke (behemoth@rz.uni-leipzig.de). Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 January 2010. Deadline for submission of articles: 30 June 2010.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has released its assessment of the coming swine flu resurgence and the US Government’s preparedness efforts. Press release here and full report here.

Hopefully some of our resident second order observers of pandemic preparedness can do some parsing for us…

The register also has a lovely article lamenting the lack of really good panic.

I thought this piece in the Times (on the vulnerability of the nation’s vital infrastructure systems, such as the electric grid, telecommunication networks, air control system, or the banking systems (e.g. payments and settlements systems), against cyber attacks organized by anonymous hackers) would be a “pleasant” distraction from those of you who are busy following the epidemic.

As you might have noticed, there has been a rising concern on how vulnerable the nation is to such cyber-attacks given the increasing dependency on computerized infrastructures nearly in all domains of collective life and who should have jurisdiction over the intelligence gathering and security activities over these infrastructures. As another Times piece from December 2008 indicates, these efforts seem to be originating from a series of break-ins into the government computer systems. (You might be interested in checking a report written by Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy group, under the title of “Securing Cyberspace in the 44th Presidency“.) Finally, “thousands of daily attacks on federal and private computer systems in the United States — many from China and Russia, some malicious and some testing chinks in the patchwork of American firewalls,” including a recent attack on the air transportation network, apparently “have prompted the Obama administration to review American strategy” by bringing this report back to the forefront of national security discussions on the internet as a source of vulnerability for the vital systems of the nation.

The article treats the issue mostly as one that is pertinent to sovereign security and, consequently, draws national security discussions on whether such attacks can be deterred or not. And if they cannot be deterred to what extent a policy of pre-emption, much discussed during the Bush presidency as a national security alternative, is more appropriate. Interestingly enough, the article points out much of the discussion resembles the debates over how to program national security against nuclear war in the 1950s and the 60s–a theme that we have visited in the OEP episode. However, or rather to be more precise just because of the reason preparedness had slowly mutated into an autonomous logic of security in the 60s thanks to the irreducible uncertainty of knowing exactly to whom a nuclear missile had belong (with the introduction of submarines) or merely an accidental launch, it seems to be the case that intelligence and national security community does not have much faith in deterrence. As it turns out, as an event a cyber-attack is pretty much an threat without enemy in the VSS language, since the origin of an attack is often impossible to know. And furthermore as far as pre-emption through destruction of the rival’s computer systems before an expected attack is concerned the asymmetrical dependence of the US to digital systems, according to experts, seems to assure the certain defeat of the US in such a cyber-war.

Therefore, the recent efforts of the Obama administration to reform the cyber security policy seems to be an acknowledgement that the problem one faces does not fit so well neither into the domain of sovereign security (as neither a matter of deterrence nor pre-emption) nor to the mode of prevention as a broader approach to security. A senior military officer who has been deeply engaged in the debate for several years, according to the Times, warns of the limitations of a cyber-security approach based on the logic of prevention: “The fortress model [based on building firewalls, better virus detectors, and further restrictions to access to government computers] simply will not work for cyber. Someone will always get in.” Despite these limitations, as the above mentioned report implies (it argues that this issue cannot be left to DHS’s jurisdiction for critical infrastructure security), in what mode security will conducted seems to be a still open issue. Hence, it would be interesting to speculate on how preparedness and VSS might look like in the case of the internet and digital systems…

The irony of the situation in my mind is the fact that internet as a vital communication infrastructure today was invented by the MIT based electrical engineers who were developing a theory of survivable telecommunications and electric networks in the 1960s in the first place as a response to the vulnerabilities a potential nuclear war had posed. Just as a caveat, those experts were the same ones who were at OEP in 1967 designing the plans of a natural gas pipeline through tools of network modeling that was also conceived as a “survivable network” in the face of a nuclear attack or internal and unexpected network failures. Thus, I think what we are seeing is a typical example of the historical process in which vital system security emerges first as a response to specific set of primary problems of the social, such as possible network failures, and then a secondary set of problems and vulnerabilities emerge as different systems become interdependent upon each other.

Before finishing, I also thought it was an interesting piece of data in the light of our conversation on the financial crisis as to what extent the financial system has more and more come to be seen as a vital system not only for the well-being and resilience of the “real” economy, but also a system worthy of national security: Mike McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, apparently had briefed Bush as early as May 2007 on the threat that  if a single large American bank were successfully attacked “it would have an order-of-magnitude greater impact on the global economy” than the Sept. 11, 2001 as “the ability to threaten the U.S. money supply is the equivalent of today’s nuclear weapon.” According to McConnell, the events that took place in the face of the near-collapse of Bear Stearns (and we can add Lehman) invite hackers to sabotage payments and settlements system of the Fed and computer systems of individual banks. In a study began last summer right before the Bear Stearns epsiode in which markets froze on their own accord, they have seemed to simulate a scenario in which the system that clears the market trades freezes.

