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Securing the Homeland: Critical Infrastructure, Risk, and

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Securing ‘the Homeland’

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[This book] provides a thorough, engaging and much overdue account of the key
issues at the intersection between critical infrastructure and the field of Security
Studies.
(Lene Hansen, University of Copenhagen)
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This edited volume uses a ‘constructivist/reflexive’ approach to address critical
infrastructure protection (CIP), a central political practice associated with
national security.
The politics of CIP, and the construction of the threat they are meant to
counter, effectively establish a powerful discursive connection between that the
traditional and normal conditions for day-to-day politics and the exceptional
dynamics of national security. Combining political theory and empirical case
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studies, this volume addresses key issues related to protection and the gover-
nance of insecurity in the contemporary world. The contributors track the trans-
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formation and evolution of critical infrastructures (and closely related issues of

homeland security) into a security problem, and analyse how practices associ-
ated with CIP constitute, and are an expression of, changing notions of security
and insecurity. The book explores aspects of ‘securitisation’ as well as at prac-
tices, audiences, and contexts that enable and constrain the production of the
specific form of governmentality that CIP exemplifies. It also explores the ratio-
nalities at play, the effects of these security practices, and the implications for
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our understanding of security and politics today.

This book will be of much interest to students of Security Studies, Terrorism
Studies and International Relations in general.

Myriam Dunn Cavelty is lecturer and head of the new risks research unit at the
Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich. Kristian Søby Kristensen is a
PhD candidate working with the Research Unit on Defence and Security at the
Danish Institute for International Studies.
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Introduction
Securing the homeland: critical
infrastructure, risk and (in)security
Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Kristian Søby Kristensen

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For a number of years since the end of the East–West bloc confrontation, a lot of
effort, both political and scholarly, has gone into debating various aspects of
how to understand and to react to ‘new’ threats posed to Western societies. From
this plethora of threats, international terrorism was propelled by the attacks of 11
September 2001 to the attention of an anxious public and gave rise to political
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action. Since then, a lot of brainpower has been expended on critically evaluat-
ing a variety of state reactions to this particular threat. In the broader environ-
ment of this debate, one political practice associated with securing vulnerable
societies and ‘the homeland’ against the threat of terrorism has been remarkably
salient: the practice of critical infrastructure protection (CIP).
Etymologically, ‘infrastructure’ is the combination of the Latin prefix infra
meaning below, underneath and the suffix structura meaning ‘the way in which
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an edifice, machine, implement etc. is made or put together’ (Oxford English

Dictionary 1993, Vol. X: 1165). This etymology recalls the context in which the
word was used in the first instance – to describe part of the construction of
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buildings, roads, etc. – and has come to signify an ‘underlying base or founda-
tion especially for an organization or system’ (Dictionary.com). According to
the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the term has been
used since 1927 to refer collectively to the roads, bridges, railway lines, and
similar public works that are required for the functioning of an industrial
economy or its constituent parts. The term is also applied specifically to the
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permanent military installations necessary for the defence of a country.

In the contemporary political debate, some infrastructures are regarded as
‘critical’ (in the sense of ‘vital’, ‘crucial’, ‘essential’) by the authorities because
their prolonged unavailability would, in all likelihood, result in social instability
and major crisis. The etymological origins of infrastructure connote a fixed,
unchanging foundation upon which things can be constructed, providing the
basis for further development – but without which, conversely, further develop-
ment and construction are also impossible. Today, these critical infrastructures
mostly take the form of interconnected, complex and increasingly virtual
systems. The most frequently listed examples of critical infrastructures
encompass banking and finance, government services, telecommunication and
information and communication technologies, emergency and rescue services,
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2 M. Dunn Cavelty and K.S. Kristensen

energy and electricity, health services, transportation, logistics and distribution 1
and water supply (Abele-Wigert and Dunn 2006: 386–9). To express just how 2
important they are for the functioning of society, they have been called ‘instru- 3
mentalities of interstate commerce’ (PCCIP 1997: 98) or ‘lifelines’ (Platt 1995) 4
and have also been metaphorically likened to vital anatomical components such 5
as ‘the nervous system’, ‘the backbone’, ‘essential arteries’ or ‘organic essen- 6
tials’ (see, for example, Faber 1997: 219). 7
Critical infrastructures are seen to be vulnerable to all kinds of threats and 8
risks, ranging from lack of funding, technical error, and natural disasters to mali- 9
cious attacks of all sorts. Not surprisingly, however, since the terrorist attacks in 10
New York and Washington (2001), Madrid (2004) and London (2005), protect- 11
ing infrastructures is mainly discussed as a measure against terrorism. Commen- 12

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surate with the perceived gravity of the threat – the worst-case scenario being 13
the end of society as we know it – a broad range of political and administrative 14
initiatives and efforts are underway both in the US and in Europe in an attempt 15
to better secure these infrastructures, both virtual and physical. 16
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18
CIP and the zeitgeist of the risk society
19
The establishment of CIP as one focal point of the current national security 20
debate of Western states can be seen as a confluence of two interlinked and at 21
times mutually reinforcing factors: 22
23
1 the perception that modern societies are – by their very nature – exposed to 24
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an ever-increasing number of potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities (Beck 25

1992); 26
2 the perception of an increasing willingness of dangerous actors to brutally 27
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exploit these vulnerabilities (Ackerman et al. 2006: x). 28

29
It has been noted that in all of the recent cases of Muslim extremism, the perpe- 30
trators both exploited and targeted elements of what can be called the civilian 31
infrastructure for the purpose of their attacks. This seems to show a propensity 32
of the ‘new’ terrorism for targeting the soft underbelly of liberal, open and 33
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increasingly networked societies, which are both held together and empowered 34
by their critical infrastructures (Barry 2001: 12ff.) and reciprocally made vulner- 35
able due to dependence on them. As the sophistication of these infrastructures 36
increases, so does the potential risk of sophisticated boomerang effects (Beck 37
1992: 37) as exemplified by recent terror attacks. 38
The combination of these two factors has proven to be a key condition for 39
promoting CIP to the forefront of current strategies for providing security. It 40
seems to correspond to the zeitgeist at a time when ‘fear of the future has 41
become a significant feature of contemporary political life’ (Bigo 2006a) and in 42
which ‘the principle of deliberately exploiting the vulnerability of modern civil 43
society replaces the principle of change and accident’ (Beck 2006) – while the 44
notion of the ‘normal accident’ (Perrow 1984) is still lingering in the techno- 45
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Introduction 3
1 logical conception of CIP. Narratives about security in connection with CIP are
2 articulated in terms of an ability (or inability) to control the future. Risk is the
3 underlying logic and rationale of CIP, due to its historical development as well
4 as the instruments and tools used for evaluating vulnerabilities. As such, CIP
5 belongs to a set of security issues linked to the emergence of a ‘rationale of risk
6 management’ in security after the Cold War, a development that is tied in with a
7 discursive shift from threats of identifiable enemies to risks (see also Aradau and
8 van Munster 2006; Castel 1991; Power 2004; Rasmussen 2001, 2004; Dunn
9 Cavelty 2007).
10 Still, the core ideas of CIP, both as a concept and in practice, are by no means
11 new: in fact, the opposite can be claimed, both for the aspect of vulnerabilities
12 and for the aspect of malicious actors. Long before 11 September 2001, the pro-

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13 tection of strategically important installations in the domestic economic and
14 social sphere was an important part of national defence concepts. CIP as a dis-
15 tinct concept for thinking about security linked to the notion of non-deterrable
16 threats has historical roots that can be traced back many decades (see Collier and
17 Lakoff, Chapter 1, this volume). This is no banal observation. There is a tend-
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18 ency, specifically since 2001, to over-endow scholarly texts addressing changes
19 in security concepts and practices with the term ‘new’. Such claims of disconti-
20 nuity are not only used to express a breach with the past, but also to stress the
21 novelty of arguments, and thus also the value of the research. But clearly, the
22 view that these security practices are without precedent and thus in a class of
23 their own prevents us from understanding them in other than superficial ways
24 and this leaves us blind to their historical trajectories. More importantly, calling
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25 things ‘new’ and pointing to a discontinuity also happens to be practiced fre-

26 quently in the political discourse. Evidence suggests that such ‘accounts of the
27 radically new are all too easily transformed into accounts of the radically dan-
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28 gerous’ (Bigo 2006a). They are used to mobilise political support and to legit-
29 imise exceptional measures, a topic that is also exposed and problematised in
30 this book (see, for example, Chapters 2 and 7, this volume). Newness only
31 makes sense against the backdrop of continuity.
32
33
The approach of this book
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34
35 Thus, rather than claiming to look at something radically new, this volume pre-
36 sents the phenomenon of CIP as a ‘specific imbrication of continuity and discon-
37 tinuity’ (Aradau and van Munster 2007: 90), as belonging to a series of events
38 that both preceded and succeeded its birth and evolution, but with distinguish-
39 able implications for security. In this understanding, recent developments follow
40 the pathways inscribed by ‘old’ logics and are the outcome of a trend based on
41 proposals that can be traced back a long way, as a large number of chapters
42 point out (Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6). By highlighting the continuities and relatively
43 subtle adjustments of CIP as a concept and as a practice, this book helps to play
44 down the 11 September 2001 attacks as a key moment in a narrative ‘of an
45 onrushing apocalypse’ (Bigo 2006a). Such an approach is all the more warranted
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4 M. Dunn Cavelty and K.S. Kristensen

because much of the (recent) debate has been driven by politics of near-hysteria 1
on the threat construction side: The CIP discourse is riddled with ‘policies based 2
on worst-case scenarios’ (Kristensen, Chapter 3, this volume) as epitomised by 3
‘shut-down-the power-grid’ stories (Conway, Chapter 5, this volume). 4
At the same time, we are aware that we are shooting at a moving target: CIP 5
is not a static concept, and it is still evolving. When seen as a ‘policy window’ 6
(Kingdon 2003), 11 September 2001 made a number of things possible in the 7
realm of CIP, the most obvious of which is the establishment of the DHS and a 8
complete organisational revamp of the previous CIP ‘assemblage’. The 2001 9
attacks thus clearly belong to a series of defining ‘moments’ for the evolution of 10
the concept – but this volume shows that there were others. For example, as 11
Collier and Lakoff (Chapter 1), Dunn Cavelty (Chapter 2), and Der Derian and 12

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Finkelstein (Chapter 4) point out, the shift from a specific emphasis on systems 13
that are essential for military production to a broader concern with the vital 14
systems that are essential for the economic and social well-being of the entire 15
nation was absolutely crucial in the rise of CIP to high prominence, as was the 16
change of emphasis from physical infrastructure to information infrastructures
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(and lately back again). 18
A ‘constructivist/reflexive’ approach (C.A.S.E. Collective 2006: 445) to 19
security allows the contributors to track the transformation and evolution of crit- 20
ical infrastructures (and closely related issues of homeland security) into a 21
security problem and to analyse how practices associated with critical infrastruc- 22
ture protection constitute, and are an expression of, changing notions of security 23
and insecurity. The book also explores the rationalities at play as well as the 24
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effects of these security practices, and looks at the implications for our under- 25
standing of security and politics today. Explicitly (and at times implicitly) using 26
the techniques provided by Foucault for scrutinising both the practices of lan- 27
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guage and the creation of objects through institutional practices (Foucault 28

1994b; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 104), the chapters in this book embed CIP 29
as a concept and CIP as practice in a changing security environment. Situated 30
somewhere between the Copenhagen and the Paris schools of security, the 31
volume looks at aspects of ‘securitisation’ as well as at practices, audiences and 32
contexts that enable and constrain the production of a specific form of govern- 33
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mentality as exemplified by CIP (C.A.S.E. Collective 2006: 457; cf. Huysmans 34

2006: 5 and 8). Since critical infrastructures and their protection, as a distinct 35
security concept, are largely constructs of the US government and have lately 36
been reconfigured by the aspiration to fight terrorism abroad and at home at the 37
same time, this book naturally focuses mainly on the US discourse and practice. 38
39
40
CIP: both wide and narrow
41
This book presents two perspectives on CIP: a narrow one and a broad one. 42
These two conceptions of CIP are the principal ordering principle of the chapters 43
in this volume, which range from the more narrow conception to the broad con- 44
ception. The narrow perspective on CIP (Part I) is closely associated with how it 45
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Introduction 5
1 is represented in the mainstream political discourse. This understanding has a
2 technical character linked to the engineering aspect of infrastructures, and is pre-
3 dominantly the purview of engineers and public policy pundits rather than of
4 political scientists (cf. Radvanovsky 2006; Auerswald et al. 2006). From this
5 perspective, CIP programmes focus on mitigating the vulnerabilities of systems
6 to a variety of potentially disruptive events, an approach known as ‘all-hazards’
7 approach. CIP is thus not focused on interdicting terrorists, but on making sure
8 that if a terrorist attack (or any other event) should occur, its consequences will
9 not be calamitous. In other words, CIP is not a policing practice, but a prepared-
10 ness practice. In fact, CIP elegantly sidesteps the policing problem. Given that it
11 is difficult to predict, deter or prevent a terrorist attack, one alternative is to
12 develop mitigation measures, by creating systems that are resilient enough to

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13 ensire that an attack will not have catastrophic effects. Thus, CIP approaches the
14 threat of terrorism not through surveillance and interdiction, but through a dif-
15 ferent form of security that is oriented toward ensuring the continuous function-
16 ing of critical systems.1
17 The second, broader perspective sees CIP as an important subset of homeland
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18 security and counter-terrorism (Part II). In this understanding, CIP is also about
19 technology of control, constituting both a threat and a means of protection, and
20 technological developments within a broader social and political frame, includ-
21 ing surveillance. In this view, CIP functions as a framework for the establish-
22 ment of new degrees and techniques of control over the properties and processes
23 of life. The important point here is the conflation of the human body, of techno-
24 logy and of knowledge in the practice of CIP. This view introduces a double or
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25 ‘reflexive’ aspect of CIP: its focus on technologies shows how some critical
26 infrastructures, most often in the form of information technologies, are used to
27 protect other critical infrastructures and how the information infrastructure is
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28 used to protect itself. This view also stresses the danger of the creation of
29 inside/outside spaces or zones of marginalisation through CIP practices, by
30 asking who is protected and who is not; and eliciting who is in fact becoming a
31 potential target of CIP practices. The representation of both viewpoints is of
32 central importance for understanding, on the one hand, how CIP is situated in
33 the wider discourse of homeland security and counter-terrorism (Part II) and, on
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34 the other hand, how this wider discourse is affected by the way in which CIP is
35 conceptualised as part of it (Part I). In order to capture this interrelation, the first
36 part of this volume focuses on CIP as a security practice emerging at a specific
37 point in time, clearly linked to what we look at in the second part: the perception
38 of terrorism as the prime threat in today’s security environment and how this
39 perception influences security practices in a broader sense.
40 When focusing on the first view, one key aspect of CIP practices is to create
41 greater resilience, commonly defined as the ability of a system to recover from
42 adversity and either revert to its original state or to assume an adjusted state
43 based on new requirements (McCarthy 2007: 2f.). As previously mentioned,
44 most precautionary and response measures can be employed as protection
45 against unexpected deliberate or natural events, except perhaps for the activities
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6 M. Dunn Cavelty and K.S. Kristensen

of the intelligence services and certain police and military responsibilities (such 1
as physical protection of facilities), which are all geared toward actor-induced 2
threats. Such practices, even though established and propagated by security pro- 3
fessionals, seem to be rather unappealing as topics for security studies scholars, 4
judging from the small amount of publications on them. One reason might be 5
that none of these practices are exceptional. Even though an ‘existential threat’ 6
(Wæver 1995) is frequently invoked, and the politics of security are often said to 7
depend on the exeptional (Jabri 2006; Dillon 2003; Agamben 2002), much of 8
the actual practice of CIP is very commonplace in character. Another explana- 9
tion is the clear division between domestic and international scholarship that 10
underpins the discipline, a cleavage that has often prevented the study of con- 11
cepts situated in both arenas or in between (cf. Abrahamsen and Williams 2006: 12

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45). Clearly, security studies have focused predominantly on discursive and 13
institutional practices ‘that rely upon national security and the sphere of the 14
international’ (Jabri 2006: 146). 15
If we look at the threat rhetoric behind CIP and at the measures that are 16
envisaged for protection, we can argue that the history of CIP is littered with
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failed securitisation moves (cf. Bendrath 2001). But we can also look at CIP 18
from a ‘French’ point of view. This school of thought perceives security not 19
only as ‘exceptional’, but also as being concerned with the everyday routines 20
and technologies of security professionals (Bigo 1996, 2002) or as a ‘technique 21
of government’ (Foucault 1994a). Such an understanding shifts the focus of 22
attention from ‘utterances referring to dangerous futures’ to the technologies and 23
strategies by means of which security is sought and produced (C.A.S.E. Collect- 24
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ive 2006: 469). To see CIP as belonging to the ‘politics of protection’ (Huys- 25
mans et al. 2006) helps to let security analysis ‘run more flexibly across 26
traditional and less traditional security agencies’ and ultimately serves to open 27
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up security studies ‘to the importance of everyday practices and routines in 28

security practices’ (Huysmans 2006: 14). ‘Protection is different from security’, 29
writes Bigo (Bigo 2006b: 93), and, in this book, we will investigate just how dif- 30
ferent it is. 31
This is also the approach taken by Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier in 32
Chapter 1. They present CIP as a central example of what is called ‘vital 33
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systems security’ and enquire about the origins of the distinctive concept that 34
views security threats as problems of system vulnerabilities. Using a Foucault- 35
inspired study of problematisations, they track the emergence of CIP as an 36
object of expert reflection in the early 1980s, with ties to far older issues, namely 37
the emergence of strategic bombing after the First World War, and Cold War 38
civil defence programmes. By uncovering a series of important moments, their 39
chapter lays the foundation for understanding many of the later developments. 40
The specific way of providing security by means of vulnerability mapping and 41
other techniques has led to a certain amount of path-dependency or institutional 42
‘lock-in’. 43
44
45
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Introduction 7
1 The information revolution as a defining moment . . .
2
While tracking the emergence of the CIP apparatus is important for understand-
3
ing the origins and the current shape of the topic, it is also important to see that
4
5 current fears exist within a far more complex. technologically dominated polity
6 than the one in which the ideas first emerged. The complex interdependence of
7 liberal (risk) societies and their growing technological sophistication have
8 transnationalised and technologised the types of security problems that they
9 face. We seem be witnessing scalar changes moving in opposite directions: the
10 power to resist vulnerability moves outwards to international markets and inter-
11 national organisations while the power to cause vulnerability moves inwards,
12 through classes and groups to the individual. And finally, the information

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13 revolution as a defining moment changed the overall scope, aim and shape of
14 CIP when it led to the displacement of the material, in favour of the virtual, as
15 the object of control.
16 As Myriam Dunn Cavelty shows in Chapter 2, a growing concern with
17 information security in the 1980s and 1990s found a technical vocabulary, a set
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18 of analytical tools and practices of intervention in a longstanding mode of think-
19 ing about infrastructures as a security problem. By analysing how CIP is
20 expressed by US security policy elites in terms of threat frames (interpretive
21 schemes about what counts as threat or risk, how to respond to this threat, and
22 who or what is responsible for it), the chapter shows how the information
23 revolution is responsible for transforming the issue into a topic of high saliency.
24 With the growth and spreading of computer networks into more and more
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25 aspects of life, the object of protection changed. Whereas it had previously con-
26 sisted of limited government networks, it now encompassed the whole of
27 society. In this environment, the threat image of the cyber-terrorist emerges as
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28 the ultimate catastrophic threat, as Maura Conway shows in Chapter 5. Through

29 the globalised media, a threat image combining fear of technology with fear of
30 terrorism is spread ad absurdum, leading to what Jean Baudrillard has coined
31 ‘hyperreality’: a ‘reality by proxy’ and endless reproductions of fundamentally
32 empty semantic shells and meanings. Fortunately, the exaggerated representa-
33 tion of the catastrophic accident in cyberspace, Conway argues (following
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34 François Debrix), means that any real cyber-terrorist attack that might occur is
35 highly unlikely to live up to the simulated scenarios, and will thus not mobilise
36 fear in a substantive way.
37 For Philippe Bonditti (Chapter 6), the reciprocal relationship between
38 information networks and terrorism, which is also seen as networked, has led to
39 a multilevel transformation of the US agencies of surveillance and control. As
40 Bonditti argues, computer systems are becoming the crucial tool through which
41 the state aims to protect territories and populations from networked terrorist
42 cells. For this reason, cyberspace must be protected first, which establishes a
43 hierarchical relation between the security of ‘the homeland’ and that of cyber-
44 space, ‘the security of the latter becoming the condition of security of the first’.
45 Virtual networks become the ultimate critical infrastructure for securing society.
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8 M. Dunn Cavelty and K.S. Kristensen

The information revolution as a defining moment is also addressed by James der 1
Derian and Jesse Finkelstein in Chapter 4. As the information infrastructure 2
emerges as an intermediary between physical assets and physical infrastructure, 3
CIP is being viewed less as a problem of protecting physical resources, and is 4
instead becoming an information problem. In other words, CIP is increasingly 5
about producing and protecting knowledge – and the private sector has become 6
crucial in refashioning the conception of CIP. In Der Derian and Finkelstein’s 7
view, the interweaving of the public and private sectors ‘marks the difference 8
between biopower in the post-disciplinary society and biopower in the control 9
society’. Likewise, biopolitics have evolved to the point where it is not the body 10
of the state that needs to be secured, ‘but the conjoined body of public and 11
private sector networks’. In the conclusion, Julian Reid expands this point even 12

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further, focusing on ‘the deliberate targeting of the human life that inhabits crit- 13
ical infrastructures with increasingly invasive techniques of governance’ that the 14
provision of such infrastructure protection requires. 15
16
17
. . . and private sector rationale
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In many countries, the provision of energy, communication, transport, financial
18
19
services and healthcare have all been, or are being, privatised as previously pro- 20
tected markets are deregulated (Héretier 2001, 2002). However, while liberalisa- 21
tion has in many cases improved efficiency and productivity, it has also led to 22
concerns regarding the accessibility, equality, reliability and affordability of ser- 23
vices. In a non-liberalised economy, the state assumes the responsibility as well 24
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as the costs of guaranteeing functioning systems and services. Clearly, assigning 25

responsibility for securing such systems and services is becoming a major issue 26
in a liberalised global economy (Andersson and Malm 2006). In this light, and 27
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given the growing importance of information and knowledge that resides within 28
the private sector, how is the state to protect something that, by definition, is 29
beyond its domain of control? The answer is simple: by closely working with 30
the private sector. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the state seeks to integ- 31
rate the private owners of critical infrastructure in CIP practices by means of so- 32
called public–private partnerships and information-sharing initiatives (Suter 33
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2007). 34
Once again, there is nothing new in the perception of the economy as being 35
important for national security. As Collier and Lakoff point out, the complex 36
interdependencies of modern economic systems were seen as their essential 37
weakness as early as the 1930s. One defining moment in the history of CIP was 38
when ACTS theorists came to see the US ‘as a collection of critical targets 39
whose destruction would paralyse the economic system’. However, this aspect 40
has been reinforced with the advent of globalisation and information-based 41
economies. More importantly, efforts to involve the private sector in national 42
security measures have transformed the private sector into a security actor that is 43
empowered vis-à-vis the rest of society, but is disciplined by the security pol- 44
icies of the state, as shown by Kristian Søby Kristensen in Chapter 3. He investi- 45
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Introduction 9
1 gates new ways of creating security in an environment of collapsed borders after
2 11 September 2001 and argues that the traditionally sovereign act of making
3 society secure has moved into the domestic space. ‘Moving security into society
4 requires engagement with the civilian and private actors of society’, he writes,
5 and shows how the interaction between these two actors is conceptualised. The
6 concept of risk in the CIP discourse ‘functions as an opener’ that allows the
7 government to engage in security policy based on domestic logic. However, col-
8 laboration between the public and the private sectors has never been easy, as
9 Dunn Cavelty’s analysis shows: discontent between the private sector and
10 government is deeply rooted in continuing struggles over the definition of
11 ‘national security’ in the domain of information security. In view of this circum-
12 stance, major efforts are undertaken to legitimise ‘new’ practices of security that

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13 seek to distribute responsibility for protecting critical infrastructures.
14
15
Breaking down borders, creating new spaces
16
17 Through the ‘securitization of private actors’ (Kristensen), the public/private
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18 distinction is effectively broken down (cf. Abrahamsen and Williams 2006;
19 Leander 2006). But in fact, another binary distinction of long standing is demol-
20 ished – that between inside and outside. In this area, Didier Bigo has published
21 seminal work on the functional and geographical extension of internal security,
22 the export of policing methods and the import of military operations in the
23 national arena (Bigo 1994, 2000). But this distinction is affected in a rather
24 peculiar way by CIP. As Kristensen points out, CIP and homeland security
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25 ‘rearticulate the relationship between security and territory’ by providing a way

26 of providing (national) security inside sovereign space. In other words, through
27 CIP, efforts are made to recreate the protective functions of borders inside
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28 society. We can therefore observe a double move: at the same time as border
29 polices are exported to the outside, some forms of security policy equally move
30 inside, into the territory of the state.
31 Elgin Brunner shows in Chapter 7 that the moving of security practices into
32 domestic space is not only done with the help of the concept of ‘risk’, but also
33 with the help of military language and logic: offensive measures are undertaken
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34 in the name of defence. As a consequence of the attacks on New York and

35 Washington in 2001, the dichotomy of the safe ‘inside’ as opposed to the anar-
36 chic and dangerous ‘outside’ no longer applies: ‘home is no longer a safe
37 haven’. By constructing the threat as already being inside US territory, particular
38 strategies for action and rationalities are legitimised. But rather than showing
39 how the state wants to recreate a sense of security for the homeland (as Kris-
40 tensen does), Brunner shows how the external realm is discursively used in
41 order to push for certain measures at home, so that the homeland security dis-
42 course shortly after September 2001 leads to a ‘semantic militarization of the
43 domestic space’ based on gendered principles. Conway also demonstrates that
44 the active intertwining of home/abroad, safe/unsafe and the breaking down of
45 inside/outside works as a mobilising device, arguing that the continued hyping
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10 M. Dunn Cavelty and K.S. Kristensen

of ‘cyber-terrorism’ in the media is also justified by ‘separating the inside from 1
the outside, the offline versus online, and the ‘ “real” or physical from the virtual 2
or imagined’. 3
But, as seen above, CIP not only breaks down distinctions, it also creates new 4
borders and spaces, such as ‘zones of marginalisation’. Bonditti, whose analysis 5
focuses on how security practices ‘spatialise’ the threat of terrorism by territori- 6
alisation, de-territorialisation and technologisation, sees the emergence of ‘two 7
different spatio-temporal imaginaries’. The first of these is governed by the geo- 8
graphical territory, in which borders work as lines of demarcation; the other one 9
is governed by fluidity, as exemplified by cyberspace. But he also notices an 10
almost schizophrenic tendency of US security professionals to both territorialise 11
(through the concepts of ‘rogue states’ and ‘terrorism’) and de-territorialise 12

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(‘cyber-terrorism’) the threat of terrorism. The first can be called ‘spatial 13
fetishism’, a tendency to reduce the units of analysis to territorially demarcated 14
national states, a phenomenon that is elsewhere called ‘the resilience of the sov- 15
ereignty frame’ (Walker 2006: 154–9). For them, the term ‘homeland security’ 16
invokes the image of a secluded, delimited and thus ultimately defendable and
ON 17
securable place, where critical infrastructures make up the innermost layer of 18
four ‘concentric circles around the inner core of the US homeland’. 19
20
21
The (im)materiality of CIP
22
This image of homeland security is painted with the help of CIP. What emerges 23
is a specific kind of materiality, which is both an underlying condition for pro- 24
F

tection practices, but also reproduced through them. As we have pointed out 25
before, an infrastructure is, in the first instance of its etymology, something that 26
exists, and is also fundamentally on the ‘inside’. In other words, we are looking 27
OO

at the practice of protecting physical and inanimate things. Bridges, storage 28

facilities, streets or buildings, for instance, are objects that are easily identifiable 29
(within Euclidian space) and that have a value for society that is usually undis- 30
puted. That they should be made safe makes perfect sense to everyone: infra- 31
structure protection is therefore ultimately concerned with protecting property – 32
and it is obviously legitimate for the state to protect its property. 33
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We can even take this argument a step further and argue that cyberspace, too, 34
is grounded in physical reality. Quite obviously, there would be no virtual realm 35
without the physical infrastructures that facilitate its existence. As one observer 36
argues, ‘the channelling of information flows . . . occurs within the framework of 37
a “real” geography’ (Suteanu 2005: 130) made up of servers, cables, computers, 38
satellites, etc. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek even suggests that 39
cyberspace realises the oxymoron of being actually virtual – that these technolo- 40
gies materialise virtuality (Zizek 1999). The protection of the critical informa- 41
tion infrastructure – like the protection of knowledge – is also concerned with 42
protecting the physical reality of the ‘real geography’ with the help of electro- 43
magnetic-pulse-proof rooms or backup storages in impenetrable mountain reser- 44
voirs, but also with the help of better locks on server rooms. 45
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Introduction 11
1 If the (core) rationality of CIP is associated with physical objects that exist in
2 time and space, CIP practices give specific value to the inside, to things that are
3 tangible. More than a metaphysical or legal expression of something that a state
4 has, or is, CI – and CIP – is a concrete instantiation of these properties. CIP
5 identifies, signifies and makes specific the sovereign territory of the state, and is
6 thus a way of re-actualising and re-identifying the state. Seen this way, infra-
7 structure emerges as an alternative to the image of Leviathan as postulated by
8 Hobbes: instead of being made up of its citizens, the state may be regarded as
9 consisting of the things inside its territory that make life there ‘good’. Thus, the
10 state consists of assets that are not directly identified with its citizens. Again,
11 CIP, in the first place, sidesteps the traditional set of problems associated with
12 security policy. Most importantly, there are no concerns about freedom/security

