Vital Systems Security

I have a sense that there are a bunch of things we should be talking about, including developments in the Anthrax case.

But here just a quickie on Georgia. I happened across a chilling article — pasted in below — from a Russian news service. The article is an exhortation for the Russian army to go all the way into Georgia. Among many interesting and disturbing things, it calls for a strategic bombing campaign against Georgia:

“Obviously, entrenching Russia’s military presence in South Ossetia cannot be the goal of this war. A source from the SKVO told us: “We have to go all the way - destroy the runways at all airfields, including civilian airports - and all key railway nodes. Cut off Georgia’s supplies of gas, and its electricity supplies - with 70% of that coming from the Inguri power plant in Abkhazia. Make the ports at Poti and Batumi inoperable, along with the oil terminal at Supsa, and the railway lines to Azerbaijan and Turkey.”

The kicker? The model is the U.S. bombing campaign against Serbia:

“Ruslan Pukhov agrees: “The USA demonstrated in Yugoslavia what ought to be done in this kind of situation. It isn’t clear why television broadcasting and cell-phones are still functioning in Georgia. I hope Russia at least decides to establish a 10-15 kilometer buffer zone around South Ossetia, patrolled by infantry
as well as from the air.”"

Full article after the jump…

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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.

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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The ongoing crisis in the housing market seems to illustrate how the economy can be thought of as a vital system and how that system and its governing can be conceptualized. The article points to how the labor market and the housing market can interact in unexpected ways and prevent markets to reach equilibrium.

The rapid decline in housing prices is distorting the normal workings of the American labor market. Mobility opens up job opportunities, allowing workers to go where they are most needed. When housing is not an obstacle, more than five million men and women, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s work force, move annually from one place to another — to a new job after a layoff, or to higher-paying work, or to the next rung in a career, often the goal of a corporate transfer. Or people seek, as in Dr. Morgan’s case, an escape from harsh northern winters.

Now that mobility is increasingly restricted. Unable to sell their homes easily and move on, tens of thousands of people like Mr. Kirkland and Dr. Morgan are making the labor force less flexible just as a weakening economy puts pressure on workers to move to wherever companies are still hiring.

In 2007, the inter-state migration dipped at a rate of 27 percent compared to last year, highest decrease in the rate of inter-state migration in the last 15 years! This seems to hint at the re-conceptualization of the economy as an open systems with interacting sub-systems and non-economic domains. In this new way of thinking, the problem of government becomes how to manage these interfaces where different series interact and influence each other. In the last post and in our conversations on the management of the economy, Stephen and I have been arguing for a transformation in the conceptualization of the economy as a vital system that needs to be governed accordingly rather than simply intervened upon. In this perspective, crisis is external to the exogenous to the system, rather than endogenous as Keynesian paradigm would argue. In the Keynesian paradigm, the crisis located at the natural life cycles of capitalism; due to the need for large scale re-investment at the end of each business cycle, the balance of savings and investment gets obscured and unless intervened the economy rather than coming back to the equilibrium point fails to restore the market equilibrium. So, the solution is proactive government intervention with the goal of prolonging the business cycle. The problem is located within the very nature of capitalism. However, as we have been seeing in the housing crisis the problem has nothing to do with fixed costs of re-investment of the business cycle. It rather has to do with the mismanagement of risk, which seems to be an agent of translation between different domains. It is a way to manage an interface, i.e the housing market, and indirectly the labor market, and people’s seemingly non-economic needs of inhabitation. As we have been seeing, miscalculation of risk is posing great vulnerabilities to the economy as a vital system, and the problem of crisis manifests itself in terms of shocks disseminating from one sub-system to an other. Then I presume the problem becomes one of resilience and robustness of the interfaces connecting different domains within the economy: the ability to absorb unexpected, and yet immanent shocks. So, can we actually understand the neoliberal language of regulation, as opposed to intervention, in terms of the management of interfaces? Probably Stephen can tell us more with regard to risk.

Today, Harvey Molotch and Noah McLain gave a talk entitled “Learning From the Subway: How to Do Security For Example” at Columbia Sociology. Based on 100+ hours of ethnographic research conducted by McLain in the New York subway system, Molotch and McLain made an argument argument for a notion of security that extends beyond counter-terrorism measures. They emphasized the inefficiency of the security measures imposed from top such as FEMA and DHS and argued for security measures that will improve regular use conditions and that can also be used under emergencies, such as a better ventilation system. Furthermore, their focus was also on how in everyday practices the subway personnel bent the formal rules to keep the subway running safe and efficiently. With a Latourian emphasis on the agency of objects, they demonstrated how the personnel found new ways of dealing with the pressing practical everyday problems of operating a subway system. Read the rest of this entry »

The special issue of Interfaces journal from 2006 was entitled: Homeland Security: Operations Research Initiatives and Applications. You might find some of the papers interesting, since they touch on broad range of topics discussed on this blog. Some of the topics are bio-security/terrorism, emergency response and critical infrastructures. The article number 6 is especially interesting, since the author starts by drawing a direct link between homeland security and the genealogy of operations research expertise that we have been tracing in OEP research.

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 »

In our work on the genealogy of vital systems security, Stephen and I have noted the importance of “imaginative enactment” as a form of VSS knowledge-production. Among other things, imaginative enactment is a method for determining infrastructural vulnerabilities in the absence of archival data on the historical incidence of what are termed “low probability, high consequence” events – such as a virulent influenza pandemic, a dirty bomb attack on a major city, a catastrophic earthquake, etc. One form of imaginative enactment that I’ve been looking at is the scenario-based exercise. These are role-playing games in which decision makers are faced with an urgent crisis sparked by an event (a terrorist attack, an outbreak of an infectious disease, etc), take action to intervene, and watch the results of their interventions unfold. In this post, I want to begin to explore the structure and history of this type of imaginative enactment – which was originally developed in the 1950s at RAND (along with everything else), and called the “political exercise.”

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One of the things I would like to do more on the blog is to introduce the work of various people we know and run into who are doing work related to vital systems security. I wanted to start by introducing a PhD student I met in Finland last year named Antti Silvast. Antti, who has a background in engineering, is working on the question of electric system reliability, particularly against the background of deregulation and increasing concerns about critical infrastructure protection. As will be immediately evident, Antti’s work is very much connected to concerns that have been central to the collaboration.

Read on for a description of Antti’s work that he sent along.

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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.