Given the new set of financial system reforms will create payments and settlements systems for exotic instruments such as derivatives, such a study on the possible secondary vulnerabilities of such systems that are offered as solutions to systemic crisis and risk management gains further importance. Obviously McConnell and his intelligence community is not the only ones doing this work; a group of economists in the Fed, systems analysts circulating between different central banks and a group of scientists calling their discipline complexity science at the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Lab of DHS are also engaged in similar simulations of the financial system with the help of network analysis.

Here is an interesting piece from NY Times on some familiar issues we have been dealing with in the OEP research. 

The record storms and floods that swept through the Midwest last month struck at the heart of America’s corn region, drowning fields and dashing hopes of a bumper crop.

They also brought into sharp relief a new economic hazard. As America grows more reliant on corn for its fuel supply, it is becoming vulnerable to the many hazards that can damage crops, ranging from droughts to plagues to storms.

Apparently the price of ethanol went up by 19 percent in a month after the floods. The article goes on to construct a scenario that can take place once the share of biofuel in the overall supply of gasoline goes up to 20 percent:

Experts fear that a future crop failure could take so much fuel out of the market that it would send prices soaring at the pump. Eventually, the cost of filling Americans’ gas tanks could be influenced as much by hail in Iowa as by the bombing of an oil pipeline in Nigeria.

Just as in the case of OEP once again a catastrophic event (storm and flood) in a medium inherently governed by stochastic processes (the weather) problematized as a potential threat to the stability of the economy as a vulnerable system (eventually leads to the question of resilience again as we saw in the case of war mobilization and inflation problem by the early 70s under Nixon). As the article argues, introduction of biofuel leads to a new level of vulnerability:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita interrupted a quarter of the nation’s oil production and closed dozens of refineries for weeks. Lines formed for the first time since the 1970s as gasoline spiked above $3 a gallon, a record at the time. The nation’s increasing dependence on crops for motor fuel adds another level of vulnerability from the weather.

I thought what is particularly interesting in this case is the opening up of a blockage as we pass a threshold with the emergence of biofuel. To my knowledge this is a very new development as corn, a conventional and critical source of food for populations is becoming a source of energy as the seemingly stable barrier between these two categories of vital domains are being linked for the first time as we demolished the barrier separating these two domains. Now we face with a new interface that is in need of being governed as one can even see in the concerns that IMF and World Bank have expressed their worries about this new phenomenon recently. 

It seems like at a technical level the first 3 generations of biofuels, there is nothing new about the process of transforming biomass into biofuel. It is a simple process of production of ethanol. However, what is interesting is that a company called Synthetic Genomics is is genetically engineering microorganisms to produce fuel directly from carbon dioxide on an industrial scale, which might be a possible solution to the problem of vulnerability mentioned above. I believe the founder of the company might be a familiar figure to those who are working on synthetic biology: Craig Venter, a member of the effort to map the human genome and the founder of The Institute for Genomic Research. An interesting convergence of VSS and Synthetic Biology and Nanotechnology blogs…

Here is a new and interesting article that engages some of the VSS work:

Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle’ (Ewald), `preparedness’ (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption’ (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feature within the Australian political imaginary. We explore how the approach to the future entailed in the paradigm enframes `life’ and stifles democratic participation and innovation in ways of living. Three case studies (in biosecurity, bioecology and biomedicine) demonstrate not only how the paradigm pervades the government of everyday life, but also how it is challenged by human `agents’, material `life’ and the dynamic relations between these two. By formulating what this involves, we point to a concept of the political more conducive to democratic pluralism, diversity of life and innovative culture.

DemfromCT — a blogger on DailyKos — has another interesting post on school closure and pandemic preparedness. It is about many things, among more information on exercises that show that in the US school closure may not be in time to help much, and an interesting comparison with a recent minor outbreak in Hong Kong, where, apparently, parents held students home from school in a “precautionary” fashion before a decision was taken to close schools. Also interesting is the mention of the role that blogs and the internet more generally would play in a pandemic.

Trust for America’s Health has released its 2007 edition of “Ready Or Not?”, a yearly treasure trove of information on the state of public health preparedness in the US. The report provides a thorough assessment of the wide array of activities, issues and trends that intersect to help form this constantly changing field. It is a gem and should be required reading for anyone with a professional interest in the field.

Read the rest of this entry »

I shouldn’t be so snarky because the story is actually really interesting. Check out this link from yesterday’s LA Times, which details the behind-the-scenes politicking which proved the coup de grace for one of the nation’s first next-generation vaccines against a category A agent: VaxGen’s rPA102 anthrax vaccine. Deft lobbying and savvy rhetoric by Emergent BioSolutions, Inc., proved insurmountable for the South San Francisco company, which not only failed to produce the nation’s first BioShield-related vaccine, but was kicked in the teeth for trying. Amongst all the great reasons for not wanting to see anthrax ever appear amongst human populations in epidemic proportions is the discomfiting imagery of the six shot series of vaccinations that will still be needed in the event of such a threat. Emergent BioSolutions, manufacturer of said scary but mostly-kind-of effective vaccine, effectively argued that VaxGen’s (substantially less onerous) product was of questionable worth, developed by novices. Ouch. I thought BioShield’s point was to get novices in the game, because BigPharma was avoiding orphan vaccines like the plague. Ha! The plague!

Oh yeah, and look at this cool picture.