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13 tradeoffs, and no civil liberty issues are involved, which differentiates CIP from
14 other better-investigated security strategies.
15 CIP thus seems to slip past Foucauldian bio-politics, and past the Homo
16 Sacer of Giorgio Agamben (1999). CIP does not ‘depend upon the invocation of
17 a state of emergency’ (Dillon 2003: 532), but is ‘clean’ and unproblematic.
ON
18 However, this ideal-type and utopian view of things is inevitably problematised,
19 because there is no way of avoiding the intermingling with both flows and
20 processes, with the truly virtual, and also with questions related to human sub-
21 jects and the law. Even if cyberspace is assumed to have a material quality, the
22 objects of protection in CIP include not only static infrastructures, but also
23 various abstract things such as services, (information) flows, the role and func-
24 tion of infrastructures for society, and especially the core values that are deliv-
F

25 ered by the infrastructures. The physical pathways through which information is

26 transmitted do matter, but ‘the role of the participants in the game, their func-
27 tional attributes, their position in the virtual context’ (Suteanu 2005: 131) matter
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28 even more. While technologies may appear to accumulate information objec-

29 tively and apolitically, the way in which that information is encoded, articulated
30 and interpreted is always political. The protection of ‘abstractions’, such as ‘the
31 population’ or ‘knowledge’ in the security domain becomes problematic rather
32 quickly when considering surveillance programmes, the PATRIOT Act etc.
33 The implications of security strategies for liberty, citizenship, and the
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34 freedom of human subjects has been thoroughly investigated and criticised else-
35 where. But CIP emerges as an intermediate entity: even in discussions about
36 virtual aspects or flows and processes, there is always a connection to a place, to
37 a space, to a space of protection. This book shows that homeland security and
38 critical infrastructure protection practices are expressions as well as causes of
39 the breakdown of the central political distinctions between inside/outside,
40 public/private, civil/military and normal/exceptional. It shows that the traditional
41 sovereign act of making society secure has moved into the domestic space,
42 changing the practice of security. In other words, security is privatised while the
43 private is securitised. In transcending the distinction between inside and outside
44 and reconfiguring the conditions for the exercise of sovereign authority, CIP
45 destabilises our relation to space, time and territory. Security is no longer a
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12 M. Dunn Cavelty and K.S. Kristensen

‘special’ and extraordinary issue. This discourse is not primarily about threats 1
and battles against an enemy, the focus of Part II of this volume, but is charac- 2
terised almost more by an inward-looking narrative about vulnerability (Bigo 3
2006b: 89). This means that the traditional and normal conditions for day-to-day 4
politics are intermingled with the exceptional dynamics of national security; and 5
new forms of (in)security and protection emerge. 6
7
8
Note
9
1 We owe this point to Stephen Collier. 10
11
12

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War Plans and Alliances in the Cyber-Security and Threat Politics 18
Cold War US efforts to secure the information age 19
Threat perceptions in the East Myriam Dunn Cavelty 20
and West 21
Edited by Vojtech Mastny, Securing ‘the Homeland’ 22
Sven Holtsmark and Andreas Wenger Critical infrastructure, risk and 23
(in)security 24
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Cold War Kristian Søby Kristensen 26
Challenges beyond deterrence in 27
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First published 2008 13
by Routledge 14
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 ON 17
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 18
© 2008 Selection and editorial matter, Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Kristian
19
Søby Kristensen; individual chapters, the contributors 20
Typeset in Times by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear 21
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJI Digital, Padstow, Cornwall 22
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or 23
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now 24
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing

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from the publishers. 26
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 28
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 29
Securing ‘the homeland’: critical infrastructure, risk, and (in)security / 30
edited by Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Kristian Søby Kristensen.
31
p.cm. – (CSS studies in security and international relations) 32
ISBN 978-0-415-44109-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-203-09265-1 (e book) 33
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1. Terrorism–Prevention. 2. National security. 3. United States–Politics

and government. 4. United States–Foreign relations. I. Dunn Cavelty,
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Myriam. II. Kristensen, Kristian Søby. 35
HV6431,S423 2008 36
363.325160973–dc22
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ISBN13: 978-0-415-44109-4
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2 Contents
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13 Notes on contributors vii
14 Foreword x
15 OLE WÆVER
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17 Acknowledgements ON xii
18 List of abbreviations xiv
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21 Introduction: securing the homeland: critical infrastructure,
22 risk, and (in)security 1
23 MYRIAM DUNN CAVELTY AND KRISTIAN SØBY KRISTENSEN

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PART I
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Origins, conceptions and the public–private rationale 15
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29 1 The vulnerability of vital systems: how ‘critical infrastructure’
30 became a security problem 17
31 STEPHEN J. COLLIER AND ANDREW LAKOFF
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2 Like a phoenix from the ashes: the reinvention of critical
33
infrastructure protection as distributed security 40
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MYRIAM DUNN CAVELTY
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36 3 ‘The absolute protection of our citizens’: critical infrastructure
37 protection and the practice of security 63
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KRISTIAN SØBY KRISTENSEN
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40 4 Critical infrastructures and network pathologies: the semiotics
41 and biopolitics of heteropolarity 84
42 JAMES DER DERIAN AND JESSE FINKELSTEIN
43
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PART II 1
Terrorism and the politics of protecting the homeland 107 2
3
5 Media, fear and the hyperreal: the construction of 4
cyberterrorism as the ultimate threat to critical infrastructures 109 5
MAURA CONWAY
6
7
6 Homeland security through traceability: technologies of 8
control as critical infrastructures 130 9
PHILIPPE BONDITTI 10
11
7 The gendered narratives of homeland security: anarchy at 12

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the front door makes home a haven 153 13
ELGIN M. BRUNNER 14
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8 Conclusion: the biopolitics of critical infrastructure protection 176 16
JULIAN REID ON 17
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Index 184 19
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2 Contributors
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13 Philippe Bonditti is a PhD candidate in Sciences Po in Paris and research assis-
14 tant at the Centre d’études et de recherche internationales (CERI). He cur-
15 rently works on the redefinition of the modalities of sovereign power through
16 an analysis of US policies against transnational political violence. He is the
17 author of ‘From territorial space to networks. A Foucauldian approach to the
ON
18 implementation of biometry’ (Alternatives: 29/4, 2004) and co-author, within
19 the C.A.S.E. Collective, of the paper ‘Critical approach to security in Europe:
20 a networked manifesto’ (Security Dialogue: 37/4, 2006). He is a member of
21 the Editorial Board of the French journal Cultures & Conflits and of the Edi-
22 torial and Communication Team of the journal International Political Soci-
23 ology, and is also involved in the European research programme
24 CHALLENGE.
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25
Elgin Brunner is a PhD candidate at the Institut für Politikwissenschaft of the
26
University of Vienna and a researcher at the Center for Security Studies
27
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(CSS), ETH Zurich. She holds a degree in International Relations and Polit-
28
ical Science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
29
She specialises in gender issues in security studies, information operations,
30
the changing nature of warfare and the societal implications thereof.
31
32 Stephen J. Collier is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Programme in
33 International Affairs at the New School University, New York. He is the co-
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34 editor of Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropo-

35 logical Problems and is completing a manuscript entitled Post-Soviet Social:
36 Neoliberalism and Biopolitics in the Russian Mirror. His research interests
37 include urbanism, neoliberalism, planning, security, infrastructure and social
38 modernity. His current projects include a genealogy of vital systems security
39 with Andrew Lakoff.
40
Maura Conway is a lecturer and the Director of MA Programmes at the Depart-
41
ment of Law and Government at Dublin City University. Her research inter-
42
ests are in the area of terrorism and the Internet. She is particularly interested
43
in cyberterrorism and its portrayal in the media, and the functioning and
44
effectiveness of terrorist websites. Along with a number of book chapters, she
45
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viii Contributors
has also published in Current History, Parliamentary Affairs, Disarmament 1
Forum, and elsewhere. 2
3
James der Derian is a Watson Institute Research Professor of International
4
Studies. In July 2004, he became the director of the Institute’s Global Secur-
5
ity Programme. Der Derian also directs the Information Technology, War and
6
Peace Project in the Watson Institute’s Global Security Programme. Der
7
Derian was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he completed an
8
M.Phil. and a D.Phil. in international relations. He has been a visiting scholar
9
at the University of Southern California, MIT, Harvard, Oxford and the Insti-
10
tute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is the author of On Diplomacy: A
11
Genealogy of Western Estrangement (1987) and Antidiplomacy: Spies,
12

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Terror, Speed, and War (1992); the editor of International Theory: Critical
13
Investigations (1995) and The Virilio Reader (1998); and co-editor with
14
Michael Shapiro of International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Read-
15
ings of World Politics (1989). His most recent book is Virtuous War:
16
Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (2001).
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Myriam Dunn Cavelty is a lecturer and the head of the New Risks research 18
unit at the Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich and coordinator of 19
the Crisis and Risk Network (CRN). Dunn Cavelty holds a degree in political 20
science, modern history and international law from the University of Zurich. 21
She specialises in security studies and the impact of the information revolu- 22
tion on security policy issues in particular. Along with articles and book 23
chapters on the topic, she is the author of Cyber-Security and Threat Politics: 24
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US Efforts to Secure the Information Age (2008) as well as co-editor of two 25

recent volumes: The Resurgence of the State: Trend and Processes in Cyber- 26
space Governance (2007) and Power and Security in the Information Age: 27
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Investigating the Role of the State in Cyberspace (2007). 28

29
Jesse Finkelstein graduated from Brown University in 2005 and was subse-
30
quently recruited by a major technology company to participate in its home-
31
land security business division. Focusing on wearable computing and
32
biometric design, he left that technology company and started his own design
33
business, JF & SON. Now in its first year, JF & SON is a multidisciplinary
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34
design group that specialises in textile innovation, fabric engineering and
35
apparel production.
36
Kristian Søby Kristensen is a PhD candidate working with the Research Unit 37
on Defense and Security at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Pre- 38
viously, he had been a research assistant also at the Danish Institute for Inter- 39
national Studies, as well as at the Department of Political Science at the 40
University of Copenhagen. His research interests include transatlantic secur- 41
ity policy, the concept of war in international relations, military trans- 42
formation and the changes in both practice and theory of security, especially 43
the blurring of the domestic/international delimitation. He is a 44
Cand.scient.pol at the University of Copenhagen. 45
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Contributors ix
1 Andrew Lakoff is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at
2 the University of California, San Diego, and is currently serving as pro-
3 gramme officer for the SSRC project, ‘Preparedness, Vital Systems and
4 Security’. He received a PhD in anthropology at the University of California,
5 Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow in the department of social medicine
6 at Harvard Medical School. Lakoff’s research involves the social analysis of
7 systems of expertise. His recent book, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge
8 and Value in Global Psychiatry (2005), examines epistemological debates
9 around the source of mental disorder. He is also co-editor of Global Pharma-
10 ceuticals: Ethics, Knowledge, Practices (2006), and has published articles on
11 the history of the behavioral sciences, on methodology in the interpretive
12 social sciences, and on the concepts of risk and security. His current work

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13 focuses on the development of techniques to enhance preparedness among
14 security experts in the US.
15
Julian Reid is a lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London,
16
UK and a visiting professor in International Relations at the University of
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Lapland in Finland. He is the author of The Biopolitics of the War on Terror
18
(2006).
19
20 Ole Wæver is a Professor of International Relations and former senior research
21 fellow at COPRI, Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (1985–99). He has
22 published and broadcast extensively in the field of international relations, and
23 is one of the main architects of the so-called Copenhagen School in Inter-
24 national Relations. Ole Wæver was a member of the Danish government’s
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25 Commission on Security and Disarmament Affairs between 1993 and 1995

26 and of the Danish Institute of International Affairs (DUPI) between 1995 and
27 2002. He is a member of the editorial board for European Journal of Inter-
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28 national Affairs, Security Dialogue, International Studies Perspective and the

29 Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
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31
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Foreword 2
3
4
Ole Wæver 5
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‘Critical infrastructure protection’ seems yet another buzzword in security 13
studies, a field prone to linguistic hyperbole. Since it also features a catchy 14
acronym, CIP, it is likely to be embraced by security experts. But, while it is 15
certainly true that CIP is one aspect among many in a boom of ‘security’ con- 16
cerns, industries and practices since September 2001, CIP is more than that. This
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book shows convincingly that CIP is an ideal lens through which to read broader 18
changes in security – and in society at large. Ultimately, the book engages the 19
question of what is defended by security policy in this day and age. 20
The novelty of the term ‘homeland security’ has been noted by many, but it is 21
still too easily perceived as being relatively traditional, due to its accompanying 22
nationalist and statist discourse. The US version of ‘homeland security’ may, at 23
a superficial glance, appear to be simply another term for ‘territorial defence’, 24
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which almost all other states already had in place – only the US had thought it 25
could do without such measures, since it could push its defence perimeter across 26
the seas. Alternately, the term was perceived as referring to no more than a 27
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slightly more novel further step in the merger between internal and external 28
security. However, upon closer examination, the matter becomes much more 29
intriguing – and interesting. ‘Homeland security’ is not practiced through the 30
category of ‘homeland’, but operates more often through logics focused on indi- 31
viduals or networks. Also, the fact that a large part of the practical preparations 32
for securing ‘critical infrastructure’ and the ‘homeland’, respectively, are the 33
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same, regardless of whether the cause of disruption is a foreign enemy or a tech- 34

nical system failure or a natural disaster, raises quite radical questions concern- 35
ing established conceptions of ‘security’. 36
The issues covered by this book are much more familiar to practitioners than 37
to academics. During the second half of the 1990s, and greatly accelerated by 38
the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, a new field of 39
action emerged that connected classical disaster protection and rescue services 40
with concerns traditionally associated with international security. The vulnera- 41
bility of modern society has become the focal point of a functionally defined set 42
of concerns and responses, where the intermediate problems and the necessary 43
responses define a unified field, irrespective of whether the first cause is a hostile 44
act by a foreign state or violent political movement, a natural disaster, a tech- 45
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Foreword xi
1 nical breakdown, or a domestic intentional disruption. But to theorists, this
2 blanket approach is not easy to handle – it does not fit in. Or rather: it fits very
3 well into new storylines, but not the established ones.
4 Policy researchers whose work reflects practical fields have obviously written
5 about (and advocated) CIP, and sweeping theorists have dropped the term into
6 their generalisations, but so far, there has been no sustained analysis of this field
7 by people who are seriously engaged with the conceptual, theoretical and polit-
8 ical debates that are underway in security studies and in society in general. One
9 of the great qualities of this book is that it takes a focused and sustained look at
10 a very specific and, in some senses, highly technical field, and simultaneously
11 presents a very illuminating examination of fundamental changes in dominant
12 dangers and the concurrent countermeasures. All societies define themselves

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13 through their categorisation of the crucial subjects and objects to be defended, so
14 the book speaks to nothing less than the question, ‘who are we?’ (or ‘what are
15 we?’). It does so through empirically grounded analysis.
16 When I first took the initiative as part of CHALLENGE, the EU Sixth Frame-
17 work Programme research programme on the changing landscape of liberty and
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18 security in Europe, to plan ‘a small workshop bringing together experts on crit-
19 ical infrastructure protection from both sides of the Atlantic’, nobody predicted
20 how productive this project would be. This is very much to the credit of the two
21 editors, who – in addition to their fine job of shaping a coherent publication –
22 were the main forces in organising the two workshops where drafts were pre-
23 sented and thoroughly discussed. When reading this volume, it quickly becomes
24 clear that it is not the typical compilation of pieces produced separately, but the
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25 result of actual interaction. It is precisely through this process of very lively dis-
26 cussions of a new phenomenon that it became possible for this combination of
27 younger and more experienced European and North American scholars to pene-
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28 trate this highly technical realm and politicise these CIP practices, and thereby
29 produce a book that brings back ‘critical’ to ‘critical infrastructure protection’.
30
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Acknowledgements 2
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Edited volumes are often faulted for being inevitably uneven in terms of quality 13
or for being nothing more than idiosyncratic collections of chapters. But they 14
can also be valuable additions to our understanding of particular research fields, 15
precisely because they look at issues from a variety of perspectives. In fact, 16
some issues seem particularly prone for being addressed in such a manner. In
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our opinion, critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is such an issue. CIP is 18
becoming an increasingly central, but not yet well-investigated political practice 19
associated with securing societies. CIP plays an important part in strategies to 20
reduce societal vulnerability and to mitigate the perceived threat from terrorism 21
on both sides of the Atlantic. Simultaneously the practice of CIP questions our 22
theoretical understanding of a range of concepts as it introduces new technolo- 23
gies and new knowledge to the practice of security that are not easily grasped 24
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from the perspective of traditional security studies or with an overly monolithic 25

approach. 26
This volume emerged from an initiative undertaken by ‘Challenge: The 27
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Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security’, a Sixth Framework 28

Research Programme of the European Commission. We greatly acknowledge 29
the financial support provided by ‘Challenge’, which made possible the first of 30
two intense authors’ workshops on CIP. At this initial gathering, which took 31
place in Copenhagen in September 2005, the foundations for this anthology 32
were laid. In order to take the discussion one step further, a second workshop 33
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was organised approximately one year later in Zurich. This was made possible 34
by the generous financial and logistical support provided by the Center for 35
Security Studies, ETH Zurich. Both workshops were invaluable instances both 36
in developing our collective thinking on CIP and associated subjects and in 37
focusing the arguments of the individual chapters. 38
We want to express our thanks to our follow contributors for their enthusiasm 39
and commitment in making this book possible. We would also like to thank col- 40
leagues not represented in this book that have, in some way or another, con- 41
tributed to it on its journey to completion: Ralf Bendrath, Christopher Daase, 42
Lene Hansen, Jorgos Kolliarakis, Ronnie Lipschutz, Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen 43
and David Wood. Special thanks go to two staff members at the Center for 44
Security Studies: to Christopher Findlay for proofreading all the chapters and to 45
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Acknowledgements xiii
1 Susanne Schmid for taking such care that the bibliographies are consistent. Fur-
2 thermore, we thank two external reviewers for very helpful comments and the
3 editors at Routledge for helping to turn the manuscript into a book.
4
5 Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Zurich and
6 Kristian Søby Kristensen, Copenhagen
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Abbreviations 2
3
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ACTS Aviation Corps Technical School 13
AFIWC Air Force Information Warfare Center 14
AHV America’s Hidden Vulnerabilities 15
AWPD Air War Plans Division 16
CAPPSII Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System
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CART Computer Analysis and Response Team 18
CF Critical Foundations 19
CGI (Script) Common Gateway Interface 20
CIA Central Intelligence Agency 21
CIITAT Critical Investigations and Infrastructure Threat 22
Assessment 23
CIP Critical Infrastructure Protection 24
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DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 25

DCPA Defense Civil Preparedness Agency 26
DEPA Defense Electric Power Administration (in DCPA) 27
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DHS Department of Homeland Security 28

DIA Defense Intelligence Agency 29
DNI Director of National Intelligence 30
DoD Department of Defense 31
EMP Electromagnetic Pulse 32
EPC Electronic Product Code 33
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EU European Union 34
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation 35
FDCA Federal Civil Defense Agency 36
FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency 37
FISA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 38
GAO General Accounting Office 39
HF/E Human Factors Engineering 40
HSDN Homeland Secure Data Network 41
IDA Institute for Defense Analysis 42
IT Information Technology 43
JDD James Der Derian 44
LIC Low-intensity Conflicts 45
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Abbreviations xv
1 MAA Maximum Availability Architectures
2 MARSOC Marines Special Operation Command
3 NCTC National Counter-Terrorism Center
4 NGA National Geospatial Agency
5 NIPP National Infrastructure Protection Plan
6 NORTHCOM United States Northern Command
7 NSA National Security Agency
8 NSDD National Security Decision Directive
9 NSEERS National Security Entry–Exit Registration System
10 ODM Office of Defense Mobilization
11 OEP Office of Emergency Preparedness (White House)
12 OHS Office of Homeland Security

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13 PCCIP Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure
14 Protection
15 PDD Presidential Decision Directive
16 RFID Radio Frequency Identification
17 SED Systems Evaluation Division (in OEP)
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18 TIA Terrorism Information Awareness Program
19 TIS Trusted Information-sharing
20 TIW Transnational Infrastructure Warfare
21 TSP Terrorist Surveillance Program
22 US United States
23 USA PATRIOT Act Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
24 Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
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25 Terrorism (Act)
26 USCD United States Civil Defense
27 USCENTCOM United States Central Command
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28 USSOCOM United States Special Operations Command

29 WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction
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31
32
33
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Part I

Origins, conceptions and

the public–private rationale

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2 1 The vulnerability of vital systems
3
4 How ‘critical infrastructure’ became a
5
6
security problem
7
8 Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff
9
10
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12

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13 In recent years, ‘critical infrastructure protection’ (CIP) has emerged as an
14 increasingly important framework for understanding and mitigating threats to
15 security. Widespread discussion of critical infrastructure protection in the US
16 began in 1996, when President Clinton formed a Commission on Critical Infra-
17 structure Protection. The Commission’s 1997 report, Critical Foundations,
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18 established the central premise of infrastructure protection efforts: that the eco-
19 nomic prosperity, military strength, and political vitality of the US all depend on
20 the continuous functioning of the nation’s critical infrastructures. As the report
21 stated: ‘Reliable and secure infrastructures are . . . the foundation for creating the
22 wealth of our nation and our quality of life as a people’. Moreover, the report
23 continued, ‘certain of our infrastructures are so vital that their incapacity or
24 destruction would have a debilitating impact on our defense and economic
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25 security’ (President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection 1997: 3).

26 In discussions such as these, we find a distinctive approach to identifying,
27 assessing, and managing security threats. The characteristics of this approach
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28 include:
29
30 1 a concern with the critical systems upon which modern society, economy,
31 and polity are seen to depend;
32 2 the identification of the vulnerabilities of these systems and of the threats
33 that might exploit these vulnerabilities as matters of national security;
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34 3 the effort to develop techniques to mitigate system vulnerabilities.

35
36 In this chapter, we ask: where did this distinctive way of understanding and
37 intervening in security threats come from? How did ‘critical infrastructure’
38 come to be regarded as a national security problem? We argue that critical infra-
39 structure protection is best understood as one response to a relatively new prob-
40 lematization of security. As Foucault writes, a new problematization occurs
41 when something has ‘happened to introduce uncertainty, a loss of familiarity;
42 that loss, that uncertainty is the result of difficulties in our previous way of
43 understanding, acting, relating’ (Foucault 1994: 598). As we will show, at
44 pivotal moments in the twentieth century, technological and political develop-
45 ments rendered existing security frameworks inadequate, leading experts to
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18 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

invent new ways of identifying and intervening in security threats. Specifically, 1
what emerged was a way of understanding security threats as problems of 2
system vulnerability. The task of protecting national security came to include 3
ensuring the ongoing functioning of a number of vulnerable systems that were 4
seen as vital to collective life. 5
The chapter follows a series of important moments in the twentieth-century 6
history of system-vulnerability thinking: the interwar articulation of strategic 7
bombing theory in Europe and the US, which focused on the ‘vital targets’ of an 8
enemy’s industrial system; the development of defence mobilization and emer- 9
gency preparedness in the US during the Cold War as a means of defending the 10
industrial system against a targeted nuclear attack; the emergence of all-hazards 11
planning and ‘total preparedness’ as paradigms for response to disruptions of 12

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vital systems; and the widespread diffusion of formal models for assessing the 13
vulnerability of vital systems (see Table 1). 14
The account culminates with discussions in the late 1970s and early 1980s 15
among a relatively peripheral group of experts who were thinking about new 16
challenges to national security. These experts had turned their attention to
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emerging threats – such as energy crises, major technological accidents, and ter- 18
19
20
Table 1 System-vulnerability thinking: 1918 – present 21
Key events Understanding of Mitigation measures 22
threat 23
24
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I. Total War and Rise of airpower in Air warfare on vital Continental defence; 25
Strategic the Second World targets/industrial web early attack on 26
Bombing War; Emergence of enemy vital centres
27
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strategic bombing
theory (post-Second 28
World War); ACTS 29
lectures (1930); 30
AWPD-1 (1941). 31
II. Civil Defence Strategic bombing Soviet nuclear attack Emergency response; 32
survey; Soviet on critical target vulnerability 33
nuclear test (1949); mapping; deterrence;
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Civil Defence Act second strike

34
(1950); Korean War capacity 35
36
III. All-Hazards 1960s–1970s: rise All-hazards, Generalized
and System of systems theory; nondeterrable, not contingency 37
Vulnerability emergency predictable planning; generic 38
management (up to system vulnerability 39
founding of FEMA analysis 40
in 1979) 41
IV. Systems Energy crisis and Vital systems CIP 42
Vulnerability as terrorism threat of vulnerability as 43
National Security 1970s through 9/11 national security
Problem and response problem
44
45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 19

1 rorist attacks – that did not fit within the strategic framework of the Cold War.
2 These new threats, they theorized, could not be deterred, and their probability
3 could not be calculated. In this context, they began to draw together techniques
4 and organizational forms developed earlier in the century to define a broad
5 approach to mitigating the perceived vulnerabilities of the nation’s critical
6 systems. From their perspective, the ongoing functioning of such systems was a
7 matter of national security. This approach to security problems was identified as
8 central to post-Cold War national security in documents such as Critical
9 Foundations, cited above.
10 In describing the history of how infrastructure became a security problem,
11 our analytic stance proposes neither that security threats are self-evident facts in
12 the world nor that they are simply imagined. Rather, in studying problematiza-

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13 tions, we are interested in how a given object – in this case, vulnerable, vital
14 systems – becomes an object of expert reflection and practice. As Foucault
15 writes:
16
17 A problematization does not mean the representation of a pre-existent object
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18 nor the creation through discourse of an object that did not exist. It is the
19 ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something
20 enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought
21 (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political
22 analysis, etc).
23 (Foucault 1994: 670)
24
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25 The central figures in this story are mostly unknown planners and technicians in
26 military and civilian bureaucracies who, over the course of the twentieth
27 century, constituted system vulnerability as an object of thought. For the most
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28 part, their work has stayed below the surface of political debates about security.
29 But the basic principles and practices they crafted can now be found in initi-
30 atives such as CIP. Our goal in tracing this history is to make this increasingly
31 central approach to security problems available for critical scrutiny by analysing
32 its elements and pointing to the contingent historical events and processes that
33 shaped its formation.
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34
35
Total war, strategic bombing, and the vital target
36
37 In this section, we trace the genealogy of system-vulnerability thinking to the
38 rise of total war and the development of strategic bombing theory. The term
39 ‘total war’ refers to a shift in the very constitution of war. In the nineteenth and
40 early twentieth centuries, wars among major European powers were no longer
41 conceived or conducted as battles between sovereigns. Rather, wars were fought
42 between entire nations and peoples, bringing military and industrial organization
43 into ever closer contact. As Aron (1954: 88) put it in a classic statement, the rise
44 of total war meant that ‘The army industrializes itself, industry militarizes itself,
45 the army absorbs the nation; the nation models itself on the army’. In this
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20 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

context, strategists increasingly recognized that military strength depended on 1
the economic and social vitality of the nation, and on the state’s capacity to 2
mobilize and direct that vital strength to strategic ends. 3
The rise of total war meant that the traditional distinction between the military 4
and civilian spheres – at least in wartime – was eroded in a variety of ways. In 5
mobilizing for war, states vastly expanded their interventions in collective life. 6
These interventions included controlling the production and distribution of indus- 7
trial products critical to the conduct of war, particularly in sectors such as metal- 8
lurgy and machine building, as well as the construction or regulation of electricity, 9
transportation, and communication systems. These mobilization efforts had their 10
counterpart in a new type of strategic thinking. Military strategists recognized that, 11
just as their own economic facilities were critical to mobilization efforts, the vital 12

