Vital Systems Security

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.

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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I am happy to introduce Amelia Moore to this blog. Amelia is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is conducting fieldwork in the Bahamas (and the U.S.). Her terrific research project focuses on biocomplexity and resonates with many other projects conducted by our little group over here at the vss blog. Amelia recently sent me a short description of her research project. To learn more, read on! Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but thought it was interesting: An Investor’s Guide to Avian Flu Found it on the UPMC Center for Biosecurity site in a page they have for a 2005 conference on avian flu and the private sector.

This summer the UN-initiated “Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction” met in Geneva. The event aimed at increasing political awareness and action on system-vulnerability questions at a global scale. It is interesting to think about this use of the term “platform.” It indicates a space that “brings together a wide range of actors in the various sectors of development and humanitarian work, and in the environmental and scientific fields related to disaster risk reduction.” However, it does not yet seem to point to a coherent way of organizing these diverse elements (including not only actors but also techniques and practices) toward a shared aim.

Howard Kunreuther, one of the major figures in insurance and catastrophe risk in the United States, has an op-ed in today’s Times about hurricane insurance post-Hurricane Katrina (he has also co-edited a book on risk and natural catastrophe post-Katrina that is worth a look). Apparently, State Farm, the major insurer for flood risk in the area, has decided to stop selling policies to homeowners in the area. Thus the question: Who will cover loss for the next big hurricane?

This has been a topic on which Kunreuther has been focused since at least the late 1960s, when attention in the United States began to turn to the question of increasing catastrophe risk as people moved into more risk-prone areas, and the role of government in promoting this “risky” behavior through compensation or cheap loans after the event. (Some studies showed that people ended up better off financially, at least in some cases, after natural catastrophes than before.)

The prescriptions now are the same as the prescriptions then: better evaluation of catastrophe loss risk, pricing of insurance to reflect that risk, and individual decisions about what kinds of risks they are willing to take, and what kind of premiums they are willing to pay. Kunreuther adds a proposal for vouchers that would help low-income households pay for insurance, which, he holds is vastly preferable to blanket subsidies which mask the real risks assumed by location decisions.

I blogged on a similar topic some time ago, concerning the Army Corps efforts to disseminate information about flood risk in New Orleans through new visualizations based on the web. Kunreuther is offering a broader overview of what might be called a neo-liberal apparatus of catastrophe risk management through the calculative choices of free actors. Sounds pretty good to me.

Read on for the full op-ed:
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In the last chapter (entitled “Death”) of her new book, Dolly Mixtures, Sarah Franklin comments in interesting ways on the food and mouth crisis of 2001 and the so-called slaughter policy.

CDC suspended on Saturday all work at Texas A&M biodefense lab due to the failure to report a series of incidents.

Melinda Cooper recently drew my attention to an interesting study conducted by Harvard Medical School Center and sponsored by Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme. The study predicts that “climate change will significantly affect the health of humans and ecosystems and these impacts will have economic consequences.” In addition, the study attempts to “survey” existing and future costs of climate change. It argues that the insurance industry “will be at the center of this issue, absorbing risk and helping society and business to adapt and reduce new risks.”

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Yesterday news sources were announcing that the Army Corps of Engineers had made available, online, findings from its post-Katrina risk and reliability reports on New Orleans. The site is well worth a look, in part because the technology is cool. They have made flood map data available in a format that can be read by google earth, so “citizens” can choose a neighborhood in New Orleans, and then view flood maps for 50, 100, and 500 year events pre- and post-Katrina (the latter taking into account improved flood control installed since the hurricane).

These kinds of flood maps have been produced by the Army Corps for a long time, and they are crucial to contingency planning for agencies like FEMA (now part of DHS). Part of what is interesting here, however, is the explicit emphasis on making such maps publicly available so that “citizens”, as the report notes, “can make risk-informed decisions.” There is, as I have written in the past, a long history of efforts to make individual citizens take greater account of natural catastrophe risk in their decisions about where to build or buy houses. The 1968 Federal Flood Insurance Act was intended precisely to create a technology through which insurance companies would “price” the risk of flood, so that this risk would be built into housing costs through insurance premiums. The new technology, however, has afforded an apparently more direct way to communicate this information. One wonders, however, about the conflicting incentives created by federal programs aimed at New Orleans. One of the conditions for receiving federal aid is that one must live in your house (previously damaged by floods) for a period of time. The political pressure to promote reconstruction may come into conflict with the desire to govern citizens through their calculative decisions about flood risk.