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nodes of enemy industrial systems could be exploited as vulnerabilities. An attack 13
on these critical nodes could weaken or completely disable the opponent’s war 14
effort. Based on this line of reasoning, air power theorists developed a theory of 15
air war – strategic bombing – in which such nodes constituted ‘vital targets’. 16
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18
Strategic bombing: enemy industrial facilities as targets
19
The Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet is generally credited with first artic- 20
ulating the theory of strategic bombing. As Meilinger (1997: 8) points out, 21
Douhet’s approach was framed by the assumptions of total war. Douhet 22
‘believed that wars were no longer fought between armies but between whole 23
peoples. All the resources of a country – human, material, and psychological – 24
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would focus on the war effort’. The rise of total war had an important strategic 25
consequence, according to Douhet: ‘the nation would have to be exhausted 26
before it would admit defeat’. The difficulty was that ‘in an age of industrializa- 27
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tion, when factories could produce the implements of war in a seemingly inex- 28
haustible supply’, the total defeat of a nation as a whole was an increasingly 29
elusive goal, at least when pursued through conventional means (Meilinger 30
1997: 8). Douhet’s contribution, in this context, was to provide a compelling (if 31
not entirely prescient) vision of strategy in future wars. 32
Future warfare, Douhet argued, would not resemble the brutal defensive 33
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battles of attrition that had characterized the First World War. Rather, it would 34
revolve around offensive actions, and particularly around offensive air power. 35
The first task of strategic operations would be to achieve air dominance by 36
disabling the enemy’s air force and air defence. Once command of the air had 37
been achieved, long-range bombers would be deployed to attack the nation 38
itself. Specifically – and for our purposes, this is the crucial concept in 39
Douhet’s theory – these bombers would attack ‘the most vital, most vulner- 40
able, and least protected points of the enemy’s territory’ (cited in Meilinger 41
1997: 4–5). Douhet identified five vital centres of a modern nation that were 42
the key targets of strategic bombing: industry, transportation infrastructure, 43
communication nodes, government buildings, and ‘the will of the people’ 44
(Meilinger 1997: 11). 45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 21

1 Douhet did not substantially develop the theory of targeting beyond his
2 general orientation to attack these vital targets. The most robust development of
3 the theory of strategic bombing in the period between the wars took place in the
4 US. In contrast to Douhet’s strategy of using strategic bombing to break the will
5 of an enemy people, the characteristic feature of the US school of strategic
6 bombing was its emphasis on the critical target – the key node in an infrastruc-
7 tural or industrial system that, if destroyed, could bring an entire enemy war
8 effort to a halt.
9 The most important centre for the development of US strategic bombing
10 theory was the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS). The ACTS also served as the
11 training grounds for a large portion of the officer corps that applied the theory in
12 developing US plans for air war in the Second World War (Faber 1997). ACTS

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13 theorists sought to identify the targets that were vital to a war effort, in particular
14 through the development of the theory of the ‘industrial web’. Billy Mitchell, an
15 air power advocate whose ideas prefigured important dimensions of the indus-
16 trial web theory, had written in 1927 that attacks on a few key nodes would
17 mean that ‘within a very short time the nation would have to capitulate or starve
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18 to death’ (quoted in Greer 1985: 57). The writing and teaching of ACTS theo-
19 rists echoed this approach. They argued that the complex interdependencies of
20 modern economic systems were their essential weakness. ACTS graduate and,
21 later, instructor Donald Wilson wrote in 1938 that the modern economy was
22 composed of ‘interrelated and entirely interdependent elements’ (quoted in
23 Faber 1997: 218). By attacking the ‘essential arteries’, or, in another pregnant
24 metaphor, ‘organic essentials’ of a modern industrial structure, one could
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25 quickly – and economically – paralyse an enemy war effort (quoted in Faber

26 1997: 219).
27 One implication of this theory was that strategic bombing depended on
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28 detailed knowledge of the economic structure of the enemy nation. As ACTS

29 theorist Muir S. Fairchild argued in 1938:
30
31 only by a careful analysis – by a painstaking investigation, will it be pos-
32 sible to select the line of action that will most efficiently and effectively
33 accomplish our purpose, and provide the correct employment of the air
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34 force during war. It is a study for the economist – the statistician – the tech-
35 nical expert – rather than for the soldier.
36 (quoted in Clodfelter 1997: 85)
37
38 The task of these experts would be to analyse the enemy’s industrial systems –
39 steel fabrication, transportation, finance, utilities, raw materials, and food supply
40 – in order to select the ‘relatively few objectives whose destruction would para-
41 lyze or neutralize’ the enemy war effort (Greer 1985: 58).
42 This theory of strategic bombing profoundly influenced planning for the US
43 air war in Germany and Japan during the Second World War. AWPD-1, the plan
44 for air war against Germany, was based on intensive study of the German indus-
45 trial system.1 Beyond that, a clear line can be drawn from the theory of strategic
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22 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

bombing to nuclear targeting strategy after the war (Freedman 1983). But the 1
present discussion follows a different line of development. Just as air power 2
theorists began to conceptualize the vital economic nodes of an enemy nation 3
as a target of attack, they turned their strategic attention to the problem of an 4
attack on the US. Their approach to analysing the vital nodes of an enemy’s 5
industrial system, initially developed as an air war strategy, was now trans- 6
posed to a new understanding of the US as a space of vital and vulnerable 7
targets. 8
9
10
The defence of vital systems: the US as target
11
For air power theorists, the development of strategic bombing as an offensive 12

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theory of attack on enemy vital targets raised the possibility of a similar attack 13
on the US. Air power theorists assumed that the strategic orientation of a pos- 14
sible future enemy would be similar to their own. As a consequence, they began 15
to envision the US – and in particular the critical systems of the US – as a target 16
in a future war. ON 17
18
19
Continental defence
20
In the interwar period, military strategists engaged in an intense debate over the 21
nature of air power and its role in a broader military organization. The question 22
was: was air power primarily of tactical importance – to be deployed in support 23
of ground operations? Or was there a separate strategic mission for air power 24
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that would justify an independent air force, and the development of long-range 25
bombers? In the US, this dispute unfolded in discussions of continental defence. 26
The long-standing assumption of US strategists had been that the central feature 27
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of US continental security was the presence of large oceans separating the US 28

from potential enemies. Thus, traditionally, the Navy was assumed to bear 29
primary responsibility for continental defence. Proponents of air power in the 30
interwar period argued that the advent of long-range aircraft had changed the 31
strategic situation dramatically. As another major ACTS figure, Lt. Kenneth 32
Walker, put it: 33
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34
The importance assigned to Air Forces by major European powers, among 35
which may be potential enemies, leaves no doubt our future enemies will 36
unquestionably rely greatly, if not primarily, upon the actions of their Air 37
Forces to bring about the defeat of the United States. 38
(quoted in Faber 1997: 193) 39
40
Against long-range bombing, a model of continental defence based on naval 41
power would be quickly rendered obsolete. 42
In making their argument for a new, air power-based approach to continental 43
defence, ACTS theorists envisioned an air attack on the US by a coalition of 44
European and Asian powers to illustrate the problems the military might face in 45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 23

1 a future war, given its current strategic assumptions and force structure. An
2 ACTS theorist, Captain Robert Olds, laid out a scenario for a future war in testi-
3 mony before the Federal Aviation Commission in 1935. One message of Olds’
4 scenario (emphatically delivered with italics) concerned the necessity of creating
5 an air force that was independent from other branches of the military. He argued
6 that in a plausible war scenario, the existing air divisions of the US military – all
7 of which were subordinated to the army and the Navy – would be drawn off to
8 army or Navy engagements.
9
10 A coalition of European and Asiatic powers have declared war on the
11 United States. Superior naval forces . . . seek a decisive naval engagement in
12 the vicinity of the Panama Canal. . . . Such actions draw the U.S. Navy to

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13 Caribbean waters, with its naval aviation. Land forces from the Orient,
14 using Alaska as an advanced base, seek . . . to establish a salient in the area
15 Washington, Oregon, California, and inland to about Salt Lake City, as a
16 land base for further offensive operations in U.S. territory. The concentra-
17 tion of the U.S. Army with its aviation, in the western theater of operations
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18 would be mandatory to resist the land invasion.
19 (quoted in Faber 1997: 194)
20
21 The implication of this scenario was that, given the existing force structure of
22 the US military, the most vital targets of the US industrial system would be
23 vulnerable to attack by the enemy air force.
24
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25 Simultaneously, the mass of the Allied [i.e., enemy] air forces have been
26 flown, or shipped under submarine and patrol boat convoy, from Ireland to
27 Newfoundland and are prepared to launch air attacks, from air bases in
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28 eastern Canada, against any targets of their choice in the vital industrial
29 heart of our country.
30 (quoted in Faber 1997: 194)2
31
32 The strategists at ACTS assumed that, following their own approach to strategic
33 bombing, an enemy would attack the ‘vital industrial heart’ of the country. This
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34 meant, specifically, ‘an industrial triangle extending from Portland, Maine, to

35 the Chesapeake Bay to Chicago’. In this triangle lay ‘75% of all U.S. factories,
36 almost all the nation’s steelworks, most of its coal, and a number of major rail-
37 road centers, including New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland’
38 (Faber 1997: 193). Attacks on the triangle would focus on rail lines, refineries,
39 electric power, and water supply (Faber 1997: 194).3 Following Douhet, the
40 assumption was that an attack on these facilities might well destroy the Amer-
41 ican population’s will to resist.
42 In anticipating such an attack, and in pressing their vision of the likely
43 pattern of future war, ACTS theorists engaged in what was perhaps the first
44 effort to catalogue the critical infrastructure of the US. In a lecture delivered in
45 1938 on ‘National Economic Structure’, Muir S. Fairchild declared that ‘the
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24 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

key elements of American production were 11,842 “critical” factories, almost 1
half of which were located in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. 2
The factories in those three states were “a concentrated objective which one 3
might not suspect existed in this great continental industrialized nation of 4
ours” ’. Their destruction, or that of the transportation or power systems 5
linking them, would ‘apply tremendous pressure to our civilian population 6
while at the same time seriously imparing [sic] our ability and capacity to 7
wage war’ (Faber 1997: 85).4 The ACTS theorists, in short, were beginning to 8
see the US as a collection of critical targets whose destruction would paralyse 9
the economic system. 10
However, little action was taken in preparing the US for attack in the period 11
before the Second World War. It was only during the course of the war, and 12

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really in its aftermath, that serious thought and organizational energy was given 13
to the problem of organizing civil defence in the US. 14
15
16
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Civil defence: mapping domestic vulnerability
18
Civil defence efforts in the US after the Second World War were, in a very 19
direct sense, the defensive counterpart to strategic bombing doctrine, as the 20
assumptions behind strategic bombing were transposed into a paradigm for the 21
protection of vital systems against nuclear attack.5 In the early years of the Cold 22
War, planners developed techniques that made it possible to identify likely 23
targets in the US, to model the effects of nuclear attack, and to anticipate 24
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requirements for emergency response. 25

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a massive effort to assess 26
wartime bomb damage in Japan, Germany, and Britain, linked prewar strategic 27
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bombing and postwar civil defence.6 The Survey took advantage of a rare 28
opportunity to observe the effects of strategic bombing in practice. In doing so, 29
it also necessarily assessed the civil defence efforts of these countries. One of 30
the Survey’s major findings was that civil defence had, in many cases, been 31
effective in mitigating the effects of strategic bombing campaigns, and in main- 32
taining an ongoing capacity to wage war in the face of attack. It concluded that a 33
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concerted national effort at civil defence was necessary, given the postwar threat 34
the US faced from the Soviet Union. This finding led to a multi-year planning 35
process that culminated in a 1950 report entitled United States Civil Defense 36
(National Security Resources Board 1950)7, which laid the groundwork for civil 37
defence after the Second World War and for many aspects of emergency man- 38
agement in the US. 39
The approach articulated in U.S. Civil Defense was firmly situated in the 40
assumptions of total war and of strategic bombing theory. ‘The outcome of two 41
world wars’, it noted: 42
43
has been decided by the weight of American industrial production in 44
support of a determined fighting force. In any future war, it is probable that 45
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1 an enemy would attempt at the outset to destroy or cripple the production
2 capacity of the US and to carry direct attack against civilian communities to
3 disrupt support of the war effort.
4 (National Security Resources Board 1950: 8)
5
6 U.S. Civil Defense assumed that a potential attacker would plan an attack based
7 on the same principles of strategic bombing that were at the centre of US Air
8 Force doctrine. As the report put it:
9
10 The considerations which determine profitable targets are understood by
11 potential enemies as well as our own planners. Such considerations include
12 total population, density of population, concentration of important indus-

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13 tries, location of communication and transportation centers, location of crit-
14 ical military facilities, and location of civil governments.
15 (National Security Resources Board 1950: 8)
16
17 A number of questions followed from this argument: what would be the
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18 impact of attacks on these ‘profitable targets’? What kinds of preparations
19 would be appropriate to meeting this threat? And who should be responsible
20 for organizing them? Elsewhere, we have argued that U.S. Civil Defense
21 answered these questions by laying out a conceptual and organizational frame-
22 work that we call ‘distributed preparedness’ (Collier and Lakoff 2008). Dis-
23 tributed preparedness delegated responsibility for civil defence functions to
24 different levels of government, and to both public and private agencies,
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25 according to their competencies, capacities, and, of course, their spatial rela-

26 tionship to a likely target. Here, we focus on an aspect of distributed prepared-
27 ness that is significant for the subsequent development of system-vulnerability
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28 thinking: a set of techniques we group together under the term ‘vulnerability

29 mapping’.
30 The purpose of vulnerability mapping was to gauge the potential impact of a
31 nuclear attack on specific US cities, to assess how an attack would affect critical
32 facilities, and to develop the capacities necessary to respond to such an attack.
33 Vulnerability mapping enabled planners to understand cities and the systems
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34 that composed them as sites of potential future disaster and as complex land-
35 scapes of response. The basic technique was to create maps that visually juxta-
36 posed an attack’s projected impact against the existing infrastructure of an urban
37 area. Using these maps, planners could assess weaknesses in existing response
38 capacities and determine where resources would have to be directed in order to
39 improve civil defence preparedness.8
40 The techniques used in vulnerability mapping deserve some elaboration.
41 Three steps of the process are of particular relevance here:
42
43 1 cataloguing key elements of collective life in a target zone;
44 2 assessing the vulnerability of these elements to nuclear attack;
45 3 developing contingency plans that would mitigate these vulnerabilities.
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26 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

In a first step, planners conducted an ‘urban analysis’ by creating an inven- 1
tory of a given city’s salient features for the purposes of civil defence. In various 2
ways, these features could prove relevant to vulnerability in the event of an 3
attack. Thus, for example, information about land use could help in estimating 4
possible damage to urban facilities and in mapping the distribution of population 5
– which was crucial to assessing likely casualties from a blast. Industrial plants 6
were significant as possible targets of sabotage or bombing, and as important 7
elements in police and fire-control planning. 8
The second step was to assess the vulnerability of the various elements in this 9
inventory to a nuclear attack on a vital target. This assessment was conducted by 10
juxtaposing a spatialized map of bomb damage over the existing features of a 11
city. A transparent acetate overlay with regularly spaced concentric circles was 12

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placed on top of a map of industrial facilities and population concentrations. 13
Each circle marked a zone in which the impact of a blast would be felt with a 14
common intensity.9 It was then possible to estimate the damage that a bomb of a 15
given size, hitting a given point, would inflict on the significant features identi- 16
fied in the urban analysis. ON 17
The analysis of likely bomb damage made possible a third and final step, 18
which was to use the estimate of the spatial distribution of physical damage and 19
casualties over the existing structure of a city as a basis for emergency response 20
plans. For example, information about damage to streets and highways, or 21
general information about the spatial distribution of casualties, might be pro- 22
vided to engineering departments and ‘incorporated in the general civil defense 23
transportation map’ (United States Federal Civil Defense Administration 1953: 24
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53). Evacuation routes would thus be planned on the basis of the likely volume 25
of evacuees over certain routes. What emerged from this analysis was a new 26
understanding of cities in a nuclear age: as possible targets and as collections of 27
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vulnerable systems that had to be understood in their complex interrelationship. 28

29
30
A generalized approach to system vulnerability
31
The civil-defence approach to national vulnerability was initially designed for 32
anticipating and organizing response to a Soviet nuclear attack. However, plan- 33
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ners soon recognized that many of the assessment techniques and organi- 34
zational forms developed to prepare for nuclear attack could also be useful in 35
preparing for other types of threats, such as natural disasters. During the 1960s 36
and early 1970s, techniques for analysing the vulnerability of systems and for 37
planning response were generalized. This process was not the result of an over- 38
arching, explicit strategy, nor was it a central aspect of US national security 39
thinking at the time. Rather, it took place through a series of autonomous devel- 40
opments that – as we show in the next section – were later brought together in a 41
coherent framework as experts identified new problems of national security in 42
the 1970s. 43
44
45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 27

1 ‘Total preparedness’ and all-hazards planning
2
As early as the 1948 Hopley Report, civil defence planners had suggested that
3
the methods of nuclear attack preparedness could be extended to preparedness
4
for other types of emergencies, such as natural disasters (Roberts 2006). In the
5
1950s and after, federal civil defence agencies were involved in disaster relief.
6
For example, after Hurricane Diana struck the Northeast in 1955, the Federal
7
Civil Defense Agency (FDCA) helped in coordinating assistance to states faced
8
with disastrous flooding (Flemming 1957).
9
10 Nonetheless, for much of the Cold War period, preparations for disaster
11 response remained secondary for federal civil defence agencies. Indeed, in the
12 1960s and early 1970s, federal officials were hesitant to allow state and local

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13 emergency management offices to use civil defence funds in preparation for
14 natural disasters (Quarantelli 2000). Gradually, however, federal civil defence
15 agencies began to accept the idea that organizing for nuclear attack and for
16 natural disasters were complementary activities that drew on the same practices
17 of vulnerability assessment and crisis management.
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18 The practice of using civil defence resources for peacetime disasters was
19 institutionalized by a 1976 amendment to the 1950 Federal Civil Defense Act.
20 This shift was further advanced in the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency
21 (DCPA) under President Carter.10 The director of the DCPA co-authored a May
22 1977 statement summarizing discussions among federal, state, and local civil
23 defence agencies, which acknowledged the legitimacy of using civil defence
24 funds for natural disaster preparedness and defined a concept of ‘total prepared-
ness’ that incorporated both civil defence measures and natural disaster pre-
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25
26 paredness: ‘Local and State governments have the responsibility to provide
27 preparedness for enemy attack as well as peacetime disasters. Therefore,
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28 DCPA’s financial assistance to local and State governments may in the future be
29 used to achieve total preparedness against any risk’ (Joint Committee on
30 Defense Production 1977: Appendix A, 38). All-hazards planning became offi-
31 cial policy at the federal level with the establishment of the Federal Emergency
32 Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979 (for a summary of key organizations in
33 this story, see Figure 1.)
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34 The shift to ‘total preparedness’ can also be observed in the area of defence
35 mobilization. During the Cold War mobilization that began in 1950, a series of
36 governmental agencies had the task of ensuring that a productive and logistical
37 network was in place to support a US war effort. In doing so, these agencies –
38 some of which were part of civil defence programmes, some of which were in
39 military branches – were also concerned about the condition of this production
40 and distribution network after a nuclear attack. The Office of Defense Mobil-
41 ization in the Executive Office of the President (1950–8) was one site for such
42 preparedness planning.
43 As in emergency response, the organizations involved in defence mobil-
44 ization – whose official task was to assure the nation’s industrial capacity for
45 war-fighting – were, nearly from their inception, also involved in planning for
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28 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

1
2
National Security 3
Resource Board 4
– 1947–53 Defense
Production 5
Administration – 6
1951–53
7
8
Direct line of succession
9
Office of Defense
Succession through 10
mobilization –
1950–53
intermediary organization 11
(not shown) 12

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13
Federal Civil 14
Defense 15
Administration – 16
1950–58
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18
Office of 19
Emergency 20
Planning – Office of Civil 21
1961–68 Defense (Army) 22
– 1964–72
23
24
Office of
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Emergency 25
Defense Civil
Preparedness –
Preparedness
26
1968 –73 27
Agency –
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1972–79 28
29
30
31
32
FEMA – 1979
33
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34
Figure 1 Organizations involved in US Emergency Response and Defense Mobilization 35
(organizations mentioned in text indicated bold face).
36
37
other types of threat. For example, in the mid-1950s, the Office of Defense 38
Mobilization explored the possibility of adapting its nuclear attack damage- 39
assessment procedures to natural disasters. A devastating 1955 flood in Califor- 40
nia provided the occasion for one such experiment. However, as was the case 41
with civilian emergency response in the 1950s, the main emphasis in defence 42
mobilization remained on war readiness. Civil defence planners saw prepared- 43
ness for natural disasters as an opportunity to test techniques and train personnel 44
for the cataclysmic event of a nuclear war (Flemming 1957). 45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 29

1 Over time, defence mobilization officials shifted toward a total preparedness
2 approach. In part, they did so to convince the managers of private sector utilities
3 – who were convinced of the need for natural disaster preparedness, but reluct-
4 ant to engage in nuclear preparedness – to voluntarily implement safeguards
5 against nuclear attack. For example, a 1970 manual for oil refineries published
6 by the Interior Department and the Army Office of Civil Defense encouraged
7 managers in charge of safety and reliability to plan not only for typical contin-
8 gencies like fires or accidents, but to simultaneously prepare for a nuclear bomb
9 blast. The argument from the manual was that the two forms of planning were
10 complementary – and essential to national security in a broad sense.
11
12 Since the petroleum industry including natural gas has the responsibility of

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13 supplying over 75% of the energy for our economy, the country must have
14 petroleum processing facilities of adequate strength and management ready
15 to cope with all emergencies be they of natural origin or doings of mankind.
16 (Stephens 1970: v, emphasis added)
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18 Civil defence planners thus developed a generic notion of ‘emergency’ that
19 would enable them to take advantage both of local government capacities and
20 private sector activities in the service of total preparedness.
21
22
System vulnerability and crisis management
23
24 The shift to total preparedness involved not only the kinds of institutional
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25 changes described above, but also a number of technical developments. Techni-

26 cians involved in emergency planning used systems analysis to develop formal
27 models of vulnerability. These models did not assess the impact of specific
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28 events, but rather analysed the intrinsic vulnerability of systems to disruptions of

29 any kind. The use of such methods was part of the broad diffusion of operations
30 research and systems analysis methods across US government bureaucracies
31 during the 1960s (Jardini 2000; Amadae 2003; Light 2003).
32 An example of such efforts can be found in the sphere of defence mobilization
33 – specifically, electricity sector preparedness. The Defense Electric Power
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34 Administration (DEPA) had been formed in the early 1950s as part of the broader
35 remobilization that began with the onset of the Korean War. Like other defence
36 mobilization agencies created at the time, its aims were both to assure adequate
37 development of power resources for defence production and to prepare for
38 dealing with the damage that production and transmission facilities would suffer
39 in the event of a nuclear attack. In the early 1960s, this agency was calculating
40 the likely effects of a nuclear blast largely by employing the techniques
41 developed in early civil defence described above, which involved estimating the
42 impact of a nuclear attack on a critical target. Toward the end of the 1960s,
43 however, DEPA studies began to adopt formal techniques – such as linear pro-
44 gramming – that changed the approach to vulnerability assessment. The shift was
45 from the analysis of specific events to generic models of system vulnerability. As
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30 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

a group of experts in the field wrote in a 1975 report to the Defense Civil Pre- 1
paredness Agency, ‘vulnerability evaluations of electric power systems have pro- 2
gressed from detailed, specific analyses of particular systems reacting to a 3
specific nuclear attack to general methods of evaluation using sophisticated mod- 4
eling techniques’ (Lambert and Minor 1973). 5
These techniques made it possible to assess the impact of a potential disrup- 6
tion not only on electrical production and distribution, but also on ‘secondary’ 7
systems – industrial enterprises, for example. This progression was consistent 8
with a shift to an all-hazards approach, but added a specific focus on the intrinsic 9
vulnerability of systems, and a methodology for assessing the interdependencies 10
among systems, to the toolkit. What was novel were the methods of technical 11
analysis: whereas prewar ‘industrial web’ theorists had been concerned with 12

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interdependency and the effect of disruptions on interconnected structures, they 13
did not have a quantitative method for analysing these interdependencies. 14
By the late 1960s, systems analysis was being employed in other areas of 15
civil defence, such as the White House Office of Emergency Preparedness 16
(OEP). The OEP was a successor to the Office of Defense Mobilization, but its
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purview was broader. Its mission was to ensure that the government would 18
respond effectively to various types of emergency. The OEP was charged with 19
coordinating response to multiple types of crisis over the course of the early 20
1970s, including the wage-price freeze of 1970, a threatened Penn Central 21
Railway strike, and the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973. 22
A department within OEP, called the Systems Evaluation Division (SED), 23
was devoted to the formal analysis of critical systems – such as transportation, 24
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energy, and communication – as part of a broad vision of crisis management. A 25

major figure in SED was Robert H. Kupperman, a specialist in operations 26
research who had come to OEP from the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a 27
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civilian think-tank that conducted technical research for the Defense Depart- 28
ment. Kupperman would later participate in discussions about the formulation of 29
critical infrastructure protection programmes in the US, such as the expert panel 30
for Critical Foundations. In SED, he initially focused on producing a sophistic- 31
ated mathematical analysis of the strategic implications of anti-ballistic missile 32
systems (Kupperman and Smith 1972; Hiltz and Turoff 1978). In subsequent 33
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work, he applied the tools of systems analysis to the problem of system vulnera- 34
bility. For example, he led a detailed analysis of the role conservation measures 35
could play in averting an anticipated energy crisis – as well as the economic 36
impact of such measures. This work analysed patterns of energy consumption in 37
multiple sectors, including electricity, transportation, and industrial production.11 38
Through his work in SED, Kupperman became interested in the common 39
structure of response to crisis situations. What was crucial across all of them, he 40
argued, was the need to have crisis management techniques in place before the 41
advent of the crisis. In this sense, his work was structurally similar to the all- 42
hazards approach in emergency management. In a 1975 article on crisis manage- 43
ment and computer-based communication, Kupperman and his co-authors 44
pointed to characteristics shared by diverse types of crisis – including hurri- 45
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1 canes, terrorism, and famine. The authors wrote that in order to adequately
2 respond to such events, which were increasing in number and complexity,
3 coherent systems of preparedness planning must already be in place: ‘As we
4 begin to recognize the complex problems that threaten every nation with disas-
5 ter’, Kupperman asked, ‘can we continue to trust the ad hoc processes of instant
6 reaction to muddle through?’ (Kupperman et al. 1975).
7
8
System vulnerability as a national security problem
9
10 Up until the mid-1970s, these various initiatives in emergency management,
11 civil defence, and defence mobilization were not organized around a single
12 national security framework. Part of the reason was organizational dispersion:

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13 they were spread out among various agencies engaged in specific activities such
14 as crisis management. It was also due to the peripheral status of civil defence
15 thinking during the Cold War. Throughout most of the Cold War, civil defence
16 was a fairly marginal aspect of national security debates, which were focused on
17 strategies for deterring the Soviet threat. From the vantage of the dominant stra-
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18 tegic paradigm – mutually assured destruction – civil defence was dangerously
19 destabilizing, since it presumed that one could fight and win a nuclear war.12
20 Beginning around the mid-1970s, however, some security experts began to
21 re-conceptualize the objects and aims of national security, particularly in
22 response to events such as terrorist attacks and the energy crisis. They argued
23 that these events presented new national security challenges – which could not
24 be adequately approached within the Cold War strategic paradigm. In this
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25 context, one subgroup of experts sought to apply practices that had been
26 developed in areas such as emergency management and defence mobilization to
27 a novel set of threats.
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28
29
Non-deterrable threats
30
31 In the 1970s, a subgroup of security thinkers with ties to civil defence – includ-
32 ing Kupperman and his colleagues – became concerned with the rise of threats
33 other than the Soviet Union. Events such as the 1972 Munich terrorist attacks,
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34 followed soon after by the Arab–Israeli War and the 1973 oil crisis, indicated to
35 these thinkers that the nation’s dependence on critical systems was a vulnerabil-
36 ity that could be exploited by actors who lacked the military strength to directly
37 challenge the US
38 As we have seen, in OEP, Kupperman was concerned with anticipating and
39 managing potential future energy crises. After the events of the early 1970s, he
40 linked this concern to the problem of terrorism. He argued that terrorism was
41 emerging as a strategic tool in low-intensity conflict – and that terrorists were
42 likely to exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical systems (Kupperman et al.
43 1982: 463). This emphasis on the conjuncture of terrorism and the vulnerability
44 of energy systems was shared by other civil defence-oriented security thinkers,
45 such as Maynard M. Stephens, the author of the 1970 study on oil refineries
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32 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

cited above. In a 1979 volume on terrorism co-edited by Kupperman, Stephens 1
wrote that ‘the uninterrupted flow of natural gas is economically essential to the 2
country’ (Stephens 1979: 213). For this reason, he argued, ‘segments of major 3
natural-gas transmission lines should therefore stand out as attractive targets to 4
the saboteur’ (Stephens 1979: 213). 5
Such arguments followed the concern, first developed in strategic bombing 6
theory with critical nodes of a production system that, if disrupted, could knock 7
out an entire industrial web. There was a crucial difference, however. The threat 8
now came not from an enemy’s military attack, but from non-deterrable threats 9
– terrorism, and ‘threats without enemies’ such as technological failures and 10
natural disasters. In short, total preparedness was no longer viewed as an adjunct 11
to the problem of confronting the Soviet Union. Rather, it was seen as a national 12

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security problem in its own right. 13
This elevation of systems vulnerability to the level of a national security 14
concern had a certain political salience in the period, given the contemporary 15
concern with problems such as energy and terrorism. For example, in 1977, the 16
Joint Congressional Committee on Defense Production held hearings and pub-
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lished a two-part report on the nation’s ‘civil preparedness’ programmes. The 18
report was highly critical of the condition of the nation’s emergency manage- 19
ment plans. It recommended the centralization of federal preparedness efforts 20
and a broadening of these efforts to include non-nuclear threats. The first 21
volume of the report articulated, in now-familiar terms, two key aspects of the 22
vital systems security framework: the dependence of contemporary society on 23
complex technological systems, and the vulnerability of citizens to multiple 24
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types of threat. ‘An increasingly complex, technology-dependent, industrial 25

economy in the United States’, the report argued, ‘has made citizens more than 26
ever vulnerable to the effects of disasters and emergencies over which they have 27
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little or no control and to which they cannot successfully respond as individuals’ 28

(Joint Committee on Defense Production 1977: 3). Moreover, the report noted 29
‘increasing demands made on government by citizens’ for protection against 30
such threats’.13 31
In July 1977, soon after the Committee’s Civil Preparedness Review was 32
published, a major blackout occurred in New York City. The blackout, which 33
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was accompanied by extensive riots and looting, brought widespread attention to 34

the frailty and vulnerability of the nation’s electrical grid and other critical 35
systems. The Defense Production Committee held hearings shortly after the 36
blackout on the implications of the event for federal emergency preparedness. 37
One conclusion was that these systems were vulnerable to a wide array of 38
threats, ranging from technical accidents to natural hazards and terrorist attacks: 39
‘Electric utilities therefore present a relatively compact and especially inviting 40
set of targets for a saboteur, a terrorist or an attacker, as well as a lightning bolt’ 41
(Joint Committee on Defense Production 1977: 1f.). The problem of system vul- 42
nerability was projected onto the enemy’s strategy, in a mirroring process that 43
was similar to early civil defence. 44
At these hearings, the director of the Defense Logistics Agency testified 45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 33

1 about military efforts to protect key defence industries from attack. He noted
2 that the scope of his agency’s activity was limited to those industries that had a
3 direct impact on defence needs. Considering the widespread impact of the New
4 York City blackout on economic and social life, he suggested the need for a
5 broader programme to secure critical facilities. This would begin with a cata-
6 loguing effort:
7
8 It might be well if there were some sort of national list, if you please, of
9 facilities that would be a key to our economic and societal well-being. Then
10 at least, we would know what they are and whether or not the Federal
11 Government would see fit to involve itself in providing for their security or
12 would provide at least some advice on what these facilities could do for

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13 themselves.
14 (Joint Committee on Defense Production 1977: 117)
15
16 What is significant in these recommendations is the proposal that the federal
17 government should generalize its efforts to assure critical infrastructure, from a
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18 specific emphasis on those systems essential to military production to a broader
19 concern with the vital systems essential to the economic and social well-being of
20 the nation as a whole.
21
22
A mature paradigm
23
24 In 1984, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown
F

25 published a report, called America’s Hidden Vulnerabilities: Crisis Management

26 in a Society of Networks (Woolsey et al. 1984). The report was based on the
27 work of a ‘Panel on Crisis Management’ chaired by Kupperman and R. James
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28 Woolsey. It can be seen as a fully articulated vision of system-vulnerability

29 thinking as a distinctive approach to national security. Its producers were mar-
30 ginal to governmental policy at the time. However, this vision would come to
31 the centre of policy discussions a decade later in the Clinton administration with
32 the explicit articulation of ‘critical infrastructure protection’ as a national secur-
33 ity problem.
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34 The CSIS document synthesized the basic elements of system-vulnerability

35 thinking whose development we have tracked so far: it identified the protection
36 of vital systems as a question of national security; it argued that these systems
37 were vulnerable to threats that could not be deterred, and whose risk could not
38 be assessed through probabilistic analysis; it proposed a framework of prepared-
39 ness that included a range of techniques for mitigating vulnerabilities, including
40 ways of understanding systems (cataloguing, vulnerability assessment), meas-
41 ures to secure these systems; and plans for response to their disruption. But it
42 went one step further, proposing that system vulnerability be seen as an
43 autonomous problem of national security in a post-Cold War world, one that
44 was distinct from the threat of foreign enemies. The elements of ‘critical infra-
45 structure protection’ discussed at the outset of this chapter were now in place.
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34 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

Security problem: the protection of vulnerable, vital systems 1
2
The report argued that the nation had become economically, technologically,
3
and psychologically dependent on a number of ‘highly complex service net-
4
works’ for ‘our daily well-being’ (Woolsey et al. 1984: 4). It emphasized the
5
risk to national security posed by the fragility and interdependency of these
6
systems: ‘We live in a civilization at risk, as much from the increasing fragility
7
and brittleness of its technological fabric as from the more visible and appar-
8
ently urgent threats from abroad’. The report enumerated the qualities of critical 9
systems that made them both an efficient means of distribution and a source of 10
vulnerability: they are made up of multiple nodes and are interconnected by 11
links that facilitate the circulation of goods and information (Woolsey et al. 12

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1984: 11). It was not in principle difficult to disrupt the operations of these net- 13
works, given their interdependence: ‘denial of the essential resources – human, 14
energy, and fiscal – that make networks function will quickly bring their opera- 15
tions to a halt’. 16
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Threats to vital systems as national security problems 18
19
The disasters that threaten these systems, the report argued, were not regularly 20
occurring events, such as those mitigated by insurance; nor were they rational 21
enemies that could be managed through strategies such as diplomacy and deter- 22
rence. Rather, the threat consisted of low-probability, high-consequence events. 23
These included terrorists or dissidents who had the capacity and intention to do 24
harm. But other kinds of events, such as natural disasters or technological acci-
F

25
dents, could also severely disrupt critical systems, according to the report. The 26
potentially catastrophic effects of such events meant that they had to be planned 27
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for even if they were rare or improbable: ‘This is an explosive combination that 28
serious and responsible national leaders need to address, however low a probab- 29
ility one might reasonably assign to any particular network vulnerability being 30
exploited at any one time’ (Woolsey et al. 1984: 7). 31
32
Techniques for mitigating vulnerabilities: contingency planning, 33
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preparedness 34
35
Given that such events could not be predicted, or necessarily prevented, the 36
emphasis in the report was on reducing the vulnerabilities of critical systems. 37
Since these networks were interrelated and interdependent, the report argued, a 38
comprehensive programme of protection must be developed. The report intro- 39
duced a number of measures for ensuring the continued functioning of critical 40
systems in the event of emergency, most of which had evolved over the years in 41
emergency response and defence mobilization programmes: improving system 42
resilience, building in redundancy, stockpiling spare parts, performing risk 43
analysis as a means of prioritizing resource allocation, and running scenario- 44
based exercises in order to test readiness. A final key element in the report’s 45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 35

1 broad ‘philosophy of crisis management’ was the specification of responsibil-
2 ities in the event of emergency – who would make preparations, who would
3 declare a state of emergency, and who would be in charge during the actual
4 emergency. While these recommendations were not directly implemented, the
5 CSIS report is significant for our story in that it exemplifies the process through
6 which systems vulnerability as a problem came to the centre of national security
7 strategy.
8
9
Conclusion: vital systems security
10
11 In this chapter we have described the process through which a new way of defin-
12 ing and intervening in collective security problems emerged over the course of

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13 the twentieth century. Through this process, experts began to define a new class
14 of threats to security: events that threatened the vital systems supporting collect-
15 ive life. In conclusion, we consider how this new way of approaching security
16 problems relates to the notion of ‘critical infrastructure protection’ as it emerged
17 in the last decade. ON
18 CIP as a concept and practice was first explicitly articulated in the 1990s. As
19 Myriam Dunn Cavelty argues (Chapter 2, this volume), early CIP policy focused
20 on cyber-infrastructures, responding to a growing concern regarding information
21 security that had developed in the US government during the 1980s. Experts
22 then expanded the concept to include the entire range of critical infrastructures
23 on which economic and political life were seen to depend. After the attacks of
24 September 11, CIP moved to the centre of domestic security doctrine. The story
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25 we have told in this chapter suggests that this development is not best under-
26 stood as a process of the ‘securitization’ of a civilian sector. Rather, it would be
27 better to say that in the 1980s and 1990s, a growing concern about information
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28 security found a technical vocabulary, a set of analytical tools, and practices of

29 intervention in a long-standing mode of thinking about infrastructures as a
30 security problem.
31 Although it has not been the focus of this chapter, it would certainly be pos-
32 sible to trace the lines of connection between the history we have recounted and
33 the explicit articulation of critical infrastructure protection in the 1990s. Thus,
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34 for example, both Kupperman and Woolsey participated in an expert panel as

35 part of a 1997 Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) report to the President’s
36 Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (Institute for Defense Analysis
37 1997). Furthermore, a remarkable proportion of the support staff for the pivotal
38 Critical Foundations report were officers in the Air Force (President’s Commis-
39 sion on Critical Infrastructure Protection 1997: iv). More broadly, critical infra-
40 structure protection has clear conceptual connections and institutional precursors
41 going all the way back to strategic bombing theory. Seen against the background
42 of the history of system-vulnerability thinking in the twentieth century, the
43 underlying rationality of critical infrastructure protection is entirely familiar.
44 Notwithstanding these continuities, the emergence of CIP as an explicit area
45 of government initiative does, we argue, mark an important development in the
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36 S.J. Collier and A. Lakoff

history of system-vulnerability thinking. For most of the twentieth century, the 1
elements of system vulnerability we have described – ‘vulnerability analysis’, 2
‘contingency planning’, and so on – functioned as adjuncts to a paradigm of sov- 3
ereign state security that was concerned with defence against foreign threats. As 4
we have shown, in the interwar period and the Cold War, the rudiments of 5
system-vulnerability thinking were developed as specific responses to the chal- 6
lenges posed by the threat of air war or Soviet nuclear attack. We might say that 7
in these contexts system-vulnerability thinking – as a way of conceptualizing 8
security problems and intervening in them – was circumscribed and limited by 9
the exigencies of sovereign state security. 10
This situation began to change as the major existential threat of the postwar 11
period – Soviet nuclear attack – faded, and new threats such as terrorism, 12

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technological failure, and energy crises came to be identified as central to 13
national security. The identification of these threats introduced, in Foucault’s 14
language, an ‘uncertainty’ provoked by difficulties in ‘previous way[s] of under- 15
standing, acting, relating’. It was unclear whether the questions and concepts of 16
sovereign state security could be meaningfully applied to these new risks. In this
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context, techniques for understanding and managing system vulnerability were 18
disarticulated from the specific demands of sovereign state security. The mitiga- 19
tion of system vulnerability came to be seen as an autonomous aim of security 20
policy. In the process, national security came to be defined, at least in part, in 21
terms of the security of vital systems (Collier and Lakoff 2006). 22
It is important to bear in mind that this new way of understanding security 23
problems has not, thus far, produced stable organizational forms or modalities of 24
F

intervention. For the moment, rather, what we observe is a profusion of plans, 25

schemas, techniques, and organizational initiatives that respond to new kinds of 26
perceived threats to collective security. Critical infrastructure protection is only 27
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one such response, and one whose actualization in bureaucratic arrangements, 28

resource flows, and established regimes of security is just beginning to emerge. 29
30
Notes 31
32
1 The wartime bombing effort also led to the development of optimization techniques
(in systems analysis and operations research) that, as we see below, were to prove 33
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important in formalizing understandings of system vulnerability in the 1960s and 34

1970s. 35
2 According to Greer (1985), this scenario of a European coalition combined with an 36
Asian power was the common assumption used in US military planning before the 37
Second World War.
3 This enumeration of likely targets within the ‘industrial triangle’ was laid out by 38
Captain Harold Lee George, another major figure in ACTS, at the same hearings. 39
4 Fairchild’s words, quoted by Faber (1997: 85), are in single quotation marks. ACTS 40
theorists worked extensively with examples from the US for reasons other than a 41
concern with continental defense. Extensive information about the industrial structure 42
of other countries was not available, and taking examples that assumed bombing of
potential future adversaries by the US military was considered provocative. 43
5 Civil defense was not the only response to this new awareness of the US as a target. A 44
range of policies were taken to reduce the vulnerability of industries that would be 45
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The vulnerability of vital systems 37

1 essential to war production, including the promotion of industrial dispersion, dis-
2 cussed in Galison (2001) and Light (2002), and programmes to assure that the US had
3 enough redundant capacity to manage disruptions of industry due to strikes.
6 McMullen (2001) discusses the relationship of the Strategic Bombing Survey to the
4 transformation in Air Force doctrine. Key figures from the ACTS, including Muir S.
5 Fairchild, played central roles in the Survey (Faber 1997).
6 7 U.S. Civil Defense led to the 1951 Civil Defense Act – which in turn created the
7 Federal Civil Defense Administration. Lee (2001: 60) argues that U.S. Civil Defense
8 – referred to as ‘The Blue Book’ – served ‘as the blueprint for structuring the Federal
Civil Defense administration’. More broadly, the document laid out a new model that
9 would subsequently be adopted in a range of other contexts for managing ‘emer-
10 gency’ situations. For a review of the studies that led up to USCD, see Lee’s chapter
11 ‘Careful studies and indecision’.
12 8 This discussion draws in particular on a document titled Civil Defense Urban Analy-

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13 sis (United States Federal Civil Defense Administration 1953).
9 Damage from the blast in each zone could be estimated using information from a doc-
14
ument that had been prepared by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department
15 of Defense, called The Effects of Atomic Weapons (United States Department of
16 Defense, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory 1950). This document, based on data
17 gathered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provided tables indicating blast damage from a
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18 nuclear strike at various distances from ground zero.
19 10 In testimony to the Joint Committee on Defense Production, the director of Civil Pre-
paredness (who had been appointed in April 1977) noted:
20
21 The previous Administration sought to limit civil defense support of State and
local government to preparations for nuclear attack only. This position was
22
rejected by the Congress in P.L. 94–361 and by this Administration under my
23 recently announced policy of dual use preparedness.
24 (Joint Committee on Defense Production 1977: 35)
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25 11 This work is summarized by the head of the Office of Emergency Management,

26 George A. Lincoln (Lincoln 1973).
27 12 Patrick Roberts writes that in 1970s, ‘civil defense advocates tussled with proponents
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28 of mutually assured destruction, who believed that civil defense efforts were futile
29 since the whole point of deterrence was to convince both sides that there could be no
winner in a nuclear war’ (Roberts 2006: 60).
30
13 The growth in the significance of the word preparedness, although little remarked,
31 has resulted primarily from two factors: (1) the increasing vulnerability of a
32 complex, highly interdependent industrial society, and (2) the increasing demands
33 made on Government by citizens whose lives may be dramatically affected by a
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34 range of emergencies they are unable to prevent or control.

35 (Joint Committee on Defense Production 1977: 3)
36
37
38 References
39
Amadae, S.M. (2003) Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of
40 Rational Choice Liberalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
41 Aron, R. (1954) The Century of Total War, Garden City: Doubleday.
42 Clodfelter, M.A. (1997) ‘Molding airpower convictions: Development and legacy of
43 William Mitchell’s strategic thought’, in Meilinger, P.S. (ed.) The Paths of Heaven:
44 The Evolution of Airpower Theory, Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press, pp.
45 79–114.
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Collier, S.J. and Lakoff, A. (2006) Vital Systems Security, ARC Working Paper no. 2, 1
Berkeley: Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory. 2
Collier, S.J. and Lakoff, A. (2008) ‘Distributed preparedness: space, security and cit- 3
izenship in the United States’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26, 1: 4
7–28.
5
Faber, P.R. (1997) ‘Interwar US army aviation and the Air Corps Tactical School: incubators
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of American airpower’, in Meilinger, P.S. (ed.) The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of
Airpower Theory, Maxwell Air Force Base: Air University Press, pp. 183–238. 7
Flemming, A.S. (1957) ‘The impact of disasters on readiness for war’, Annals of the 8
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 309: 65–70. 9
Foucault, M. (1994) Dits et Ecrits, 1954–1988, Paris: Gallimard. 10
Freedman, L. (1983) The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, New York: St. Martin’s Press. 11
Galison, P. (2001) ‘War against the center’, Grey Room, 4, Summer: 6–33. 12

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Greer, T.H. (1985) The Development of Air Doctrine in the Army Air Arm, 1917–1941, 13
Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, U.S. Air Force. 14
Hiltz, S.R. and Turoff, M. (1978) The Network Nation: Human Communication via Com- 15
puter, Reading: Addison-Wesley.
16
Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) (1997) National Strategies and Structures for Infra-
ON 17
structure Protection. Report to the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure
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lps19700/NationalStrategiesStructures.pdf (accessed 16 October 2007). 19
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Pentagon to the great society, 1961–1965’, in Hughes, A.C. and Hughes, T.P. (eds) 21
Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engin- 22
eering, World War II and After, Cambridge: MIT Press. 23
Joint Committee on Defense Production (JCDP) (1977) Civil Preparedness Review. Part 24
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I: Emergency Preparedness and Industrial Mobilization, Washington, DC: US 25

Government Printing Office. 26
Kupperman, R.H. and Smith, H.A. (1972) ‘Strategies of mutual deterrence’, Science, 176,
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4030: 18–23.
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Kupperman, R.H., van Opstal, D. and Williamson, D. (1982) ‘Terror, the strategic tool:
response and control’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social 29
Science, 463: 24–38. 30
Kupperman, R.H., Wilcox, R.H. and Smith, H.A. (1975) ‘Crisis management: some 31
opportunities’, Science, 187: 229. 32
Lambert, B.K. and Minor, J.E. (1973) Vulnerability of Regional Electric Power Systems 33
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to Nuclear Weapons Effect, Washington, DC: Defense Electric Power Administration. 34

Lee, C.P. (2001) An Exercise in Utility: Civil Defense from Hiroshima to the Cuban 35
Missile Crisis, doctoral thesis, St. Louis: St. Louis University. 36
Light, J.S. (2002) ‘Urban security from warfare to welfare’, International Journal of 37
Urban and Regional Research, 26, 3: 607–13.
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Light, J.S. (2003) From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems
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in Cold War America, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lincoln, G.A. (1973) ‘Energy conservation’, Science, 180, 4082: 155–62. 40
McMullen, J.K. (2001) The United States Strategic Bombing Survey And Air Force Doc- 41
trine, Maxwell Air Force Base: School Of Advanced Airpower Studies. 42
Meilinger, P.S. (1997) ‘Giulio Douhet and the origins of airpower theory’, in Meilinger, 43
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1 National Security Resources Board (1950) United States Civil Defense, Washington, DC:
2 US Government Printing Office.
3 President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) (1997) Critical
4 Foundations: Protecting America’s Infrastructures, Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office.
5
Quarantelli, E.L. (2000) Disaster Planning, Emergency Management and Civil Protec-
6
tion: The Historical Development of Organized Efforts to Plan for and Respond to Dis-
7 asters, Preliminary paper 301, Newark: Disaster Research Center, University of
8 Delaware.
9 Roberts, P.S. (2006) ‘FEMA and the prospects for reputation-based autonomy’, Studies
10 in American Political Development, 20, Spring: 57–87.
11 Stephens, M.M. (1970) Minimizing Damage to Refineries from Nuclear Attack, Natural,
12 and Other Disasters. A Handbook Reviewing Potential Hazards that Could Affect

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13 Petroleum Refinery Operations in Times of War and Peace, Washington, DC: Office of
14 Oil and Gas Department of the Interior.
15 Stephens, M.M. (1979) ‘Industries: a potential target of terrorists’, in Kupperman, R.H.
and Trent, D.M. (eds) Terrorism: Threat, Reality, Response, Stanford: Hoover Institu-
16
tion Press Stanford University.
17 ON
United States Department of Defense, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (1950) The
18 Effects of Atomic Weapons, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
19 United States Federal Civil Defense Administration (1953) Civil Defense Urban
20 Analysis, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
21 Woolsey, R.J., Wilcox, R.H. and Garrity, P.J. (1984) America’s Hidden Vulnerabilities:
22 Crisis Management in a Society of Networks. A Report of the Panel on Crisis Manage-
23 ment of the CSIS Science and Technology Committee, Washington, DC: Center for
24 Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University.
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25
26
27
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29
30
31
32
33
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34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
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1
2 Like a phoenix from the ashes 2
3
The reinvention of critical 4
5
infrastructure protection as distributed 6
security 7
8
9
Myriam Dunn Cavelty 10
11
12

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Critical infrastructures are usually defined as systems or assets so vital to a 13
country that any extended incapacity or destruction of such systems would have 14
a debilitating impact on security, the economy, national public health or safety, 15
or any combination of the above. For this reason, critical infrastructure protec- 16
tion (CIP) is currently seen as essential part of national security in numerous
ON 17
countries around the world (Abele-Wigert and Dunn 2006). Protection concepts 18
for strategically important infrastructures and objects are nothing new, as Collier 19
and Lakoff aptly show in this volume: these concepts have, in some form or 20
another, been part of national defence planning for decades (Collier and Lakoff, 21
Chapter 1, this volume; see also Moteff et al. 2002). For most of the time, 22
however, the possibility of infrastructure discontinuity caused by attacks or 23
other disruptions played a relatively minor role in the security debate vis-à-vis 24
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concerns such as deterrence – only to gain new impetus around the mid-1990s, 25
when CIP as a concept and a practice was first explicitly articulated and became 26
the subject of many hearings, policy documents and study groups. 27
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The main reason for the strengthening of concepts for the protection of vital 28
infrastructures, this chapter argues, has been the information revolution. The 29
relatively recent technological development in information processing and com- 30
munication technologies and the rapid global dispersion of these technologies – 31
most significantly, the ascent of ‘the Internet’, a global decentralised communi- 32
cation network of computer networks – is seen, by many observers, to cause an 33
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ongoing transformation of all aspects of life through saturation with information 34

and communication technologies (Dunn Cavelty and Brunner 2007). But most 35
importantly, it adds a variety of novel aspects to the older debate about vital 36
system security: first of all, the dependency of modern industrialised societies on 37
a wide variety of national and international information infrastructures, charac- 38
terised by highly interdependent software-based control systems, is charac- 39
terised as a new development bringing about novel vulnerabilities. Furthermore, 40
the information revolution is seen to empower new malicious actors, including 41
states as well as non-state actors, and to enhance the overall capability of these 42
actors to do harm by inexpensive, ever more sophisticated, rapidly proliferating, 43
easy-to-use tools in cyberspace. In other words, when ‘cyber-threats’ were dis- 44
cursively interlinked with the older concept of vital system security in the 45
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Like a phoenix from the ashes 41

1 mid-1990s, the specific form of thinking about security and protection in terms
2 of vulnerable systems arose like a phoenix from the ashes and was elevated,
3 under the new name of CIP, to a high status on the security political agenda. The
4 attacks on New York and Washington of 11 September 2001 only further
5 increased the awareness of vulnerabilities and the need to protect critical infra-
6 structures in the context of terrorism. Afterwards, the term ‘CIP’ as one of the
7 main pillars of the US homeland security efforts almost became a shorthand
8 expression for domestic security in general.
9 By focusing on the reinvention of vital systems security in connection with
10 the information revolution, this chapter traces the current conceptualisation of
11 CIP back to the 1980s, starting around the time immediately following the
12 period discussed in the conclusion of Lakoff and Collier’s contribution. In

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13 particular, this chapter looks at the topic of CIP from the perspective of threat
14 frames. Threat frames are interpretive schemas about what counts as threat or
15 risk, how to respond to this threat, and who or what is responsible for it (see also
16 Eriksson and Noreen 2002; Eriksson 2001a, 2001b). Threat frames are, on the
17 one hand, tools used in the struggle for discursive hegemony and, on the other,
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18 indicators for how certain security issues are conceptualised and argued in terms
19 of causes, consequences and solutions.
20 After first discussing the idea of threat framing in relation to discursive hege-
21 mony in more detail, this chapter will explore how CIP is expressed by US
22 security policy elites in terms of threat frames and analyse the consequences of
23 this conceptualisation for security practices. The documents used in this chapter
24 are mainly official government publications and reports. They contain distilled
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25 threat frames that are filtered and sedimented so as to be indicative of the domin-
26 ant discourse of the security elite. The analysis follows a chronological order:
27 first, it focuses on how cyber-threats, defined as the malicious use of information
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28 and communication technologies either as a target or as a tool by a wide range

29 of malevolent actors, were firmly established as a national security threat in the
30 1980s to produce a fairly restricted threat frame, mainly concerned with classi-
31 fied information and government networks. Second, it shows how the two issues
32 of cyber-threats and critical infrastructures were interlinked, paying special
33 attention to the role of the US military in the process, and how the issue was
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34 thus turned into a topic of society-threatening import. Third, the chapter focuses
35 on the threat frames established in the 1997 Presidential Commission on Critical
36 Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) report, a clear culmination point in the more
37 recent CIP history, and how the idea of ‘distributed security’ was solidified.
38 Fourth, it looks at threat frames in the most recent conceptualisation of CIP
39 under the heading of homeland security. In conclusion, this chapter shows how
40 threat frames are used in the political discourse to legitimise ‘new’ practices of
41 security that seek to distribute responsibility for protecting critical infrastruc-
42 tures. This notion of ‘distributed security’ closely follows the rationale of risk
43 management and is intended as a response to a changing threat environment in
44 which the government sees itself as being unable to provide the required level of
45 security on its own.
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42 M. Dunn Cavelty
Threat framing and discourse hegemony 1
2
Within the state, there are various positions of authority from which security
3
issues can be voiced; this multiplicity of positions leads to struggles between
4
competing discourses, the goal of each group in the game being to establish a 5
dominant discourse pattern (Boekle et al. 2000, 2001; Townson 1992). In order 6
to convince others that they are acting appropriately, the participants of the dis- 7
course seek to be argumentatively persuasive. The goal is to control the attach- 8
ment of meaning to specific terms and therefore to control the discourse, in other 9
words, to obtain discourse hegemony through ‘linguistic dominance’. Foreign 10
policy research has shown that discourse participants have better prospects of 11
being convincing when they refer to an already existing discourse formation 12

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(Joerißen and Stahl 2003). This practice, which is called ‘referencing’, seeks to 13
establish linkages with existing terms, which have, in a general discourse, posit- 14
ive connotations such as morality, responsibility, and others. In addition, 15
‘naming’, that is, establishing new terms in a discourse such as for example the 16
term ‘cyber-terrorism’, and ‘signifying’, that is, being able to dominate a
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particular discourse and to act as an authoritative source for the ‘true’ meaning 18
of certain terms, assist in the struggle to gain discourse hegemony (Townson 19
1992: 25–33). The resulting dominant discourse concurs most closely with 20
common experiences and other indicators of ‘truth’ and will seem legitimate. It 21
creates (and is created by) a ‘common sense’ with which a large section of the 22
population concurs, and thus reduces the possibility for societal resistance 23
against particular state actions but, at the same time, also imposes limits on state 24
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action. 25
Social contests for the legitimate definition of reality – the struggle for dis- 26
cursive hegemony – are held by way of different categories, expressed in cogni- 27
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tive frames (see, for example, Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Snow and Benford 28
1988, 1992). Frames are rooted in and constituted by group-based social inter- 29
action and can be defined as the ‘underlying structures of belief, perception, and 30
appreciation’ through which subsequent interpretation is filtered (Rein and 31
Schön 1994: 23). The activity of framing, whether done actively or passively, 32
thus refers to the selection of certain aspects of an issue in order to cue a specific 33
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response (Ryan 1991: 59). Competing frames arise out of the political situation 34
and are expressions of ongoing discursive struggles about different conceptuali- 35
sations of an issue. The frames of the winning discourse create ‘conditions of 36
possibility’ (Campbell 1998: 13) and successfully institutionalise the practices 37
that are constitutive for the dominant discourse. 38
The key driving force behind security policy is the identification and designa- 39
tion of issues that threaten ‘the nation’. This articulation of threats is a way to 40
establish the difference between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, a fundamental prac- 41
tice in the ever-continuing construction of national identity (Campbell 1998: 9; 42
Weldes et al. 1999: 10). Furthermore, as posited by securitisation theory, 43
government officials and experts use certain phrases and also certain types of 44
stories to make their claim for urgency in the security domain (Wæver 1995). If 45
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1 this security speech act follows the ‘grammar of security’, i.e. if it constructs a
2 plot containing an existential threat and a point of no return (Buzan et al. 1998:
3 32), the issue under discussion has a better chance of being included in the
4 security agenda. Therefore, when it comes to national security issues, reference
5 is made to terms and concepts that have negative connotations and create fear,
6 anxiety and hostile images.
7 In the following chapters, three types of (interlinked) frames as outlined by
8 Snow and Benford are identified (1988: 199–202) in order to identify what or
9 who is constructed as threat or risk and how the conditions of possibility are
10 created to respond to this threat. The first type of framing is diagnostic framing,
11 which is about defining a problem and assigning blame for the problem to an
12 agent or agencies. This amounts to the designation of two parameters known

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13 from securitisation theory: the threat subject – that which threatens; and the ref-
14 erent object – that which is threatened (Buzan et al. 1998: 32). The second type
15 is prognostic framing, which concerns the proposition of solutions, as well as
16 specific strategies, tactics and objectives by which these solutions may be
17 achieved. The third type of framing is motivational framing, in order to ‘rally
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18 the troops behind the cause’ or express a ‘call for action’.
19
20
The foreign intelligence threat and the encryption debate
21
22 As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the merger of telecommunications with
23 computers – the basis of the current information revolution – meant that every-
24 body with a computer at home became theoretically able to make use of the
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25 slowly emerging computer networks. The introduction of the personal computer

26 created a rapid rise in tech-savvy users, many of whom would dial into bulletin
27 board systems with a modem and download or disseminate information on how
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28 to tinker with technology. Together with this emerging cyber-counter-culture,

29 the notion of cyber-crime was born. During this period, the amount of attention
30 given to computer and communications security issues grew incrementally in
31 response to highly publicised events such as politically motivated attacks, com-
32 puter viruses and penetrations of networked computer systems for criminal pur-
33 poses (cf. Bequai 1986; Parker 1983). Such events served as indicators of truth
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34 in the discourse and shaped it by defining legitimate practices and threat frames.
35 The dominant topic was cyber-crime. But even though it was called crime,
36 the issue was by referencing linked to the topic of espionage and thus elevated to
37 the level of urgency required for an issue to become a national security topic.
38 Mainly by referring to a couple of well-publicised incidents, some of which
39 involved data theft by foreign individuals (Stoll 1989), computer intrusions were
40 successfully framed at an early stage as a national security issue. The Reagan
41 administration’s major concern in the domain was the prevention of what it
42 viewed as damaging disclosures of classified information as well as the acquisi-
43 tion of ‘sensitive but unclassified’ information. The discourse was dominated by
44 two closely connected strands: the first one framed the issue as a growing
45 problem of computer crime, which culminated in the Computer Abuse Act of
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44 M. Dunn Cavelty
1984/86, a piece of legislation defining legitimate punitive practices in the field 1
of computer security until the passage of the Uniting and Strengthening America 2
by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism 3
(USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001. The second strand focused on the protection of 4
federal agencies’ computer data from espionage, a debate that was interlinked 5
with an ongoing debate on encryption technology. This led to the Computer 6
Security Act of 1987, which spelled out responsibilities in the area of computer 7
security. 8
Among the policy documents of the time,1 one of the first threat frames can 9
be found in the National Security Decision Directive Number 145 (NSDD 145) 10
on ‘National policy on telecommunications and automated information systems 11
security’, issued on 17 September 1984. The document describes the fusion 12

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between telecommunications und computers, a development that is seen to bring 13
opportunities as well as dangers. The threat subject ranges from foreign nations 14
to terrorists to criminals, with a clear emphasis on ‘foreign exploitation’ (Reagan 15
1984: § 1). As part of motivational framing, it is pointed out that the technology 16
to exploit these electronic systems is widespread and is used extensively. In
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addition, this document must be read in the context of new legislation and regu- 18
lations aimed at increasing government secrecy and tightening government 19
control over the flow of public information. While this move was justified by 20
reference to the hostile (foreign) intelligence threat stemming from the Soviet 21
intelligence services and ‘their surrogate services among the Soviet-bloc coun- 22
tries’ (Reagan 1985: § 4), it was not justified by the far more widespread 23
problem stemming from domestic hackers and underage youths who made the 24
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news because they easily managed to gain access to multimillion-dollar com- 25

puter systems (Elmer-Dewitt 1983; Covert 1983). 26
The document then specifically addresses the problem as relating to the US 27
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government. The focus is on ‘classified national security information’, the 28

integrity of which is presented as a national security issue (Reagan 1984: § 2). It 29
is also stated that ‘security’, understood in this context as information security, 30
is a vital element of the operational effectiveness of the national security activ- 31
ities of the government and of military combat-readiness, thus making the 32
national-security connotation even more explicit. In this diagnostic threat frame, 33
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the referent object is limited to government systems and some business systems 34
carrying critical information, as well as classified material more generally, and 35
does not yet encompass society-threatening aspects of cyber-threats. The reason 36
for this is simple: the technological substructure at the time still lacked the 37
quality of a mass phenomenon that it would acquire once computer networks 38
turned into a pivotal element of modern society, so that any such reasoning 39
would have been outside the ‘truth horizon’ of the time. 40
Similar diagnostic threat frames can be found in other documents.2 While the 41
diagnostic threat frame and its wide listing of possible actors with a focus on 42
foreign exploitation was not contested, there was rather a lot of controversy con- 43
cerning the prognostic threat frame. In fact, NSDD 145 became a culmination 44
point in the raging conflict between the academic and government cryptography 45
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1 communities. At the time, academic research in cryptography had achieved
2 several major breakthroughs, and the National Security Agency (NSA) was
3 starting to lose control over this technology (Diffie and Hellman 1976; Dam and
4 Lin 1996). With NSDD 145, the NSA was authorised to undertake a ‘compre-
5 hensive and coordinated’ approach to ‘protect the government’s telecommunica-
6 tions and automated information systems’ that ‘process and communicate
7 classified national security information and other sensitive information concern-
8 ing the vital interests of the United States’ (Reagan 1984). NSDD 145 also
9 permitted the NSA to control the dissemination of government, government-
10 derived, and even non-government information that might adversely affect
11 national security. On 29 October 1986, National Security Adviser John Poindex-
12 ter expanded the NSA’s information security role even further when he signed

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13 the document ‘National telecommunications and information systems security
14 policy (NTISSP) No. 2’ (text in Office of Technology Assessment 1987: Appen-
15 dix B). In this document, ‘sensitive’ information was to include not just unclas-
16 sified information that would ‘adversely affect national security’ if acquired by
17 hostile nations, but any unclassified information that might affect any ‘other
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18 Federal Government interests’, a definition so broad it could have been applied
19 to almost any kind of information (Knezo 2003).
20 In this way, the NSA was assigned responsibilities that fell outside of the
21 scope of its traditional foreign eavesdropping and military and diplomatic com-
22 munications security roles, a practice legitimised by
23
24 1 the construction of the foreign intelligence threat as a pressing and urgent
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25 national security matter;

26 2 phrases such as ‘information, even if unclassified in isolation, often can
27 reveal highly classified and other sensitive information when taken in
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28 aggregate’ or ‘other sensitive information’ (see above), which tried to rede-

29 fine the boundaries between national security information and non-national
30 security information;
31 3 attempts to construct cyber-security as an issue concerning both the govern-
32 ment and the private sector, depicting ‘offering assistance in the protection
33 of certain private sector information’ as a key national responsibility
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34 (Reagan 1984: § 4).

35
36 This development gave rise to considerable concern within the private sector
37 and in Congress as well as academic circles, especially since the NSA quickly
38 began to exercise its newfound authority. In the face of this, the Computer
39 Security Act of 1987 was introduced. The Act and the activity after the revision
40 of NSDD 145 (resulting in NSD 42) progressively restricted the main focus of
41 the NSA’s activities to the protection of defence systems, and the NSA was
42 forced to scale back its interaction with commercial organisations (Electronic
43 Privacy Information Center 1998). However, these struggles over ‘signifying’
44 and ‘naming’ terms in the domain of information security have continued over
45 the years, accompanied by efforts to establish the truth about terms such as
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46 M. Dunn Cavelty
‘national security systems’, information considered ‘sensitive but unclassified’, 1
and others. 2
The struggle was (and is) mainly related to the meaning of ‘national security’ 3
and about the continued securitisation of cryptology. This particular struggle is a 4
textbook case of a securitisation move that was thwarted: the argument that 5
national security and economic security had become one and the same, and that 6
therefore, the protection of economic information also fell under the purview of 7
the national government, was not accepted. Many of the fundamental advances 8
in personal computing and networking during the 1970s and 1980s were made 9
by people influenced by the technological optimism of the new left, best 10
expressed in Marshall McLuhan’s predictions that new technology would have 11
an intrinsically empowering effect on individuals (McLuhan 1964). The emer- 12

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gence of the so-called ‘Californian Ideology’ mirrored their passionate belief in 13
electronic direct democracy, in which everyone would be able to express their 14
opinions without fear of censorship (cf. Barlow 1994, 1996). This was so 15
fundamentally opposed to what the US security establishment wanted to estab- 16
lish as ‘truth’ that various exponents of this counter-culture began to forcefully
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react by promoting their own ideas of reality. 18
In other words, the controversy over cryptology involved two completely dif- 19
ferent conceptions of security, and the applicability of related initiatives went 20
beyond the close-knit security community to include exponents of the private 21
sector and academia. The debate basically centred on the question of whether 22
‘security’ meant the security of US society as a whole, or whether it only 23
referred to the security of individual users or technical systems, and should 24
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therefore be handled by authorities other than national security bodies. As such, 25

the issue discussed here is exemplary for the difficulties inherent in the national 26
security community’s relationship with the private sector: an issue neither for- 27
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gotten nor ever solved. 28

29
30
Interlinking cyber-threats and critical infrastructures
31
In the late 1980s, documents started to appear that made a clear link between 32
cyber-threats and critical infrastructures (cf. Computer Science and Telecommu- 33
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nications Board 1989). The initiative came from the Department of Defense 34
(DoD), which was in a strong position to interlink the two strands. Information 35
technology had been firmly coupled with national security since at least the 36
Second World War, and specifically so in the wake of the more general debate 37
in the Cold War about technological innovation and warfare (Hinsley and Stripp 38
2001; Hables Gray 1997). Furthermore, concrete ideas of information warfare 39
date back at least to the 1970s, when it was argued that communications and 40
information support networks were sufficiently linked and cross-dependent to be 41
inviting targets (Rona 1976). Also, as Collier and Lakoff point out in Chapter 1, 42
thinking about vulnerabilities and critical targets had become a well-established 43
part of US air power theorists’ culture during the Cold War. 44
At the beginning of the 1990s, the advantages of the use and dissemination of 45
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1 ICT that had fuelled the revolution in military affairs (Metz 2000; Rattray 2001),
2 were no longer seen only as a great opportunity providing the country with an
3 ‘information edge’ (Nye and Owens 1996), but were also perceived as constitut-
4 ing an over-proportional vulnerability vis-à-vis a plethora of malicious actors. In
5 clear continuation from vital system thinking, there was a widespread fear that
6 those likely to fail against the American war machine might instead plan to
7 bring the US to its knees by striking vital points at home (Berkowitz 1997) –
8 these points being fundamental to the national security and the essential func-
9 tioning of industrialised societies as a whole, and not necessarily to the military
10 in particular (Bendrath 2001). Even though this kind of fear was not completely
11 new, it is not surprising that ‘asymmetry’ and asymmetric tactics – the intention
12 to circumvent an opponent’s advantage in capabilities by avoiding his strengths

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13 and exploiting his weaknesses (Kolet 2001) – came to dominate the national
14 security debate in the 1990s. It can be seen as part of the DoD’s struggle to
15 come to grasp with the post-Cold War security environment and redefine its foes
16 and tasks. Simply put, since the global distribution of power was unbalanced, it
17 followed that asymmetric strategies would be a natural evolution (Blank 2003;
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18 Metz and Johnson 2001: 2). The US as the only remaining superpower was pre-
19 destined to become the prime target of asymmetric warfare.
20 The information revolution helped to shape this perception. In particular,
21 experiences gained during the 1991 Gulf War, when information warfare con-
22 cepts were first used, made clear the benefits of the ‘information differential’
23 provided by the information systems employed (Campen 1992; Eriksson
24 1999), but it was also the Gulf War that gave rise to fears about the downside
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25 of this development, mainly through experiences with the threat of data intru-
26 sion as perpetrated by hacker attacks against 34 Department of Defense com-
27 puter sites during the conflict (Devost 1995; GAO 1996). In the aftermath,
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28 global information networks were established, making it much easier to attack

29 the US asymmetrically, as such an attack no longer required big, specialised
30 weapons systems or an army: borders, already porous in many ways in the real
31 world, were non-existent in cyberspace. Subsequently, it was established in
32 various reports and publications that the information revolution had made the
33 US asymmetrically vulnerable, due to the disappearance of borders and the
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34 dependence of military forces on vulnerable civilian infrastructures. At a later

35 stage, a number of computer intrusions, such as the ‘Rome Lab incident’ in
36 1994 (AFIWC 1995; GAO 1996) or Solar Sunrise and Moonlight Maze in
37 1998 demonstrated how a small group of hackers could easily and quickly take
38 control of defence networks.3 Even more significant were exercises such as
39 ‘The Day After’ in 1996, or ‘Eligible Receiver’ in 1997 (Molander et al. 1996;
40 Anderson and Hearn 1996; Hamre 2003). The exercises were designed to
41 assess the plausibility of information warfare scenarios and to help define key
42 issues to be addressed in this area. Perhaps most importantly, the link between
43 cyber-threats and infrastructures was already built into the exercise scenarios.
44 Therefore, they naturally demonstrated that US critical infrastructure pre-
45 sented a set of attractive strategic targets for opponents possessing information
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48 M. Dunn Cavelty
warfare capabilities. The fears already harboured by experts were thus sub- 1
stantiated. 2
An exemplary threat frame linking cyber-aspects with vital systems can be 3
found in an influential and much cited report published in 1991. The report, with 4
the title ‘Computers at risk: safe computing in the information age’, was the 5
outcome of a request from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 6
(DARPA) to address the security and trustworthiness of US computing and 7
communications systems as a reaction to the Morris Worm, the first computer 8
worm. It began with the following observation: 9
10
We are at risk. Increasingly, America depends on computers. They control 11
power delivery, communications, aviation, and financial services. They are 12

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used to store vital information, from medical records to business plans to 13
criminal records. . . . The modern thief can steal more with a computer than 14
with a gun. Tomorrow’s terrorist may be able to do more damage with a 15
keyboard than with a bomb. 16
ON (National Academy of Sciences 1991: 7) 17
18
The threat subject in this document encompasses thieves, terrorists and, less 19
explicitly, nation states, as encapsulated in the phrase ‘international nature of 20
military and intelligence threats’ (National Academy of Sciences 1991: 8). The 21
report states that the ‘the concentration of information and economic activity in 22
computer systems makes those systems an attractive target to hostile entities’ 23
(National Academy of Sciences 1991: 8). Furthermore, the report very clearly 24
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links information technology to society as a whole: as computer systems become 25

more prevalent, sophisticated, embedded in physical processes, and intercon- 26
nected, it argues, society becomes more vulnerable to poor system design, acci- 27
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dents that disable systems and attacks on computer systems (National Academy 28
of Sciences 1991: 1). The report speaks of ‘potential disasters that can cause 29
economic and even human losses’ if nothing is done (National Academy of Sci- 30
ences 1991: 2). The new aspect in this reasoning is the link it makes to other so- 31
called ‘infrastructures’ (National Academy of Sciences 1991: 2), its focus on 32
complexity and interconnections between elements of the infrastructure, and the 33
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establishment of the whole of society as referent object. 34

Furthermore, we find a strong motivational frame: the trends that the report 35
identifies suggest to the authors that whatever trust may have been justified in 36
the past will not be justified in the future ‘unless action is taken now’ (National 37
Academy of Sciences 1991: 11). Basically, it is argued that society has reached 38
a ‘discontinuity’, and that what lies ahead is new terrain that requires new think- 39
ing, and quickly, because in ‘this period of rapid change, significant damage can 40
occur if one waits to develop a countermeasure until after an attack is manifest’ 41
(National Academy of Sciences 1991: 11). This urgency is also due to the fact 42
that the threat is bigger and growing, due to the proliferation of computer 43
systems into ever more applications, especially applications involving network- 44
ing; the changing nature of the technology base; the increase in computer system 45
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1 expertise among the general public, which increases the potential for system
2 abuse; the increasingly global environment for business and research; and the
3 global reach and interconnection of computer networks, which multiply system
4 vulnerabilities (National Academy of Sciences 1991: 1).
5 Various other military reports and studies from the early 1990s list the same
6 broad range of adversaries and refer to the whole nation as being endangered
7 due to its dependence on the information infrastructure (Defense Science Board
8 1994; Defense Science Board 1996). Again, it is not the diagnostic threat frame
9 that is disputed, but the prognostic one. A report called ‘Information warfare –
10 defense (IW-D)’ can serve as an example for this ongoing struggle for more
11 influence in the domain (Defense Science Board 1996). In trying to carve out a
12 position for the DoD to take on an active role in the civil sector, the report

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13 states: ‘We should not forget that information warfare is a form of warfare, not a
14 crime or an act of terror’ (Defense Science Board 1996: Exhibit 3–1). To defend
15 the DoD and critical non-governmental systems against information warfare
16 activities, the report recommends new legal authorisation that would allow
17 ‘DoD, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies to conduct efficient,
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18 coordinated monitoring of attacks on the critical civilian information infrastruc-
19 ture’ (Defense Science Board 1996: 6–30).
20 While such military documents were influential in shaping threat perceptions
21 and in bringing the issue of cyber-threats to the attention of a broad audience,
22 they did not establish the winning threat frame. Apart from the distribution of
23 resources – based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, the FBI had
24 set up a special Computer Crime Squad in the early 1990s and occupied the
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25 strongest position within government – legal norms as ‘truth indicators’ pre-

26 vented a more important role for the armed forces in the protection of critical
27 infrastructures. As one report notes: ‘the Defense Department is legally prohib-
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28 ited from taking action beyond identification of a cyber-attacker on its own initi-
29 ative, even though the ability of the United States to defend itself against
30 external threats is compromised by attacks on its C4I infrastructure’ (Computer
31 Science and Telecommunications Board 1999: 176).
32 While a substantial role of the military in CIP was not feasible, these docu-
33 ments started a trend of great importance: at this point in time, the rationale of
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34 risk management emerges as a significant feature in military documents. One

35 prominent example is a report of the Joint Security Commission called Redefin-
36 ing Security. The commission was tasked with developing a new approach to
37 security that would assure cost-effective security measures in times of shrinking
38 defence budgets (Joint Security Commission 1994). This general study on secur-
39 ity after the end of the Cold War not only features a strong focus on information
40 systems, but it also argues that ‘the new paradigm’ brought about by new kinds
41 of threats that are ‘diffuse, multifaceted, dynamic’ requires ‘a risk management
42 approach that considers actual threats, inherent vulnerabilities, and the availabil-
43 ity and costs of countermeasures as the underlying basis for making security
44 decisions’ (Joint Security Commission 1994: iv). This attitude marks the begin-
45 ning of the ‘managerial security story’ (Aradau 2001), a notion that is linked to
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50 M. Dunn Cavelty
non-deterrable threats that provide insurmountable challenges for the state. Such 1
threats and their characteristics imply that complete risk avoidance is no longer 2
possible. This necessitates a shift in strategy from retaliation and deterrence to 3
prevention and preparedness. At the heart of this thinking lies the idea of ‘dis- 4
tributed security’: a kind of security that is provided in cooperation with various 5
stakeholders who are not necessarily considered key actors in the security 6
domain. 7
8
9
Public–private partnerships as instances of distributed
10
security
11
This kind of reasoning took root in the domain of CIP after the Oklahoma City 12

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bombing in April 1995. The attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building 13
provided a different indicator of truth for the entire discourse: it solidified fears 14
by demonstrating that scenarios that had previously been contemplated had 15
become reality. The attack on a seemingly insignificant federal building was 16
able to set off a chain reaction due to interdependencies, so that a set of
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processes controlled from that building were also lost (Critical Infrastructure 18
Protection Oral History Project 2005). One direct outcome of the Oklahoma 19
City bombing was Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD-39), which directed 20
Attorney General Janet Reno to ‘chair a Cabinet Committee to review the vul- 21
nerability to terrorism of government facilities in the United States and critical 22
national infrastructure’ (Clinton 1995). The review, which was completed in 23
early February 1996, noted that it was necessary ‘to address both traditional 24
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“physical” attacks (e.g. bombings) and electronic, “cyber” attacks on the infra- 25
structures (e.g., an attack on a computer or communications system)’ in light of 26
the breadth of critical infrastructures and the multiplicity of sources and forms 27
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of attack (Reno 1996). The report also called for a ‘full-time Task Force’ to 28
address the issue. Subsequently, President Bill Clinton set up the Presidential 29
Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP), chaired by Robert 30
T. Marsh, a former air force general, to recommend a national strategy for pro- 31
tecting and assuring the integrity of critical infrastructures from physical and 32
cyber-threats. The PCCIP report, presented in October 1997, established threat 33
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frames that were solidified by Presidential Decision Directives 62 and 63 in 34

May 1998 (Clinton 1998a, 1998b) and a more elaborate version of the same 35
document, the National Plan for Information Systems Protection, in January 36
2000 (Clinton 2000). 37
The PCCIP noted that potential adversaries included a very broad range of 38
actors ‘from recreational hackers to terrorists to national teams of information 39
warfare specialists’ (PCCIP 1997: 15). On the side of the threat subject, the 40
threat is thus, once again, constructed as stemming from a very broad range of 41
actors. Harmful attacks can be done by anyone with a computer connected to the 42
Internet, and for purposes ranging from juvenile hacking to organised crime to 43
political activism to strategic warfare. Thus, the new enemy can neither be 44
clearly identified nor associated with a particular state, and the image of the 45
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1 enemy is more faceless and less clearly foreign than in earlier documents,
2 paying tribute to the kind of threat image that had become widespread after the
3 Cold War. Even though the report also lists natural disasters, component failures
4 and human negligence among the threats, most of its content focuses on mali-
5 cious attacks, the ‘least predictable threat to the infrastructure’ (PCCIP 1997: A-
6 4). This tendency to ‘actorise’ a threat, even one that is strongly linked to
7 technical and system failure, seems to be a hallmark of security discourse. This
8 practice links threats to actors, even though they originate to an equal degree in
9 structural conditions such as power outages, floods, epidemics and similar phe-
10 nomena (Sundelius 1983; Eriksson 2001b: 11–12; Buzan et al. 1998: 44).
11 This can be very clearly seen in the case of the Year 2000 problem, which
12 became an issue in US policy circles starting in around 1997. Although the

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13 problem arose from the anticipated technical failure in the information infra-
14 structure, the issue was also linked to potentially malicious human agency in
15 congressional hearings: it was believed that because many people, such as the
16 technicians who updated computers to make them ‘Y2K-safe’, had been given
17 access to programmes as well as the authority to modify them and place them in
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18 service, there was a considerable threat from an insider or foreign contractors
19 (cf. PCCIP 1997: 12; Tenet 1999). Apparently, the spectre of failures or acci-
20 dents did not convey enough urgency, so that the problem was again linked to an
21 ‘enemy’ problem. Or, as one analyst noticed in 1999: ‘If your system goes
22 down, it is a lot more interesting to say it was the work of a foreign government
23 rather than admit it was due to an American teenage “script-kiddy” tinkering
24 with a badly written CGI script’ (Ingles-le Noble 1999).
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25 On the referent object side, it was established that ‘the nation is so dependent
26 on our infrastructures that we must view them through a national security lens’
27 (PCCIP 1997: vii). Furthermore, critical infrastructures are ‘the foundations of
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28 our prosperity, enablers of our defense, and the vanguard of our future. They
29 empower every element of our society. There is no more urgent priority than
30 assuring the security, continuity, and availability of our critical infrastructures’
31 (PCCIP 1997: vii). The dependence of society on the information and communi-
32 cation infrastructure on the one hand, and ever-more complex interdependencies
33 between infrastructures on the other, were established as creating a new dimen-
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34 sion of vulnerability, ‘which, when combined with an emerging constellation of

35 threats, poses unprecedented national risk’ (PCCIP 1997: ix).
36 Again and again, the PCCIP stresses the evaporation of boundaries and the
37 high degree of interdependency between single infrastructure elements, which
38 creates overwhelming complexity, conveying a sense of powerlessness vis-à-vis
39 technology. This powerlessness seems exacerbated by several business trends
40 within the infrastructures: extensive use of information automation; deregulation
41 and restructuring; physical consolidation; globalisation; and adoption of a ‘just-
42 in-time’ operational tempo (PCCIP 1997: Appendix A). Technological develop-
43 ment is depicted as a force out of control, and the combination of technology
44 and complexity conveys a sense of unmanageability. An overall pessimistic
45 perspective concerning accidents and the limited possibilities of preventing them
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52 M. Dunn Cavelty
and coping with them resonates in much of the cyber-threats debate (Perrow 1
1984). Furthermore, the dynamic interaction of complex systems is believed to 2
overtax the human ability to articulate and evaluate the problem. This discourse 3
is built on a general distrust towards computer technology, which feeds on the 4
fear of the unknown. Technology, including information technology, is feared 5
because it is seen as complex, abstract and arcane in its impact on individuals. 6
Because computers do things that used to be done by humans, there is a notion 7
of technology being out of control that is even strengthened by the increase in 8
connectivity that the information revolution brings (see Conway, Chapter 5, this 9
volume; Pollitt 1997). 10
A sense of great urgency is created through the almost constant allusion to 11
concepts of discontinuity and newness. The headings of the first three chapters 12

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read: ‘acting now to protect the future’, ‘the new geography’, ‘new vulnerabili- 13
ties, shared threats’ (PCCIP 1997: 3, 7, 11). The threat, with a strong focus on 14
the cyber-dimension, is presented as being so ‘new’ that old defences become 15
utterly useless, and new ways of thinking and new ways of protecting become 16
indispensable. Such a departure from past experiences calls for ‘new thinking’
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(PCCIP 1997: vii, x). The not-so-new thinking that the report presents is a 18
renewed attempt to get the private sector to cooperate. More urgently than 19
before, the report seeks to convince the business community that the interdepen- 20
dent nature of infrastructures creates a shared risk environment and that manag- 21
ing that risk will require close cooperation between the public and the private 22
sector. This is done by an appeal to responsibility: ‘Because the infrastructures 23
are mainly privately owned and operated, we concluded that critical infrastruc- 24
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ture assurance is a shared responsibility of the public and private sectors’ 25

(PCCIP 1997: i). The responsibility must be shared, because the threats are 26
shared: ‘the line separating threats that apply only to the private sector from 27
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those associated with traditional national security concerns must give way to a 28
concept of shared threats’ (PCCIP 1997: 20, especially Figure 4). These shared 29
threats are terrorism, industrial espionage and organised crime. The appeal to the 30
self-interest of owners and operators of critical infrastructures argues that they 31
are on the frontlines of security efforts, as they are the ones most vulnerable to 32
cyber-attacks (PCCIP 1997: 20). 33
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Thus, the distinction between the private and public spheres of action is dis- 34
solved. It is implied that national defence is no longer the exclusive preserve of 35
government, and economic security is no longer just about business. The private 36
sector must focus on protecting itself against the tools of disruption, and should 37
be encouraged to perform a periodic ‘quantitative risk-assessment process’ 38
(PCCIP 1997: 69), a process that corporations are already very familiar with. In 39
addition, the report advocates a strategy of cooperative ‘information-sharing’. 40
Mutual win-win situations are to be created by exchanging information that the 41
other party does not have: ‘government can help by collecting and disseminating 42
information about all the tools that can do harm. Owners and operators can help 43
by informing government when new tools or techniques are detected’ (PCCIP 44
1997: 20). In other words, the government flags the proprietary information it 45
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1 requires about potentially hostile groups and nation states and which it intends to
2 acquire through its intelligence services, while the private sector is to give up
3 technological knowledge that the public sector does not have. The approach of
4 the PCCIP report is therefore to firmly establish the idea of ‘distributed secur-
5 ity’, an idea that follows the rationale of the risk management paradigm: the
6 problem owner is no longer only the military or the state; responsibility is dis-
7 tributed.
8
9
Homeland security and the resurgence of the physical
10
11 When George W. Bush came into office in 2001, CIP had lost some of its drive,
12 and the implementation of Clinton’s National Strategy progressed more slowly

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13 than many had expected (GAO 2001). In addition, Congress had withheld
14 funding for many of the initiatives proposed by the Executive Branch to imple-
15 ment elements of Clinton’s National Plan. Also, it seems that the incoming
16 Bush administration was generally less interested in the topic of cyber-threats
17 than its predecessors. For example, in his first National Security Presidential
ON
18 Decision (NSPD 1), promulgated on 5 March 2001, President Bush also
19 emphasised that national security also depends on America’s ability to prosper
20 in the global economy. In sharp contrast to his predecessor, however, who had
21 always equated the information revolution with economic prosperity, the presid-
22 ent did not mention cyber-security or the information infrastructure once (Bush
23 2001c).
24 The very physical aspect of the 11 September 2001 attacks, combined with an
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25 administration that was less interested in matters related to cyberspace, led to a

26 shift in the overall focus of CIP after September 2001 (Moteff 2003: 3). As one
27 staff member of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board
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28 expressed in an interview:
29
30 We were very shocked in the federal government that the attack didn’t come
31 from cyberspace . . . Based on what we knew at the time, the most likely
32 scenario was an attack from cyberspace, not airliners slamming into build-
33 ings . . . We had spent a lot of time preparing for a cyber attack, not a phys-
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34 ical attack.
35 (Poulsen 2003)
36
37 This ‘shock’ is the product of ‘the extent to which present dangers are con-
38 structed through the simulation of future fears’, as Der Derian and Finkelstein
39 write in this volume (Chapter 4), referring to Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreal-
40 ity. Cyber-exercises like the ones mentioned above and general threat projec-
41 tions had produced a very distinct future reality. When reality struck, it turned
42 out to be rather different. Thus, when securing the nation’s critical infrastruc-
43 ture became a vital component of a post-9/11 homeland security strategy, it was
44 accompanied by a new focus on strengthening physical aspects in the existing
45 critical infrastructure policy (Bush 2001a, 2001b). Even though cyber-threats
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54 M. Dunn Cavelty
remained on the agenda of decision-makers, the phenomenon got less attention 1
as a threat to CIP in the post-9/11 world, causing many critics to voice their dis- 2
approval over the degree of attention devoted to the cyber-dimension (cf. Mark 3
2004; Verton 2004). This change is also plainly visible in the 2002 National 4
Security Strategy; while there had been a strong commitment to cyber-threats 5
and information aspects of power in the previous six national security strategies 6
(Kuehl 2000), the 2002 edition does not use the prefix ‘cyber-’ even once 7
(Bush 2002). 8
With the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, the overall 9
organisational framework of CIP in the US was also restructured. This step, 10
praised as a step towards pulling down the artificial walls between institutions 11
that deal with internal and others that deal with external threats, had been previ- 12

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ously legitimised by countless arguments to the effect that the boundaries 13
between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ had been dissolved in the ‘new threat environ- 14
ment’. CIP became one of six ‘critical mission areas’ to reduce vulnerability for 15
‘the homeland’, and previously established structures and agencies were integ- 16
rated or abandoned. CIP was thus completely absorbed into a concept represent-
ON 17
ing ‘a new triad of prevention, protection, and response’ (Hart and Rudman 18
2001: 5f.; also DHS 2004: 3). In September 2002, the President’s Critical Infra- 19
structure Protection Board released a draft version of its National Strategy to 20
Secure Cyberspace for public comment, which described a general strategic 21
overview, specific recommendations and policies, and the rationale for these 22
actions. After a public vetting process that signalled that cyberspace security 23
was still viewed as a public–private partnership, the final version appeared in 24
F

February 2003 (Bush 2003a). It was closely followed by a National Strategy for 25
the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets (Bush 2003b), 26
once again clearly showing that critical infrastructure protection was no longer 27
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shorthand for cyber-security. The cornerstone of both documents, again, is the 28

implementation of a public–private partnership (Bush 2003a: ix; 2003b: 17). 29
On the surface, the threat frames established by the PCCIP report remained in 30
place after 9/11. However, at least initially, the threat subject was narrowed 31
down to the specific enemy image of Muslim terrorism, while the main focus in 32
public hearings was on the possibility of terrorists using cyber-means for attacks 33
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(Bendrath et al. 2007; Conway, Chapter 5, this volume). As in so many other 34

areas, this was sufficient legitimisation to usher in some radical changes: the 35
USA PATRIOT Act, which entered into force on 26 October 2001, contains 36
some of the most substantial changes to US federal cyber-crime laws since the 37
last major revisions of 1996 and amended the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 38
several controversial areas. The granularity of what was to be understood as part 39
of the referent object also changed. In his Executive Order of 8 October 2001, 40
George W. Bush expanded the sectors included among critical infrastructures to 41
encompass nuclear material, agriculture and ‘special events’ of ‘national 42
significance’ (Bush 2001a: sec. e, § 4). This was followed by other documents 43
that added the chemical industry, postal services and shipping to the list (Bush 44
2002: 31). When the concept of criticality, and accordingly the notion of what is 45
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Like a phoenix from the ashes 55

1 to be secured, is expanded from interconnected physical networks to include
2 everything with emotional significance, almost everything becomes an infra-
3 structure, and everything is potentially critical: even a minor event of little
4 apparent significance can potentially trigger largely unpredictable cascading
5 effects throughout a large number of sectors. This not only creates great chal-
6 lenges for any protection policy, but also an even greater sense of vulnerability
7 and urgency. Like before, the dilemma is resolved by arguing in favour of the
8 idea of distributed security: first, the federal government argues that there is a
9 great and urgent need for securing the critical infrastructure on which everything
10 depends. Second, it argues that it cannot achieve this by itself. Third, it tries to
11 give away responsibility and, as Kristensen shows in this volume (Chapter 3),
12 does so by encouraging the tools and the rationale of risk management.

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13 Despite of this, CIP seems never to have been a priority for the Bush admin-
14 istration. For one thing, it has become bogged down in the details of implement-
15 ing its own twin strategies, and continues to draw criticism for including
16 thousands of assets in the so-called National Asset Database, which, as of
17 January 2006, contained over 77,000 entries (Moteff 2006, 2007: 25), of which
ON
18 it appears that many have more local than national importance. More import-
19 antly, however, despite the rhetoric of how important the protection of critical
20 infrastructures is for the nation, the pursuit of security through attacks on foreign
21 enemies seems much preferred over the often ‘nitty gritty’ details of prepared-
22 ness and response, so that distributed security seems an even more attractive
23 option. To argue again and again that complete risk avoidance is not possible is
24 a failsafe way to ensure that in case of an incident, blame does not hit the top
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25 echelons of decision-making as hard as might otherwise be the case.

26
27
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Conclusion: (national) security through distributed

28
responsibility
29
30 This chapter has approached the topic of critical infrastructure protection by
31 looking at how threat frames – diagnostic, prognostic and motivational ones –
32 are employed in the struggle for discursive hegemony by US security elites,
33 specifically focusing on how these frames are used to create the sense of
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34 urgency necessary to establish a topic as a national security issue. This is mainly

35 done by ‘referencing’, by linking topics to concepts that are already established
36 as national security issues. For example, cyber-crime was interlinked with
37 foreign intrusion and espionage to elevate it to a national security issue. Then,
38 the resulting threat ‘package’ was linked to critical infrastructures and terrorism.
39 In this way, the old idea of vital system security was firmly hoisted onto the
40 security political agenda in a new form.
41 Practices such as referencing, but also naming and signifying, are aimed at
42 legitimising the discourse: in the case of CIP, ‘cyber-incidents’, or the state of
43 the technological substructure more generally, are specific ‘truth indicators’ that
44 are used as examples for insinuating that something awful is about to happen,
45 but that also limit what is discursively possible. Changing technological features
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56 M. Dunn Cavelty
are therefore partly responsible for change in the discourse, since they bring 1
about a change in the ‘truth horizon’. For example, technological development 2
and changes in the referent object are closely interlinked: at first, the threatened 3
elements consisted mainly of government networks and the classified informa- 4
tion residing in it. Later, critical infrastructures were conceptualised as constitut- 5
ing the heart of society, with a specific focus on the cyber-dimension. That was 6
possible because computer networks had become a pivotal element of modern 7
society. Finally, the attacks of 11 September 2001 highlighted the fact that ter- 8
rorists could cause enormous damage by attacking critical infrastructures 9
directly and physically, and not just through the cyber-infrastructure. In this 10
way, the truth horizon was transformed, allowing the previously very dominant 11
cyber-dimension to be downscaled. 12

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When focusing on the threat subject in the diagnostic threat frame, it can be 13
seen that from the beginning, cyber-attacks were constructed as stemming from 14
a very broad range of actors. This broadening of the threat frame to encompass a 15
wider range of potential adversaries underscores a perspective of vulnerability, 16
uncertainty and insecurity. A danger is constructed that emanates from an enemy
ON 17
who is located outside of the US, both in geographical and in moral terms. This 18
picture of a dangerous ‘other’ reinforces the idea of the nation as a collective 19
self. The use of phrases such as ‘our computers’ or ‘our infrastructures’ ampli- 20
fies this effect. Different focal points were used for different purposes: framed as 21
a foreign intelligence threat, the threat subject is used to argue in favour of allo- 22
cating more responsibility to the NSA. Later, a more faceless ‘malicious actor’ 23
that has easy access to information networks is used to create the image of the 24
F

shared threats as shared responsibility. More recently, a focus on terrorists that 25

are able to employ the information infrastructure for their purposes is used to 26
underscore arguments in favour of changing laws. 27
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Motivational framing became a feature of threat frames in the 1990s, when 28

the threat was more clearly attributed to new and poorly understood vulnerabili- 29
ties. During this period, everything was represented as being new: the actors, the 30
threats, the way society works, the technology, etc. All this newness is used to 31
create a sense of great urgency, because old ways are no longer sufficient to 32
counter the looming threat. Naturally, these new threats demand a new logic of 33
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security, which manifests itself in the prognostic threat frame in the shape of 34
new counter-measures. After some intergovernmental turf battles as to who was 35
to be in charge, CIP was established as an issue in the realm of civil defence, 36
emergency management and preparedness. 37
It is argued that because absolute security is not possible, it is technically and 38
economically impossible to design and protect the infrastructure to withstand 39
any and all disruptions, intrusions or attacks. The logical consequence is that one 40
has to manage the existing risks. Due to the nature of what is to be secured, pol- 41
icies are predicated on the concept of sharing responsibility with private actors – 42
quite a challenge considering that the government and private industry had been 43
at odds for some time with regard to the regulation of computer products, secur- 44
ity issues and the use of encryption technologies. Calls for cooperation with the 45
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Like a phoenix from the ashes 57

1 private sector could only be legitimised on the basis of a convincing argument to
2 the effect that the interests of the national security apparatus and the private
3 sector were one and the same. Therefore, many arguments can be found that try
4 to fuse the two realms of economy and security, as well as the private and the
5 public sectors.
6 Through such threat frames, a security paradigm based on the idea of distrib-
7 uted security through distributed responsibility is argued into existence. The
8 maintenance of ‘business continuity’ for an individual, corporate or local actor is
9 treated as being essentially equivalent to security efforts in terms of national or
10 even international security in the realm of CIP and homeland security. Suddenly,
11 grey zones of security become possible: security is no longer inherently binary –
12 meaning that either one is secure, or one is not – but the future state of being

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13 secure is continually approached through risk management, creating a sense of
14 security that never fully exists, but is always becoming, like the technological
15 substructure on which critical infrastructures rest. This conceptualisation is both
16 highly convenient and highly legitimate. It has contributed to the fact that CIP
17 has risen like phoenix from the ashes, and is likely here to stay as a key concept
ON
18 expressing the insecurity of modern societies, non-deterrable threats, and a
19 world in which government see themselves unable ‘to go it alone’.
20
21
Notes
22
23 1 EO 12356 of 1982, named ‘National Security Information’, prescribed a uniform
24 system for classifying, declassifying and safeguarding national security information
(Reagan 1982). National Security Decision Directives: NSDD 19 on the ‘Protection of
F

25 Classified National Security Council and Intelligence Information’, NSDD 196 on

26 ‘Counterintelligence/Countermeasure Implementations Task Force’, and NSDD 197 on
27 ‘Reporting Hostile Contacts and Security Awareness’, NSDD 84 on ‘Safeguarding
OO

28 National Security Information’.

29 2 Such as National Security Directive (NSD) 42, entitled ‘National Policy for the Secur-
ity of National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems’, Computer
30 Crime and Abuse Act in 1984 and 1986, and others.
31 3 1994, Rome Lab incident: during March and April 1994, more than 150 Internet intru-
32 sions were carried out on the computers of the Rome Laboratory, a research centre
33 reporting to the Air Research and Development Command specialising in electronic
PR

34 systems. During the investigations and the observations of the two hackers by Com-
puter Crime Investigators, one of the hackers accessed a system in Korea, obtained all
35 data stored on the Korean Atomic Research Institute system, and deposited it on Rome
36 Lab’s system. Subsequently, it was feared that North Korea could view these intrusions
37 conducted via Rome Lab computers as an act of war (during this period, the US was
38 involved in sensitive negotiations with the North Koreans regarding their nuclear
39 weapons programme). The incident was well-documented by the US Department of
Defense and seen to be of particular concern because the attack showed how a small
40 (and, as it later turned out, underage) group of hackers could easily and quickly take
41 control of defence networks.
42 1998, Solar Sunrise: In February 1998, more than 500 electronic break-ins into com-
43 puter systems of the US government and the private sector were detected. The hackers
44 gained access to at least 200 different computer systems of the US military, the nuclear
weapons laboratories, the Department of Energy and NASA. At precisely the same
45 time, the US forces in the Middle East were being built up because of tensions with
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58 M. Dunn Cavelty
Iraq over UN arms inspections. The fact that some of the intrusions could be traced 1
back to Internet service providers in the Gulf region led to the initial conclusion that 2
the Iraqi government had to be behind the attacks. The incident provided a major
3
impetus for the formation of a Joint Task Force on Computer Network Defense (JTF-
CND) later in the year. A closer investigation of the case later exposed the real attack- 4
ers: two teenagers from Cloverdale in California and another teen from Israel. 5
1998, Moonlight Maze: in March 1998, US officials accidentally discovered a 6
pattern of probing of computer systems at the Pentagon, NASA, Energy Department, 7
private universities and research labs. The highly classified incident, called ‘Moonlight
8
Maze’, had apparently been going on for nearly two years before it was discovered.
The invaders were systematically marauding through tens of thousands of files – 9
including maps of military installations, troop configurations and military hardware 10
designs. The Defense Department says it traced the trail back to a mainframe computer 11
in the former Soviet Union, but the sponsor of the attacks remains unknown, and the 12

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Russian government denied any involvement.
13
14
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Hart, G. and Rudman, W. (2001) Road Map for National Security: Imperative for 34
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45
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3 ‘The absolute protection of our

citizens’
Critical infrastructure protection and
the practice of security
Kristian Søby Kristensen

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According to US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, the goal of the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is nothing less than ‘the absolute pro-
tection of our citizens’ (Ridge 2004a). This statement, and the fact that it was
made in the first place, should, however, draw our attention to the political func-
tion of the DHS. The events of 11 September 2001 both reactualized and
ON
destabilized the relationship between security, territory and borders. The US,
which had hitherto been imagined to be secure and protected by natural borders,
was shown to be insecure and vulnerable to threats and enemies who were
already inside the domestic space. Ridge’s statement – and the Department of
Homeland Security itself – can be seen as attempts to reconceptualize the prac-
tice of security under conditions considered in political discourse to be
fundamentally new.
F

This goal of ‘absolute protection of our citizens’ goes to the heart of the
concept of sovereignty. From Thomas Hobbes onwards, the core legitimizing
function of the state has been assumed to be the provision of physical security to
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its citizens inside its territory. This is the essential precondition for the existence
of society (Hobbes 1996: 84). Therefore, the attacks of 11 September 2001
could easily be integrated into a narrative that showed the US government to be
unable to protect its territory and, accordingly, the foundations of its own sover-
eignty. By this point in time, borders had lost much of their function as symbolic
and physical demarcations between the peaceful and secure inside and the anar-
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chical outside. This is not a new development; on the contrary, the functions of
borders have arguably been changing for some time (e.g. Andreas and Bier-
steker 2003; Albert et al. 2001). Nevertheless, the narrative of the 11 September
2001 attacks increased the political salience of the problems in the relationship
between borders, territory and security. In the words of President Bush: ‘The US
government has no more important mission than protecting the homeland from
future terrorist attacks’ (Bush 2002).
The discourse of the US government can be seen as attempts to rearticulate
the relationship between security and territory. The territorial vulnerability man-
ifested by the threat from terror has led to an increased focus on various defen-
sive measures. The creation of the DHS in itself shows the political importance
of this ‘mission’ – a mission aimed at re-establishing the relationship between
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64 K.S. Kristensen
the sovereign and its subjects in a situation where the functionality of borders is 1
being questioned. 2
In the following, the focus will be on the issue of ‘critical infrastructure pro- 3
tection’ (CIP), a core task of the DHS, and a central aim of the government in its 4
attempts to recreate a sense of security and reducing vulnerability inside the US, 5
thus assuring ‘the absolute protection of our citizens’. The claim made here is 6
that the discourse on critical infrastructure protection provides an excellent 7
approach with which to understand changing or reactualized meanings attached 8
to the concept and practice of security. 9
In order to explore critical infrastructure protection and the changing forms of 10
security, the chapter first discusses recent literature on the relationship between 11
security, sovereignty and borders, further making the case for focusing on CIP. 12

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This sets the stage for the actual analysis of the CIP discourse. The analysis is 13
focused on exploring how policies are argued by the US administration in trying to 14
make security inside sovereign space. This analysis consists of three parts: first, 15
the history of CIP is discussed; this is followed by an investigation of how 16
domestic space both limits sovereign power and empowers new private actors.
ON 17
The third part looks at how the US administration tries to combine the concepts of 18
risk and protection in the rationalization of its security strategy in relation to CIP 19
policies. In conclusion, this chapter analyses the struggle for conceptual coherence 20
concerning the concepts of security, and thus, ultimately, sovereignty, as negotia- 21
tion and probability are incorporated into the security strategies of the state. 22
23
24
Borders, security and sovereignty
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25
The border is the ultimate place of sovereign control demarcating inside from 26
outside. It has a central symbolic function as the external face of the state. It is 27
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supposed to be impregnable and controlled by the state. ‘Citizen’ and ‘non- 28

citizen’, ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’ entry, ‘legitimate trade’ and ‘smuggling’ – all these 29
labels are used to characterize the subjects crossing the border into the territorial 30
space of the state. Borders play an essential function in the production of state 31
sovereignty, security and territorial integrity. The border is the symbolic begin- 32
ning and end, as well as the primary point of control and surveillance of the state 33
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(Bigo 2001: 101). Inside, the social contract applies; outside, there are no such 34
guarantees. This concept of borders and sovereignty has, of course, always been 35
an idealized theoretical description – no such thing as a secure border has ever 36
existed. However, the ideal is an exact description of a pure form, and this pure 37
form of border and security is the conceptual ideal on which the modern nation 38
state is founded (e.g. Hertz 1957; Hinsley 1967; Morgenthau 1948; Kratochwil 39
1986). This ideal has lived side by side with a sedimented practice that has stabi- 40
lized inconsistencies between practice and theory, and has reproduced the sym- 41
bolic value of borders in delimiting sovereign space as well as their practical 42
function as points of control and passage into the inside (Lapid 2001: 8). 43
Borders create places where sovereign power is legitimated – they establish the 44
spatial beginning of the Hobbesian contract. 45
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‘The absolute protection of our citizens’ 65

1 This practice of state sovereignty at the territorial border has, however, for
2 some time been challenged. Global flows of trade, investment, migration and
3 commerce, it is argued, put the sovereign state under functional pressure. This
4 pressure changes the character and function of borders as barriers to movement,
5 and as points of sovereign control. Globalization favours freedom and the cre-
6 ation of a ‘space of flows’ decoupled from territorial constraints (Castells 2000;
7 Anderson et al. 2002; Sassen 1996). The functions of borders are in the process
8 of changing from ‘being boundaries that are heavily protected and militarized to
9 [being] more porous, permitting cross border social and economic integration’
10 (Hertzog 1996: 84). Thus, the state and the ‘world of states’ (Blatter 2001: 175)
11 are changing as a consequence of changed border practices. The effects of glob-
12 alization also manifest themselves in relation to security. Society, it is argued, is

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13 threatened by these new trans-border flows. For the Western societies, the threat
14 from this new condition of porous borders has been politically conceptualized as
15 being closely entwined with immigration (e.g. Bigo 2000; Wæver et al. 1993),
16 as well as terror and organized crime (Andreas 2003; Guild 2003). The state is
17 caught in a dilemma; on the one hand, it has to allow the economically essential
ON
18 flows of globalization. On the other hand, flows of people and things cannot be
19 controlled as in the Westphalian ideal, leaving both state and society vulnerable
20 (Biersteker 2003: 157–61; Rudolph 2005). This leads to new border policies
21 blurring the distinction between inside and outside (Walker 1993; Beck 2003),
22 thus also blurring the distinction between external and internal security (Bigo
23 2000; Lutterbeck 2005). The border is deterritorialized or debordered (Andreas
24 2003: 98; Blatter 2001: 176f.). These developments move the sovereign task of
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25 providing security away from the border and change its character.
26 Much of the literature that is based on this assumption of a blurring of the
27 distinction between inside and outside focuses on how internal security dynam-
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28 ics are pushed outwards (Bigo 2000: 171ff.). This is especially true for the way
29 in which the state manages the outsider (asylum seekers, immigrants etc.) and
30 how this subject, in state practices, is associated with terror (Bigo 2000: 174;
31 Bonditti, Chapter 6, this volume; Huysmans 2004). A number of studies have
32 empirically investigated this debordering of the border both in Europe and in
33 America. For instance, developments in Europe displace border controls from
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34 the territory of individual states to the EU’s external borders as well as to the
35 territory of third countries (Boswell 2003; Huysmans 2000). Similarly, US
36 policy towards Mexico has consisted of pushing its anti-immigration efforts as
37 well as counter-terrorism policies into Mexican territory, while still strengthen-
38 ing controls at the border (Andreas 2003; Serrano 2003). Similarly, the US ‘war
39 on drugs’ can be seen as an outward displacement of practices traditionally
40 carried out at the border (Andreas 2000). Thus, a widespread and well investi-
41 gated (and criticized) change in border policies is taking place. States are
42 extending their border policies from the state boundary in order to secure their
43 own societies. However, this change is not a solitary trend occurring in isolation.
44 It coincides with a reverse movement; at the same time, various forms of secur-
45 ity policy are moving inside, into the territory of the state.
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66 K.S. Kristensen
The sense of security provided by borders – especially in the US – was seri- 1
ously impaired by the 11 September 2001 attacks. The idealized and traditional 2
conception of borders was destabilized, because ‘insecurity is now seen as 3
something “in here” as well as “out there” ’ (Salter 2004: 71). The attacks of 11 4
September 2001 constituted yet another attack on the state’s ability to maintain 5
the ideal of a secure inside delimited from the outside by its borders. In the 6
words of Secretary Ridge: ‘it would be a horrible mistake to conclude that there 7
aren’t some Al Qaeda operatives within this country’ (Ridge 2002). From this 8
perspective, the events of 11 September 2001 introduced insecurity, and thus a 9
potential state of nature, inside the state. This explains the vehement US 10
response to 11 September 2001. Major efforts have to be undertaken to rearticu- 11
late the distinction between the ‘secure homeland’ and the still dangerous 12

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outside. As noted above, a lot of investigative work has been undertaken to 13
analyse how security policies are moved to the outside. CIP, on the other hand, 14
shows how security policy is equally moved into the inside. Basically, providing 15
security through traditional border policies is increasingly rendered difficult and 16
insufficient. The sense of security lost as a consequence of 11 September 2001
ON 17
entails increased efforts to recreate security by moving it ‘inside’ into the sover- 18
eign territory and thus into society. 19
This chapter will empirically explore these efforts by analysing the US 20
government’s discourse on CIP and relate the findings to how security practices 21
are changing, thus complementing the studies focusing on the move to the 22
outside. Fundamentally the function of discourse is to create conditions of possi- 23
bility. Thus, when Secretary Ridge makes the statement that he cannot conclude 24
F

that there are no al-Qaida operatives on US territory, the performative function 25

of the statement is to open up new conditions – or to change the existing con- 26
ditions – for making security (Wæver 1995). By making this particular state- 27
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ment, by constructing the threat as being already present inside US territory, 28

particular strategies for action and particular rationalities are legitimized; insecu- 29
rity on the inside requires security strategies on the inside as well. Taken 30
together, this and other statements by US officials form a discourse on CIP that 31
construct certain conditions of possibility for what security is, how it is concep- 32
tualized, and what security strategies can and cannot be applied. It follows from 33
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this that the answers to questions such as what infrastructure is, what criticality 34
means, and what who does in order to secure it are not given, but constructed in 35
political discourse. By answering these questions, the following analysis shows 36
how the rules guiding security policies are changed as these policies move inside 37
society, and contribute to questioning conceptions of security and sovereignty. 38
In parallel with the questions posed above, the analysis is subdivided into three 39
parts. First, this chapter provides an account of how CIP has developed into 40
what it is today, providing the basis for its present conceptualization in govern- 41
ment discourse. This is followed by an investigation of the principal actors and 42
their relationship. Finally, the central strategies and concepts of the US adminis- 43
tration are analysed. 44
45
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‘The absolute protection of our citizens’ 67

1 A short history of critical infrastructure protection
2
The basis of the current conception of CIP originated in the post-Cold War dis-
3
course on new threats in an unpredictable environment (e.g. Tenet 1997; Stude-
4
5 man 1995; Hart and Rudman 2001). The threats to critical infrastructure were,
6 then as now, primarily constructed as consisting of terrorism, a wide range of
7 cyber-threats, or a combination of these in the concept of cyber-terrorism; but
8 the salience of such threats has increased since 11 September 2001 (compare
9 Clinton 1998: 1 with Bush 2003a: 7).
10 What is it exactly being threatened and accordingly in need of protection
11 from these threats? The President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Pro-
12 tection in 1997 defined infrastructure as ‘the framework of interdependent net-

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13 works and systems . . . that provide a reliable flow of products and services
14 essential to the defense and the economic security of the United States, the
15 smooth functioning of government of all levels, and society as a whole’ (US
16 President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure 1997: 142). Not all infrastruc-
17 tures are equally critical; therefore, Executive Order 13010 identified the most
ON
18 critical of these ‘networks and systems’. The list was still comprehensive.
19 Telecommunications, electrical power systems, gas and oil storage and trans-
20 portation, banking and finance, transportation, water supply systems, emergency
21 services, and continuity of government (PCCIP 1997): all of these are critical
22 infrastructures, considered to be at risk from terrorist attacks, both conventional
23 and virtual. The central element in this definition is the focus on infrastructure
24 owned and run by private actors (Moteff and Parfomak 2004: 4). In fact, 85 per
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25 cent of all critical infrastructures are owned or operated by private actors. In the
26 following years, cyber-terrorism was the main focus of both government action
27 and the public debate. A number of commentators pointed to the real and imma-
OO

28 nent threat of a ‘virtual Pearl Harbour’, arguing that the offensive potential of
29 virtual – and thus deterritorialized – information technologies left the US just as
30 open, vulnerable and unprepared as it had been in 1941 (e.g. Arquilla et al.
31 1999: 39–84; Robinson et al. 1998: 62; Lewis 2003: 34, for a critique, see
32 Conway, Chapter 5, this volume).
33 Accordingly, infrastructure had by the end of the 1990s attained a set
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34 meaning (for the history of CIP, see Dunn Cavelty, Chapter 2, this volume;
35 Collier and Lakoff, Chapter 1, this volume; Lopez 2006). Infrastructure consists,
36 on the one hand, of both individual physical sites and the networks of such sites,
37 which collectively constitute the essential underpinnings of society. On the other
38 hand, the definition also includes virtual data networks that are central to
39 society, both in their own right – as facilitating elements of private and commer-
40 cial use of the Internet – and as means of controlling the networks of physical
41 sites. Because these networks are both interdependent and interconnected, the
42 distinction between physical and virtual is often blurred, and system failures in
43 one sector can often have cascading effects, thus magnifying the vulnerability of
44 any one network, as well as the entirety of networks (Robinson et al. 1998).
45 These systems of networks are increasingly framed throughout the late 1990s as
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68 K.S. Kristensen
vulnerable and in need of policies to ensure their protection. This task is not easily 1
accomplished, however. First of all, the sheer quantity of sites, systems and sectors 2
is overwhelming. For example, the US transportation infrastructure consists of 3
four million miles of paved roads, 600,000 bridges, more than 300,000 miles of 4
railroads and 500 commercial airports (Moteff et al. 2003: 8). Not all bridges are 5
equally critical to the security of ‘society as a whole’, of course. Nonetheless, 6
defining criticality is a difficult endeavour. By defining the security of ‘society as a 7
whole’ as the ultimate object to be protected through CIP, there is the obvious risk 8
of casting an overly broad net in defining criticality. 9
The events of 11 September 2001 – which were easily integrated into a 10
narrative reaching back to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – brought with it 11
a renewed focus on CIP, both physical and virtual, and a number of legislative 12

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initiatives in its immediate aftermath focused on infrastructure protection. 13
Already on 8 October 2001, George W. Bush issued an Executive Order estab- 14
lishing the Office of Homeland Security, and directing its functions as related to 15
CIP (Bush 2001). This document expands the sectors included in CIP to 16
encompass nuclear material, agriculture, and ‘special events’ of ‘national
ON 17
significance’ (Bush 2001). This is followed by a number of other documents. 18
The USA PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act and the National Strategy 19
for Homeland Security all discuss what constitutes critical infrastructure. These 20
documents add the chemical industry, postal services and shipping to the list 21
(Bush 2002: 31). Furthermore, in addition to critical infrastructure, the Home- 22
land Security Act mentions ‘key resources’, defined as ‘publicly or privately 23
controlled resources essential to the minimal operations of the economy and 24
F

government’ (US Congress 2002: 10). Another new term coming to the fore 25
after 11 September 2001 is that of ‘key assets’. These are defined in the National 26
Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets 27
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as ‘individual targets whose attack . . . could result in not only large-scale human 28
casualties and property destruction, but also profound damage to our national 29
prestige, morale, and confidence’ (Bush 2003a: vii). Key assets include, for 30
instance, nuclear power plants and dams, but also sites that are ‘symbolically 31
equated with traditional American values and institutions or US political and 32
economic power’, that function to ‘preserve history, honor achievements, and 33
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represent the natural grandeur of our country’. These key assets are especially 34
vulnerable at ‘high profile events and celebratory activities that bring together 35
significant numbers of people’ (Bush 2003a: vii). Thus, instead of defining criti- 36
cality only in relation to the physical security of society, public confidence is 37
now also introduced as a measurement of the criticality of any given infrastruc- 38
ture (Bush 2003a: 2). 39
In sum, while retaining basically the same meaning, CIP has expanded during 40
the last ten years. First, sectors containing critical infrastructure in need of 41
government action have been broadened, and consequently more and more 42
private actors have to take account of the criticality of their businesses from a 43
security perspective. Second, the interdependency and interconnectedness that 44
are essential characteristics of CIP underline the dual character of the object. On 45
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‘The absolute protection of our citizens’ 69

1 the one hand, CIP is the protection of physically existing objects, and on the
2 other hand, CIP is aimed at securing the flows and processes – both physical and
3 virtual – that are deemed central to the continued function of society. Third, the
4 lesson from 11 September 2001 is that not only are critical infrastructures at
5 risk, society itself is threatened by the ‘dual-use’ character of these infrastruc-
6 tures. Fourth, by including events and sites of importance to the public confi-
7 dence and morale, both a temporal and psychological dimension are imparted to
8 criticality as well as to infrastructure itself.
9 The expanding definition of CIP in the discourse changes the politics as well.
10 CIP becomes more intangible and, accordingly, the assessment of risk, threat,
11 criticality and adequate protection becomes less clear-cut. ‘A fluid definition of
12 what constitutes a critical infrastructure could complicate policy making’, and

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13 ‘rationally balancing the costs and benefits of increased security’ becomes
14 increasingly difficult (Moteff et al. 2003: 13). These expansions of the concept
15 in both time and space, as well as its increasingly fluid definition, make critical
16 infrastructure protection difficult. What is to be protected, and how? As the defi-
17 nition of CIP broadens, so does the range of sectors of society that are touched
ON
18 by government action. More critical infrastructure means more government
19 action inside society. This reflects a change away from the classic conception of
20 security at the border towards the completely different concept of creating secur-
21 ity on the inside. Moving security into society requires engagement with the
22 civilian and private actors of society. How these inside actors and their relation-
23 ship with government are conceptualized in the CIP discourse has important
24 consequences for the elaboration of security strategies. Accordingly, relations
F

25 between the central actors – both in government and in the private sector – are
26 discussed in the following.
27
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28
Sovereign prerogative or normal market-driven politics
29
30 One important aspect of critical infrastructure is that about 85 per cent are
31 owned and operated by private actors. The challenge for CIP policies is thus to
32 create security in an environment not controlled by the state. Inside society,
33 other considerations have to be taken into account. However, the final aim of
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34 government politics is still to make society secure. This leaves the government
35 with a fundamental dilemma in its CIP policies – a dilemma that is only made
36 more explicit by the expanding definition of what critical infrastructure is.
37 On the one hand ‘The United States government has no more important
38 mission than protecting the homeland from future terrorist attacks’ (Bush 2002:
39 unnumbered preface). The quote frames the politics of homeland security in
40 terms normally associated with the national security discourse. If homeland pro-
41 tection is the most important mission of government, then one could expect
42 swift, ubiquitous, and decisive action to regulate the various sectors containing
43 critical infrastructure, thus ensuring their safety and protecting the homeland.
44 This line of action and reasoning fits perfectly with classical Hobbesian security,
45 and would re-establish things as they ‘should be’.
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70 K.S. Kristensen
This has not been the case, however, because on the other hand, ‘Homeland 1
security . . . in the context of CIP and key asset protection is a shared respons- 2
ibility that cannot be accomplished by the federal government alone’ (Bush 3
2003a: vii). The government cannot ‘alone protect this nation’s expansive and 4
widely distributed national infrastructures’ (Liscouski 2004). On the contrary, 5
homeland security ‘requires coordinated and focused effort from our entire 6
society’ (DHS 2004: 9). A large part of the responsibility for this ‘important 7
mission’ of government is thus moved away from the Hobbesian state and 8
placed on the shoulders of society, and – concerning the protection of critical 9
infrastructure – on the shoulders of private owners and operators. This results in 10
changes both in the role of government and in the strategies pursued to secure 11
the homeland; creating security inside society is not the same as doing so on the 12

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outside. The private actors involved with critical infrastructure are now integ- 13
rated into the security strategies of government; these private owners and oper- 14
ators become central actors in the discourse on CIP. 15
Two aspects are useful for understanding this change. First, by defining both 16
criticality and infrastructure broadly, the task of securing them has an equally
ON 17
broad range. Second, the policies of homeland security and CIP are blurred by 18
domestic considerations. The management of infrastructure should not be the 19
prerogative of government, because it is privately owned; instead, it should be 20
based on the market, limiting government intervention. The economic consider- 21
ations of society collide with the security concerns of the state when infrastruc- 22
ture – governed by the market – is framed as an object that is both threatened 23
and itself a threat to society. Accordingly, the discourse has to tread carefully 24
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between these two priorities: ‘We face a two-pronged challenge: Safeguard our 25
homeland, but at the same time ensure that the free flow of people, goods and 26
commerce is not disrupted’ (Ridge 2003). In sum, how can governments allow 27
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the economically critical ‘space of flows’ of globalization to persist while secur- 28

ing their citizens? 29
The central challenge is to square the circle by somehow merging these two 30
priorities. One way is to redefine the roles and identity of the actors participating 31
in CIP. First, homeland security in general is argued as a task that only can be 32
accomplished by an ‘effort from our entire society’ (DHS 2004: 9). As stated in 33
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the National Strategy for Homeland Security: ‘Private firms bear primary and 34
substantial responsibility for addressing the public safety risks posed by their 35
industries’ (Bush 2002: 33). Again, the responsibility of private actors is under- 36
lined. However, the 11 September 2001 attacks made it clear that the ordinary 37
safety measures undertaken by business in the past to secure their assets are not 38
enough to secure society in the present ‘threat environment’ (Bush 2003a: x). 39
Government action is required as well. How the interaction between these two 40
actors is conceptualized becomes a central aspect of how to create security on 41
the inside. The role of government is to ‘enable, not inhibit, the private sector’s 42
ability to carry out its protection responsibilities. The Nation’s infrastructure 43
protection effort must harness the capabilities of the private sector to achieve a 44
prudent level of security’ (Bush 2002: 33). Consequently, it is still the private 45
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1 sector that is responsible for security. Its ability to meet this responsibility is,
2 however, to be facilitated by the government, which must ‘use all available
3 policy instruments to raise the security of America’s critical infrastructures and
4 key assets to a prudent level, relying to the maximum possible extent on the
5 market to provide appropriate levels of security’ (Bush 2002: 33, italics added).
6 Government involvement is conceptualized as somewhat limited. Instead of
7 participating directly, the role of government is to ‘help sectors organize them-
8 selves’ and to function only in an ‘active partnership’ (Liscouski 2004: 3).
9 Government action is described in terms such as ‘coordination’, ‘exploring’,
10 ‘facilitating’, ‘encouraging’, ‘supporting’ and ‘seeding’ (Bush 2003a: 16; Bush
11 2003b: 6). The argument of the discourse is that if government fosters coopera-
12 tion and if the distribution of best practices is achieved, then business will be

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13 able to live up to their responsibility and secure their assets on their own. It is as
14 if the natural way of things would be to have maximum security driven by
15 market forces. This has not been the case in government discourse, partly
16 because of lack of attention from the private sector. The role of government
17 becomes more that of a midwife than of a sovereign state. By facilitating coop-
ON
18 eration and information-sharing, the state can make the private industry secure
19 critical infrastructures without compromising the basic economic logic that dic-
20 tates non-interference from the state. The state plays an auxiliary role as a ‘force
21 multiplier’ building on existing incentives, while the efforts made by the private
22 sector are conceptualized as based on calculated self-interest only. The market
23 seems to be given priority.
24 Nonetheless, the cooperative, but market-driven relationship between the
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25 actors is only part of the government discourse on how to integrate business; it is

26 reinforced with elements of patriotism. Homeland security is ‘about the integra-
27 tion of a nation’ (Ridge 2004b). This means, again, that responsibility not only
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28 rests with the federal government. On the contrary, homeland security is about
29 ‘local governments, communities, business, organizations and citizens, all
30 coming together around a shared goal of keeping our country safe’ (Ridge
31 2004b). The market is not the only important concept in government discourse.
32 As the quote shows, private enterprise apparently has other goals than profit.
33 Keeping the country safe, it is argued, is just as much of an obligation for
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34 private businesses. Once one has accepted this dual conceptualization of private
35 operators of infrastructure, participating in government programmes makes
36 sense, as it is both ‘practical and patriotic’ (Liscouski 2004: 9). Participating in
37 CIP policies will help achieve the necessary level of security – which private
38 actors should be encouraged to strive for primarily through market incentives.
39 Additionally, businesses can by ‘voluntarily sharing such critical information . . .
40 demonstrate responsiveness to government need and public good’. The corpor-
41 ate sector is expected to voluntarily participate in – and acknowledge the goal of
42 – the ‘integration of the nation’, thereby showing ‘good corporate citizenship’
43 (Liscouski 2004: 9). Companies are expected to express the national virtue that
44 the struggle against terror and ‘the shared goal of keeping our country safe’ will
45 require. Arguing along this discursive structure, Secretary Ridge can state that:
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72 K.S. Kristensen
the citizens of this country rely on you . . . to strengthen the security of your 1
facilities with your dollars and with your determination. It is what we must 2
ask of everyone – to make the fullest protection of this nation, the highest 3
charge of all. 4
(Ridge 2004c) 5
6
According to the government discourse, there are thus two concepts that drive 7
the actions of the private sector: profit and corporate citizenship. By conceptual- 8
izing private actors in this way, it is discursively possible for the government to 9
achieve the ultimate aim – which it cannot achieve alone – of making society 10
safe. The relationship between the subjects participating in CIP is conceptual- 11
ized as being both normal and internal. Both ‘the market’ and ‘corporate cit- 12

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izenship’ are labels that legitimately engage private actors and thus legitimize 13
government action inside society. However, the discourse simultaneously points 14
in another, somewhat different direction. 15
Information-sharing is argued as one of the key activities in engaging private 16
actors, and cooperation on this issue is seen as essential for achieving the neces-
ON 17
sary protection (Bush 2003a). Information-sharing, however, presents problems, 18
as it runs counter to the competitive nature of the market. Sharing information 19
between private actors on how their business is run and organized goes against 20
the normal conception of the market, and, accordingly, also against the regula- 21
tive framework. Companies engaged in government CIP programmes have 22
voiced concern that by participating, business will run the risk of violating 23
antitrust regulations and potentially face liability lawsuits from their sharehold- 24
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ers (Malcolm 2002: 2). A second problem is how to treat the shared information 25
generated in these partnerships. Normally, the US government is bound by the 26
Freedom of Information Act stating that agency records must be made available 27
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to the general public (Stohs 2002). This fact has been pointed out by private 28
businesses as a major impediment to information-sharing, as the information 29
could potentially be used in civil litigation. In this respect, government actions 30
have departed from normality. Instead of subjugating CIP to the normal regula- 31
tions that apply to private business and government transparency, the strategy 32
has consisted of making exemptions. Basically, information-sharing is portrayed 33
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as being essential to achieving ‘the absolute protection of our citizens’, and, 34

when push comes to shove, national security discourse mingles with the dis- 35
course of the domestic inside. The government response has been to make 36
exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act for information provided by 37
owners and operators of critical infrastructure (US Congress 2002: 41). The 38
same approach is being considered in relation to liability issues (Chertoff 39
2005a). The sovereign power shows itself not in the regulation of private actors, 40
but in the granting of exemptions from other ‘normal’ domestic regulations. 41
In sum, while securing society is the core task of government, this is 42
simultaneously impossible for a government to achieve by itself. This dilemma 43
explains why government discourse states that CIP is both the responsibility of 44
government and simultaneously the responsibility of private-sector infrastruc- 45
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1 ture owners. From this comes the overall duality in the discourse. We find both
2 the domestic concepts of market and corporate citizenship and, somewhat in the
3 background, the exemptions normally associated with national security. In this
4 relationship, characterized by shared responsibility and partnership, security
5 becomes domesticated and subjugated to economic considerations. Simultan-
6 eously, however, economic policy is influenced by security considerations. The
7 discourse makes security an inherent part of doing business in the US (see also
8 Petersen 2008). The result is that these private actors – as far as they follow the
9 dictates in government discourse on ‘partnership’ and ‘responsibility’ – are
10 empowered in comparison with other parts of society. Businesses both ‘bear a
11 part of the security burden as well as become part of the security solution’
12 (Chertoff 2005b). They thus become acting subjects in the CIP discourse. Their

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13 existence as essential partners in government CIP strategies both creates and
14 limits the conditions of possibility for government action. The position of these
15 actors both allows them to participate in negotiating how to make security and
16 limits or changes the role of the state as an actor in its own right.
17 This process of securitizing private actors – by exempting them from normal
ON
18 domestic rules – is, however, not devoid of disagreements: ‘Although private-
19 and public-sector stakeholders share similar objectives, they have different per-
20 spectives on what constitutes acceptable risks and how to achieve security and
21 reliability’. Therefore, establishing what President Bush calls a ‘sustainable
22 security threshold’ is not always a straightforward exercise (Bush 2003a: 48–9).
23 Definitions of critical infrastructure, as well as the relation of government to
24 private actors, are factors that have direct implications for the determination of
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25 which strategies are viable and rational in government discourse, and for what
26 can and what cannot be done. The following section focuses on how the con-
27 cepts of risk and protection collide in the overall security strategies associated
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28 with CIP.
29
30
Homeland protection or homeland risk?
31
32 Until now, the analysis has focused on the characteristics of infrastructure, and
33 on the ways in which different actors and their relationship are articulated in CIP
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34 discourse. In the following, focus is on how a sustainable ‘security threshold’

35 can be established. This is obviously a core question in any strategy – including
36 that of critical infrastructure protection. Again, the creation of security inside
37 society is characterized by a fundamental dualism.
38 On the one hand, the stated goal is ‘the absolute protection of our citizens’
39 (Ridge 2004a). Furthermore, when President Bush states that the US govern-
40 ment ‘has no more important mission than protecting the homeland from terror-
41 ist attacks’ (Bush 2002: preface), the importance of the task is underlined, and
42 critical infrastructure protection is again conceptualized in line with the tradi-
43 tional national security discourse. In explaining the strong government commit-
44 ment to this task, reference is even made to the constitutional obligation of the
45 government to defend society, clearly referring to the traditional contractual
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74 K.S. Kristensen
Hobbesian relationship between the state and society (Bush 2003a: 16). In short, 1
physically securing the citizen body and the territorial homeland of the US is the 2
core task of the government. This line of argumentation again invokes the out- 3
of-the-ordinary dynamics of security policy. When the security of every citizen 4
is at play in conjunction with what is in fact the survival of the constitutionally 5
legitimate government, the goal of securing both obviously takes precedence, 6
and protective measures naturally spread to include more and more issues and 7
sectors of society. This all-inclusive strategy runs through much of CIP dis- 8
course, and the expansion of the concept in particular can be understood as a 9
consequence of this discursive function. When the security of the nation and 10
every citizen as well as the legitimacy of the government are defined as being at 11
stake, then everything that could possibly have an effect immediately becomes 12

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critical, and thus a potential object for securitization. The strategies in the CIP 13
discourse relate directly to potentiality and securitization, as they attempt to 14
answer questions concerning the potential impacts of certain developments. The 15
emphasis on networks, interdependency and interconnectedness in the conceptu- 16
alization of CIP has to be seen from this perspective. Even a discrete event of
ON 17
little apparent significance could entail largely unpredictable cascading effects 18
throughout a large number of sectors. These factors, combined with the high 19
stakes involved, give rise to a natural impulse to protect everything. Further- 20
more, the expansion of the concept to include both a psychological perspective 21
and public trust in government is also an illustration of the above dynamic of 22
eliciting possible outcomes. For example, a terror attack on a local school (Bush 23
2002: 42) does not in itself threaten the continued functioning of US society. 24
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However, the psychological effect of such an attack on the public might very 25
well have ‘cascading’ consequences for both the continued functioning of 26
society and indeed for public trust in government. The concept of criticality, and 27
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accordingly what is to be secured, is thus expanded from interconnected phys- 28

ical networks to include everything with an emotional attachment ranging from 29
schools to national monuments. In the words of President Bush: ‘every terrorist 30
attack has a potential national impact’ (Bush 2003a: ix). In principle, everything 31
has to be protected. But this follows not from an assessment of the particular 32
threat, but from an a priori definition of terrorist attacks as constituting critical 33
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threats. From the argument that any terrorist attack is a potential threat to the 34
nation, it automatically follows that everything that can be targeted is a critical 35
infrastructure. Therefore, everything has to be secured; the constitutional legiti- 36
macy of government depends upon it. This is in line with the traditional concep- 37
tion of security inside the sovereign space. Every citizen everywhere inside 38
sovereign space should be able to demand absolute protection. The universal 39
character of the discourse leads to policies based on worst-case scenarios. 40
But protecting everything is impossible. It is not in the power of the sover- 41
eign to absolutely secure the homeland, because ‘we must accept some level of 42
terrorist risk as a persistent condition of our daily life’ (Bush 2003a: 13). The 43
threat is already inside: ‘[T]errorism is insidious. Terrorists seek to infiltrate our 44
society, scope out targets and wage war in our streets and cities’ (Ridge 2003). 45
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1 The consequences for the provision of security are considerable. As we have
2 seen, inside sovereign space, sovereign power is paradoxically limited, and the
3 almost natural tendency of the state to protect everything is equally and
4 necessarily limited. Inside society, the state faces other political imperatives than
5 that of security. Absolute protection can only be achieved by imposing severe
6 restrictions on activities inside society; by going against the economic preroga-
7 tive of private actors. As stated by Secretary Chertoff: ‘I can guarantee you
8 perfect security at a port, for example, if I shut the port down’ (Chertoff 2005c:
9 8). Instead, to avoid these consequences, the aim is ‘to create a security environ-
10 ment that works with the grain of commerce’ (Chertoff 2005a). Consequently,
11 how does the state secure the homeland and carry out its constitutional obliga-
12 tions, while still bearing in mind that absolute protection is impossible because

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13 on the inside state action is limited. That is the project of the DHS – to create a
14 security environment that on the one hand protects society, but on the other hand
15 ‘works with the grain’ of society. Again, the issue is how to balance the differ-
16 ences between security and the market, and between state and society. This is to
17 be achieved through the concept of risk.ON
18 The concept of risk functions in a twofold way in government discourse. First,
19 it serves to bridge the gap between government and private security strategies.
20 Second, the concept of risk promises to provide – without shutting down society –
21 a new or different form of a society-wide state of security. We have shown above
22 how, in government discourse, the market and cooperate citizenship were concep-
23 tualized as driving private actors for the initial focus on CIP, thus making them
24 security actors. Parallel to this, the government argues that risk is essentially a
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25 private logic: ‘Customarily, private sector firms prudently engage in risk manage-
26 ment planning and invest in security as a necessary function of business operations
27 and customer confidence’ (Bush 2003a: x). Dealing with risk is accordingly part of
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28 the ‘normal’ actions of private actors. The concept thus functions as an opener,
29 allowing the government to engage in security policy based on domestic logics.
30 By arguing in the terminology of risk, government and private-sector actions are
31 brought in line with each other. Secretary Ridge can thus combine the two and
32 argue that ‘if you look at homeland security from a business perspective, we are in
33 a diverse risk-management business’ (Ridge 2004a).
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34 Arguing CIP by means of the concept of risk indicates that government must
35 ‘carefully weigh the benefit of each homeland security endeavor and only allo-
36 cate resources where the benefit of reducing risk is worth the amount of addi-
37 tional cost’ (Bush 2002: 64). Risk becomes the baseline for government action.
38 This argument puts government strategy in line with that of private actors, and
39 government can thus justifiably argue that:
40
41 The private sector should conduct risk assessments on their holdings and
42 invest in systems to protect key assets. The internalization of these costs is
43 not only a matter of sound corporate governance . . . but also an essential
44 safeguard of economic assets for shareholders, employees, and the Nation.
45 (Bush 2002: 12, italics added)
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76 K.S. Kristensen
Recourse to the government’s conceptualization of private actors as both eco- 1
nomic and patriotic subjects, as well as to the concept of risk, ensures that the 2
strategies of the two actors are compatible, as the rationalities and not least the 3
goals are in fact argued as being essentially the same. Security is thus not 4
exclusively defined as absolute and unconditional protection. Now a fundament- 5
ally economic logic is introduced to the government discourse. Securing critical 6
infrastructure is conditioned on whether it is worth the additional cost. The 7
concept of ‘risk’ is argued as a new basis for providing security inside sovereign 8
space. It works ‘with the grain’ of society. The traditional conceptualization of 9
security, on the other hand, limits and hinders the processes necessary for the 10
continued function of society; it creates boundaries. Conversely, risk strategies 11
apparently fit in, enable and facilitate the flows of society, as they are already 12

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part of society. Accordingly, risk becomes a central concept in the discourse on 13
how to provide CIP. According to Secretary Chertoff, the term is the basis for a 14
whole new ‘philosophy’ applied to security (Chertoff 2005d). Security becomes 15
guided by the concept of risk. 16
What does ‘risk’ mean in this context? It is not easy to find a clear-cut defini-
ON 17
tion of what exactly a risk-based approach will achieve, apart from providing a 18
new solution to what is seen as a new problem, which, at the same time, will 19
‘provide a baseline for investment decisions’ (Bush 2003a: 34). Risk is argued 20
as a new way of thinking about how to manage threats and constitutes ‘a general 21
model for assessing risk and deciding on the protective measures we undertake 22
(Chertoff 2005b). The central point is how risk assessment is done. In the words 23
of Secretary Chertoff: ‘[W]henever we make a risk analysis, we have to also 24
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make a cost-benefit analysis’ (Chertoff 2005c). This is clearly an expression of 25

government action rationalized by an essentially economic discourse, which 26
differs from the traditional worst-case discourse of security. However, the con- 27
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ceptualization of risk is not in sync with that of private actors. In the context of 28
risk, talking the talk is easier than walking the walk, because government strat- 29
egies inevitably become entwined with traditional worst-case security scenarios. 30
When it is stated that in the present ‘threat environment . . . private sector owners 31
and operators should reassess and adjust their planning, assurance, and invest- 32
ment programs to better accommodate the increased risk presented by deliberate 33
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acts of violence’ (Bush 2003a: x), it is clear that although the rationale guiding 34
government and private actors may be the same, the assessment of what is 35
necessary is not. The costs and benefits associated with risk-based critical infra- 36
structure protection do not add up in the same way. Although government dis- 37
course might be changing, the ultimate goal is not. The function of ‘risk-based 38
analytical tools’ is to bring government ‘in a position to anticipate the national 39
security, economic, and public safety implications of terrorist attacks’ (DHS 40
2004: 11). On the face of it, this leaves the impression that government action – 41
on the basis of risk assessments – aims at discriminating between various terror 42
attacks and their effects. It thus follows that there are some terrorist attacks that 43
have only insignificant implications for national security, or maybe even none at 44
all. Terror is made relative by the concept of risk. 45
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1 This view is diametrically opposed to the conception outlined earlier. If, as
2 stated by President Bush, every terrorist attack has a national impact (Bush
3 2003a: ix), then every terrorist attack is important. This effectively annuls the
4 discriminating function of risk. There are two simultaneous CIP rationalities at
5 work in government strategies, with two opposing goals. On the one hand, the
6 goal of absolute protection inevitably expands the meaning of critical infrastruc-
7 ture protection, and security concerns cover more and more parts of society and
8 thus necessarily integrate an increasing number of private actors. On the other
9 hand, the concept of risk makes anti-terror strategies relative, dependent on
10 other goals besides absolute protection. There is a fundamental conceptual insta-
11 bility in the discourse on how to protect critical infrastructure and secure
12 society. Risk introduces probability as the basis for action, which makes sense

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13 from the economic-risk perspective of business. Taking action based on calcu-
14 lated risk is a normal and legitimate business practice. However, that is not the
15 way things usually work when national security is at stake. In the national secur-
16 ity context, action is usually justified by the precautionary principle of ‘better
17 safe than sorry’ (on the precautionary principle as security strategy, see Ras-
ON
18 mussen 2006: 123–9; Aradau and van Munster 2007). Risk analysis depends on
19 how important the object of analysis is deemed to be, and on how the con-
20 sequences of putting it at risk are assessed; ultimately, it depends on a
21 cost–benefit analysis. Furthermore, when protection from terror has already been
22 defined as the most important activity of the state, the costs of a terrorist attack
23 are always already analysed as being too high; the risk of incurring such an
24 attack would always be catastrophic. Applying a risk perspective will not
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25 fundamentally change this, and thus the goal of securing the homeland is still
26 conceived as consisting of ‘absolute protection’. The two opposing conceptual-
27 izations, which are not easily made compatible, both live on in the discourse.
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28 Paradoxically, applying both probability and security to critical infrastructure

29 protection are not without political effects in the government’s discourse. First,
30 working with the concept of risk opens the door to domestic space. The tradi-
31 tional tools of security are neither applicable nor legitimate in the long run when
32 applied inside society, as mentioned above; to shut down a port completely is
33 not a viable strategy. Risk functions as a means of legitimizing state interven-
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34 tions in domestic space. By arguing security through risk as a ‘normal’ activity

35 routinely carried out by private actors in making their own security policies, the
36 focus of which is by definition domestic, the government can create security
37 inside its sovereign space by applying the same concept. The concept of risk, in
38 addition to opening domestic policy fields to direct government action, also
39 opens up discursive space for engaging private actors. By arguing government
40 strategies as being based on risk, the policies and goals of government are
41 brought into agreement with, and argued in the same language as, private busi-
42 ness. The concept of risk helps to discipline private actors and to ensure that
43 they work towards government goals, without applying the traditional discipli-
44 nary means of sovereign power. Second, the conceptual differences between risk
45 and absolute protection introduce two temporalities with two different
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78 K.S. Kristensen
rationales. Risk functions as a means of managing the present, and the goal of 1
providing absolute protection is pushed into the future. The state can thus claim 2
to fulfill its constitutional commitments by continuously arguing that it is mini- 3
mizing risk in the present. This gives the government the conceptual means to 4
construct the reality of CIP as a constant ‘work in progress’. Taken together, the 5
concepts of present risk management and future absolute protection allow the 6
government to argue that it is working towards an end-state when protection will 7
be simultaneously absolute, all-inclusive, and devoid of the drawbacks of tradi- 8
tional security policy. The goal of the discourse then consists of effectively com- 9
bining the two in a future when ‘security measures are a comfortable, 10
convenient part of our routine’ (Chertoff 2005d). 11
12

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13
Conclusions: critical infrastructure and the changing
14
practice of security
15
The attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 revealed the 16
vulnerability of the continental US, and made clear that the protective functions
ON 17
of traditional border practices are not sufficient to secure the territory and popu- 18
lation of the US. But providing security and territorial integrity is still a central 19
conception of state sovereignty; it is argued as a constitutional commitment. 20
‘Homeland security’ consists of protecting the sacred territory from the danger- 21
ous outside (Lipschutz 2001: 75). In order to do so, the security strategies of the 22
state are decoupled from the physical borders of the nation; border control prac- 23
tices are moved to the outside. Simultaneously, efforts are made to recreate the 24
F

protective functions of borders inside society. Accordingly, political discourse 25

on critical infrastructure protection can be seen as part of an effort aimed at 26
maintaining state sovereignty under conditions seen as new and dangerous. This 27
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development can be seen as an empirical manifestation of the state’s attempts to 28

come to terms with how to make security in an era of debordered borders. This 29
chapter has attempted to break down the discourse and open it up for analysis by 30
splitting it up into three parts: the definitions of CIP, the relationship between 31
the actors, and finally the concepts and strategies of the discourse. In this way, 32
new conditions of possibility for security were illustrated. 33
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Due to the very broad conception of the objects of CIP, which makes them 34
almost synonymous with society in general, integrating private actors in the 35
practice of security becomes a central aim for the state. To this end, private 36
actors are given a privileged position. Together, these two aspects – how private 37
actors and critical infrastructure are conceptualized – are of great importance for 38
the strategies that governments can pursue. These changes create new conditions 39
of possibility for the provision of security that diverge from traditional security 40
practice. As security changes – in accordance with what is considered new con- 41
ditions – maintaining the meaning of sovereignty is made difficult. Security is 42
changed as the practice moves into society. On the one hand, the task of secur- 43
ing society is privatized by sharing responsibility with owners and operators of 44
critical infrastructure. Government discourse declares them to be security actors, 45
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‘The absolute protection of our citizens’ 79

1 and this empowers them vis-à-vis the rest of society. Simultaneously, sovereign
2 power is limited by this domestication. The state has to subjugate itself to the
3 domestic logic of the market in order to act inside domestic space and to negoti-
4 ate security strategies with private actors, which is achieved largely by employ-
5 ing the concept of risk. On the other hand, the goal is still ‘absolute protection’,
6 which implies a spillover of the traditional dynamics of security into society.
7 Security is domesticated and privatized, while the private is securitized. The
8 outside and inside faces of the state are conflated when the state attempts to
9 make security on the inside. The traditional conception of state practice is
10 changed by this conflation, and the discursive formation on which this practice
11 rests is destabilized.
12 Employing the concept of risk is a strategy that in itself further destabilizes

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13 the discourse. Security is traditionally a binary concept. You are either secure or
14 you are not; the concept is an existential one aiming at finality, and at ‘the
15 absolute protection of our citizens’. As such, it is opposed to risk, which is a
16 probabilistic concept aimed at managing an ongoing process. Risk is essentially
17 linked to the notion of being insecure. The discourse of the current US adminis-
ON
18 tration is paradoxically applying both, by using risk management as a strategy to
19 achieve a secure end-state. This central duality runs through the discourse on
20 CIP. This has been the case both in the way in which the sovereign prerogative
21 of providing security clashed with market-based politics, and in how the goal of
22 absolute protection clashed with risk management strategies. This duality lives
23 on in the discourse, and will be a constant source of conceptual instability in
24 debates over how to provide security inside society; the security strategies of the
F

25 state will inevitably find themselves strung out between the absolute rationalities
26 of the sovereign state and the diversified concerns of society. The duality leaves
27 the state in an almost schizophrenic position.
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28 Consequently, instead of creating finality, merging these concepts leads to

29 conceptual instability and a continuing sense of insecurity. The threat is argued
30 as an existential one, but by simultaneously employing risk strategies, it is con-
31 ceded that the threat can only be managed, not overcome. The combination of
32 these two factors implies that the condition of security inside society and thus
33 also US sovereignty will constantly be questioned. CIP and other homeland
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34 security initiatives cannot ensure public confidence in the government. They can
35 only, as Bush states in the National Strategy for Homeland Protection, ‘reassure
36 the public and reinforce its confidence in our institutions’ (Bush 2002: 11, italics
37 added). Security requires constant reassurance and reinforcement, and there is
38 thus a tendency for the state to spread security – in the form of CIP or other
39 practices – to cover more and more parts of society. But as illustrated, this is not
40 feasible from the perspective of a liberal state. The state is caught in a dilemma
41 between expansion and retreat. The conceptual conflict between absolute secur-
42 ity and the flows of (global) society lives on in practice.
43
44
45
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80 K.S. Kristensen
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4 Critical infrastructures and 2
3
network pathologies 4
5
The semiotics and biopolitics of 6
heteropolarity 7
8
9
James Der Derian and Jesse Finkelstein 10
11
12

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60 years ago a moth flew into a Mark II computer in a Harvard lab crashing it 13
and the term computer ‘bug’ was born. 14
15
16
And although the planning was not complete, a lot of work had been done.
ON 17
But there were two problems here. First of all, it’s as if someone took that 18
plan and dropped an atomic bomb simply to make it more difficult. We 19
didn’t merely have the overflow, we actually had the break in the wall. And 20
I will tell you that, really, that perfect storm of combination of catastrophes 21
exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody’s foresight . . . I 22
think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous 23
effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the 24
F

National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evac- 25

uation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break 26
the traditional model and create a new model – one for what you might call 27
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kind of an ultra-catastrophe. 28
(Secretary of Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, 29
3 September 2005 [CNN 2005a]) 30
31
At a news conference, Mr. Chertoff called the hurricane and subsequent 32
flooding, an ‘ultra-catastrophe’ that exceeded the foresight of planners. 33
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Asked what the government’s response signified about the nation’s pre- 34
paredness for a potential terrorist attack, Mr. Chertoff said, ‘If an ultra-cata- 35
strophe occurs, there’s going to be some harmful fallout’. 36
(McFadden 2005) 37
38
When our security mandarins so badly mix disasters as well as metaphors and so 39
baldly duck responsibility by coining terms like ‘ultra-catastrophe’, it is prob- 40
ably time to run for the hills. Under the Bush administration, the hype of the 41
‘global war on terror’, the fiasco of Iraq, and the debacle of New Orleans con- 42
verged to produce a rising tide of ‘toxic soup’, as the residue of Hurricane 43
Katrina became charmingly known. Numerous investigations were launched 44
into immediate causes and consequences. A common feature of all these devel- 45
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Critical infrastructures 85
1 opments was a failure of intelligence, of the technical kind that relies on satel-
2 lites, spies and analysts but also of critical intelligence, the kind that searches
3 out unasked questions and alternative solutions rather than hide behind linguistic
4 gymnastics, bureaucratic excuses, and political apologia. Unsurprisingly, this
5 failure also plagues the latest growth industry of the national security state: crit-
6 ical infrastructure protection (CIP).
7 This chapter aims to disturb conventional definitions, interrogate general
8 assumptions and challenge the very validity of ‘critical infrastructure protec-
9 tion’. In order to do so, it raises some fundamental questions: what makes an
10 infrastructure ‘critical’ and in need of protection? Who says so, and by what
11 authority? How have new actors redefined the security discourse? We seek
12 answers to these questions by undertaking a semiotic investigation of a new het-

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13 eropolarity, in which networked private actors challenge the exclusive preroga-
14 tives and capacities of the public sector to define and protect its citizens, creating
15 a new biopolitics that trumps the traditional security concerns of the body
16 politic.
17 ON
18
The evolution of critical infrastructure protection: the
19
physical, the virtual and the network
20
21 The spread of hybrid networks combining public and private sectors means that
22 the ultimate guarantor of infrastructure security, the sovereign state, is in a bind.
23 The most powerful networks are now global in nature, and, by definition, they
24 resist state control. As a result, the legitimacy and efficacy of the traditional
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25 institutions of the international system, like balance of power, diplomacy and

26 international law, have been greatly attenuated. International order can no longer
27 be sustained by uni-, bi-, or multipolar configurations of power: the new global
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28 order is heteropolar, in the sense of a wide range of different actors, not only
29 states, capable of producing profound global effects through interconnectivity.
30 Varying in identity, interests and strength, new global actors gain advantage
31 through the broad bandwidth of information technology; networked IT provides
32 new global actors with the means to traverse political, economic, religious and
33 cultural boundaries, changing, for instance, not only how war is fought and
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34 peace is made, but making it ever more difficult to maintain the very distinction
35 of war and peace.
36 The ‘West’ might currently enjoy an advantage in the new heteropolar order,
37 with its domination of surveillance, media and military networks; but the ‘Rest’,
38 including fundamentalist terrorist groups, non-governmental organizations, and
39 anti-globalization activists, have fully tapped the political potential of networked
40 technologies of information collection, transmission and storage. In the recent
41 past networked information technologies have traditionally signified the superi-
42 ority of Western civilization over barbarian others; the perpetrators of the 11
43 September 2001 attacks were referred to as ‘cave dwellers’. But a less culturally
44 biased and more semiotically sensitive examination challenges this artificial dis-
45 tinction, one which is rhetorically perpetuated at our peril. Networks now
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86 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

produce (not always intentionally) shifting zones of inferiority and superiority, 1
each with contingent advantages and disadvantages that are often based on the 2
leveraging of power asymmetries. For instance, Bin Laden’s appeal as well as 3
longevity is a study of strategic choices of when best to be off the grid (and in 4
the cave) or on the Internet (and promoting jihad). 5
Of course, the national security state, eminently powerful and intermittently 6
pathological, is still very much with us, and will remain so, as the black box 7
within a grid of networks. The challenge for the investigator is to get inside the 8
operational box while staying outside the semiotic box of security discourse. To 9
understand how the essential features of critical infrastructure – the powerful 10
nodes, hubs and flows of networks – have transformed global politics, one must 11
navigate between state secrecy and corporate opacity as well as between meta- 12

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theoretical debates and conventional levels of analysis. 13
Our response is to adopt a supra-state and extra-disciplinary approach for 14
understanding what makes an infrastructure critical. We begin with Kevin 15
Kelly’s definition of a network, as ‘organic behavior in a technological matrix’ 16
(Kelly 1999: 31). It might not be the most transparent definition, but it does
ON 17
capture a dual aspect of networks, linking the technical structure and effects of 18
networks to innate features of human agency and complex vulnerabilities. The 19
linkages become obvious when one considers the dual nature of globalized 20
human networks (for instance, greater economic opportunity, but also more 21
human trafficking), or digital interconnectivity (increased information flows, but 22
a higher likelihood of computer virus attacks), or media convergence (broader 23
coverage, but also increased likelihood of cascading dissimulations). 24
F

25
26
The primacy of the virtual: CIP as an information problem
27
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Semiotics, or the study of signs, is not an approach endorsed by mainstream 28

International Relations. Yet its origins, in the art of military signalling, was 29
central to the security of the sovereign state. The same is true of ‘infrastructure’, 30
which originally referred to physical installations that formed the basis or target 31
for any military operations. From these shared origins we can surmise how the 32
formation and potential destruction of the state and its capital city – or centre of 33
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gravity – first gave rise to a science of studying the fundamental facilities and 34
systems of a physically specified territory, like transportation and communica- 35
tion systems, power plants and schools. Semiotics also provides us with clues 36
for understanding how the modifier ‘critical’, added a new element to the assess- 37
ment of vital interests. Just as ‘national security’ came to displace ‘national 38
interest’ as stronger concept for appreciating the dangers of the nuclear age, so 39
too has ‘critical infrastructure’ come to represent both physical structures and 40
virtual systems in an information age. 41
The coining of ‘critical infrastructure’ is more than a single semantic shift: it 42
represents an historical evolution in the determination of what is to be deemed 43
critical. In recent years, the tag of ‘critical infrastructure’ gives primacy to infor- 44
mational networks over physical assets. In Executive Order 13231 of 16 October 45
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Critical infrastructures 87
1 2001 Critical Infrastructure Protection in the Information Age, infrastructure is
2 understood largely in the context of information:
3
4 The information technology revolution has changed the way business is
5 transacted, government operates, and national defense is conducted. Those
6 three functions now depend on an interdependent network of critical
7 information infrastructures. The protection program authorized by this order
8 shall consist of continuous efforts to secure information systems for critical
9 infrastructure, including emergency preparedness communications, and the
10 physical assets that support such systems. Protection of these systems is
11 essential to the telecommunications, energy, financial services, manufactur-
12 ing, water, transportation, health care, and emergency services sectors.

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13 (Bush 2001)
14
15 President George W. Bush’s Order is telling because it describes the complex
16 hierarchy of infrastructural systems, both informational and physical. The goal
17 of the Order is to ‘secure information systems’, where physical infrastructure is
ON
18 understood as ‘supporting such systems’. Concomitantly, ‘informational assets’
19 support a more diverse array of systems, like financial services and energy.
20 Here, informational infrastructure provides the structure that relates physical
21 infrastructure to primary assets. This emphasis on the informational content of
22 CIP is important definitionally, but also critically, as we will see later on, in
23 determining the effectiveness and risks of CIP.
24 We can identify three stages to the semantical evolution of ‘infrastructure’. It
F

25 begins as a description of physical systems in a military space, and then expands

26 to designate physical systems that sustain a territory. With the Internet boom and
27 the emergence of cyberspace a new distinction is added to the meaning of infra-
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28 structure, between the virtual and the physical. Then, after 11 September 2001
29 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, we arrive at a more
30 complicated picture where physical infrastructure is subsumed by the realm of
31 virtual systems.
32 Within this general etymology, we can identify divergences and contradic-
33 tions. As we mentioned previously, the international system increasingly resem-
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34 bles a heteropolar matrix with competing and collaborating actors, each with
35 their own comprehension of CIP. In Global Security Matrix, our web-based
36 visualization of these ideas (www.globalsecuritymatrix.org), we have organized
37 these interpretations according to the levels of analysis provided by different
38 infrastructures: Human, State, System, Network and Global. Human security is
39 defined by two core negative rights of the individual: to be free of fear (safety)
40 and free of want (well-being). Similarly, the definition of state security is negat-
41 ive, in that the state is charged with averting the extreme dangers of anarchy and
42 tyranny. System security refers to those institutions and organizations that play a
43 role in formalizing and institutionalizing norms and relations between states and
44 non-state actors. Network security can be defined as the integrity of those webs
45 of interconnectivity that allow various organizations of people to communicate,
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88 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

transfer and process information free from infringement and subversion. Global 1
security refers to the prevention of events that present a danger beyond state- 2
hood or the individual, like nuclear holocaust or global warming. Each of these 3
levels anticipates a different sense of what it means to be critical and what is 4
referred to as infrastructure. 5
Our discussion of CIP touches on all of these levels, but for the time being, 6
we will return to the most salient ones: the state, the network and the system. It 7
is these levels of analysis that the President’s Order directly refers to when dis- 8
cussing CIP. These levels also represent those sectors that are in the powerful 9
position to frame the discussion of CIP. The state and the system are two of the 10
most powerful, contending and collaborating levels of analysis that have gone 11
the greatest lengths to define CIP. The term ‘state’ refers here to the federal and 12

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local levels of government, and ‘system’ refers to organizations such as think- 13
tanks, corporations and NGOs that have made CIP their business. Throughout 14
this chapter, we will more generally refer to these levels as the ‘public’ and 15
‘private sectors’, respectively. 16
When we previously discussed the evolving definition of infrastructure, we
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pointed out a major turning point that occurred after 11 September 2001, 18
whereby CIP, which previously referred to two distinct terrains of infrastructure, 19
was redefined. CIP became an information problem, in such a way that ‘phys- 20
ical’ and ‘human assets’ became terms in a virtual system. We would like to 21
argue that this shift is primarily the result of the growing importance of the 22
private sector in reframing CIP as a commodity both to drive corporate growth 23
and to structure corporate responsibility. 24
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25
26
The private sector’s understanding of CIP
27
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The private sector has a different appreciation for CIP than the public sector. 28
Firms are not primarily interested in the peace and well-being of the nation – 29
their main concern is the bottom line, which is their financial welfare – though 30
this may require peace. One may argue that if a firm can continue to operate 31
regardless of an attack or insure itself against risks to its ‘body’, then the moti- 32
vation to invest proactively in CIP is minimal. Certainly, a peaceful environment 33
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is necessary for some companies to operate, but their ultimate goal is not peace, 34
but wealth. 35
Another consideration for the private sector is the role of the US government 36
in standardizing protocols for CIP. Since 11 September 2001, CIP has increas- 37
ingly become a top priority of ‘homeland security’, i.e. the need to pre-empt, 38
mitigate and recover from terrorist attacks. The DHS has understandably taken 39
the lead in this effort, instituting the National Infrastructure Protection Plan 40
(NIPP) to unify and integrate efforts towards CIP within a national programme. 41
Companies are not required by law to implement CIP procedures, but the devel- 42
opment of the NIPP is a strong indication that the US government may, in the 43
near future, attempt to legislate for this standardization. In fact, since 2001, the 44
general public’s concern over security has driven many companies to invest in 45
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Critical infrastructures 89
1 areas like CIP. This move seems primarily a public relations one – firms want to
2 improve their public image by showing a deep commitment to the overall safety
3 agenda of the US. With anticipated future attacks against the US and its allies,
4 security investment will likely become an increasingly powerful tool to enhance
5 a firm’s reputation.
6 But what firms disregard in terms of physical assets they prize in virtual
7 assets. In a brutal sense, any individual person in a firm is replaceable, and loss
8 of employees is covered by insurance. If a company’s building is destroyed or if
9 an employee is killed, a new building can be purchased, a new employee can be
10 hired. But theft, leaks or loss of information can mean the end of a corporation’s
11 livelihood. There is not just the danger of information disappearing or being
12 leaked; the continuity and flow of that information is of equal importance, espe-

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13 cially for many companies for whom time is a crucial factor in determining
14 gains.
15 The most significant private-sector forces driving CIP, therefore, are cyber-
16 crime and intellectual property theft. As we mentioned earlier, international rela-
17 tions has become a heteropolar matrix, and this fact is clearly evident in the
ON
18 threats against the private sector’s knowledge resources. At almost every level
19 of analysis, there is a potential risk to a company’s IT infrastructure: from
20 hackers looking to profit from stolen information, to ‘cyber-terrorists’ looking to
21 compromise important resources. Entire nations have been identified as alleged
22 perpetrators in the struggle against corporate IT espionage. In 2005, FBI Assis-
23 tant Director for Counterintelligence David Szady cited Russia, Iran, Cuba,
24 North Korea and China among countries allegedly engaging in espionage
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25 against the US (CNN 2005b).

26 While the 11 September 2001 attacks may have revealed the vulnerability of
27 US physical assets, the private sector understood the attacks as foreshadowing
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28 the dangers posed to their information networks. In this way, the discourse and
29 technology of CIP has moved increasingly towards the security of virtual assets.
30 According to French Caldwell, an employee of Gartner, a leading technology
31 analyst group, ‘in a real-time economy, the physical and electronic systems are
32 becoming more interdependent. In that real-time world, the Internet is the most
33 critical infrastructure of all – without information and data, the real-time world
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34 grinds to a halt’ (Caldwell 2003).

35 Whether this concern over the vulnerability of the virtual is legitimate, that is
36 how CIP is being sold to the public sector. As will be shown in the following
37 chapter, CIP is moving away from being seen as strictly a problem of protecting
38 key physical resources, and is increasingly being regarded as an information
39 problem. Moreover, this information problem is not simply a matter of protect-
40 ing knowledge, but involves harnessing information to predict and protect infra-
41 structures. Clearly, CIP cannot be reduced to hardware: again, networked
42 technology not only exhibits organic, human behaviour, but in its more complex
43 forms, to invoke Arthur C. Clarke, ‘sufficiently advanced technology is indistin-
44 guishable from magic’ (Clarke 1961). The greatest challenge is when negative
45 synergy and cascading effects in dense networks produce super-human effects.
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90 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

CIP technology trends for public and private crisis situations 1
2
As others have noted, CIP is fundamentally a human issue. This is true in many
3
ways. Most notable is the way in which CIP technologies are articulated around
4
the individual. For instance, knowledge management tools aim to codify human 5
knowledge into the institutional workings of public and private-sector organi- 6
zations. Organizations continually struggle with high turnover rates, as people 7
switch jobs routinely. Knowledge management technologies help companies 8
capture, manage and retain existing data so that an up-to-date knowledge base is 9
available in real time across the organization. The intersection of knowledge 10
management and CIP is clearly demonstrated by the fallout of 11 September 11
2001. The destruction of the World Trade Center greatly undermined the US 12

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economy. This was partly a consequence of the loss of information that was 13
crucial to the performance and integrity of the firms residing in the Twin 14
Towers. While the impact of human and technology ‘inputs’ cannot be deter- 15
mined with a safe margin of predictability, it is apparent that the loss of human 16
knowledge presents a loss to a corporation’s resources. Knowledge management
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tools are crucial for CIP, because they help retain important information despite 18
massive catastrophes or risks. As one company has explained, in an era of 19
increased uncertainty, in which companies are broadening their geographic 20
reach, protection against loss of information and routine preservation of know- 21
ledge become crucial for the continued performance and effectiveness of the 22
private and public sectors. 23
It is crucial that we interrogate this conflation of humanity, technology and 24
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CIP in order to reveal other human implications of CIP. In the following, we 25

offer four depictions for the dual application of CIP technology in both national 26
security and private corporate crisis situations. Knowledge management tools 27
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understand people as living networks – repositories of knowledge and data 28

exchange. The role of knowledge management technology is to draw out this 29
information and reinscribe it into the larger networks of public and private 30
organizations. What is determined critical, then, is not the human ‘incubator’ of 31
this knowledge, but the knowledge itself. Technology indeed becomes indistin- 32
guishable from magic when it can be used for extracting human thought from an 33
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individual, or possibly this is what makes it super-human. 34

This point brings us to the first human implication of CIP, which is, one 35
again, the question ‘what is critical’? According to the private sector, informa- 36
tion networks appear to be the most crucial asset worthy of protection. As indi- 37
cated above, ‘the Internet is the most critical infrastructure of all’. The public 38
sector may take a different approach to this question. One would hope that gov- 39
ernments consider human life to be their most critical asset, yet states have an 40
unfortunate history of attaching more importance to some people than to others. 41
We shall remain sceptical for a moment and say that like corporations, govern- 42
ments value the persistence of their own information networks above the protec- 43
tion of their citizens. As we will show below, the ‘information problem’ that 44
was previously the responsibility of corporations is now being handed over to 45
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Critical infrastructures 91
1 governments. In other words, for the public sector, CIP is an information
2 problem that can be managed using the same predictive and analytical technolo-
3 gies that many firms use to determine buying patterns. Now governments can
4 purchase technologies that purportedly forecast criminal activity.
5 While the juridical implications of these technologies are daunting, many
6 countries have been quick to mobilize this software to maintain the integrity of
7 their networks. Which introduces us to the second human implication and ques-
8 tion we shall engage with: who is CIP protecting? And, more importantly, who
9 is CIP not protecting? Any introduction, by the public or private sector, of
10 resources and technology that is intended to maintain the security of critical
11 assets raises explicit political and juridical questions. For whose benefit these
12 assets are protected, and how this protection is achieved, speaks directly to the

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13 condition of those outside the safety zone, and it is often these people whose
14 critical assets are in the greatest need of protection. Always bearing in mind
15 these all-too-human elements, we shall consider four situations, each of which
16 refers to the main technological drivers behind CIP.
17 ON
18
Scenario one: radio frequency identification (RFID)
19
20 RFID, or radio frequency identification, is a system for tracking and identifying
21 items through a combination of tags placed on the items to be tracked and
22 readers that interrogate those tags (via radio waves) at appropriate points in a
23 distribution chain. RFID tags contain small integrated circuits that have tiny
24 antennae for communicating with the RFID readers as well as the ability to store
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25 identification information. For the past two-and-a-half years, Wal-Mart has been
26 working with the Auto-ID Center, a non-profit research organization based at the
27 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to develop and test RFID technology
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28 that will allow companies to track goods using a universal Electronic Product
29 Code (EPC). The Auto-ID Center’s long-term vision is for companies to use
30 smart shelves to monitor how many items are on each shelf. When the inventory
31 is low, the software would notify a store manager that more items need to be
32 brought from the storeroom. Subsequently, readers in the storeroom would
33 monitor the inventory and alert the distribution centre when more products are
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34 needed, and so on back through the supply chain. Ultimately, RFID is intended
35 to help retailers refine supply orders and product placement.
36 A related development is the broader application of supply chain score-
37 carding. Supply chain score-carding aligns operations with an organization’s
38 supply chain management strategy. By quantifying goals and objectives using
39 shared criteria and metrics, a firm benefits from understanding how day-to-day
40 operating decisions influence supply chain capability and performance. Top per-
41 formers are rewarded while firms reduce dependency on sluggish trading part-
42 ners. By monitoring and analysing data received from RFID chips, companies
43 are better equipped to develop these metric indicators. Terrorist attacks, political
44 instability in the developing world, and supply chain complexity have awakened
45 managers to supply chain risks, some of which had been introduced or
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92 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

heightened by the very actions companies had taken to reduce costs in their 1
supply chains. RFID allows companies to track the movement and stock of 2
goods, so that, for example, if Indonesia should experience a civil war, Wal- 3
Mart would be able to contact vendors in other countries to make up for supply 4
shortfalls in the company’s lumber products. 5
RFID is now being used to sustain the complex logistics of the occupation of 6
Iraq. In the past ten years, the DOD has invested US$100 million in the imple- 7
mentation of active RFID chips. Active RFID tags have a battery, which allows 8
them to emit a signal that increases the read range of the tag, while increasing 9
the amount of data that the tag can store. Currently, the Department of Defense 10
(DoD) is collaborating with Wal-Mart to advance passive RFID technology, 11
which does not require manual scanning, but updates data automatically. One of 12

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RFID’s chief advocates from the military is Vice Admiral (ret) Arthur 13
Cebrowski, the father of ‘network-centric warfare’, who went on to head the 14
DoD’s Office of Force Transformation, and whose mantra is that the US should 15
wage war like it conducts business – with Wal-Mart as his prime example. 16
According to Alan Estev, Supply Chain Chief of the DoD:
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18
In Operation Iraqi Freedom – and in Operation Desert Storm, for that matter 19
– logistics did not cause battlefield deaths. But your ability to operate and 20
your ability to move about the battlefield are constrained by your ability to 21
support the logistics, and RFID is a tool that will enable us to better support 22
that force in a dynamic environment. 23
(quoted in Gilbert 2004) 24
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25
The role of RFID in security is not limited to overseas military activity. The 26
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is investing heavily in RFID techno- 27
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logy, or what the DHS is referring to euphemistically as ‘contactless chips’. Like 28

passive RFID technology, contactless chips do not require manual scanning; 29
instead, they emit a frequency which is automatically read by handheld or sta- 30
tionary scanners. In 2005, the DHS began issuing RFID-tagged employee ID 31
cards (which include fingerprint records) to tens of thousands of its employees. 32
The employee ID card used by the DHS has ‘contactless’ technology to give 33
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workers faster access to secure areas. The DHS is also evaluating technology 34
pitches from several RFID tag manufacturers for an RFID-tagged passport con- 35
taining biometric data. The government’s plan will earn billions of dollars for 36
the RFID suppliers while helping security officials track individuals more effect- 37
ively by detecting their ID documents’ radio signals in airport terminals, or 38
wherever reader devices are present. 39
This use of RFID represents an important feature of CIP technology, because 40
it demonstrates the desire on the part of the public sector to organize the system 41
of networks that pervade and cross a nation’s borders. However, this desire is 42
nothing new. Since the first cities, fortifications were constructed to regulate 43
movement and contact amongst neighbours. CIP distinguishes itself from these 44
rudimentary efforts because the technology is not concerned with the physical 45
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Critical infrastructures 93
1 space. As the recent efforts by the DHS indicate, CIP technology now converges
2 on the virtual and biological. Paul Virilio points out in Pure War that technology
3 has made the world smaller; the last fields of exploration and control will take
4 place in the microcosm of the body and the elusive channels of the virtual
5 (Virilio and Lotringer 1998). And, crucially, it is these two spaces, the virtual
6 and the biological, that CIP technology conflates. Our biology becomes indis-
7 tinct from the processor chips and memory cards that we use to compute
8 information.
9
10
Scenario two: grid computing
11
12 Best known through the SETI programme, the concerted computer effort to

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13 detect intelligent life in the universe (not supported by the White House), grid
14 computing has the potential to provide seamless and scalable access to widely
15 distributed resources. Computational grids enable the sharing, selection and
16 aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational
17 resources (such as supercomputers, compute clusters, storage systems, data
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18 sources, instruments and people) and presents them as a single, unified resource
19 for running large-scale, data-intensive computing applications.
20 The problem that underlies the grid concept is the difficulty of coordinating
21 resource-sharing and problem-solving across multi-institutional virtual organi-
22 zations. For instance, an industrial consortium formed to develop a feasibility
23 study for a programme that would spatially model bio-terrorist attacks and
24 natural pandemics undertakes a multidisciplinary simulation of such an event.
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25 This simulation integrates proprietary software components developed by differ-

26 ent participants, with each component operating on that participant’s computers
27 and having access to the appropriate design databases and other data made avail-
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28 able to the consortium by its members. Enabling these many virtual organi-
29 zations to communicate and share information is the goal of grid computational
30 architecture. Here, the establishment, management and exploitation of dynamic,
31 cross-organizational firms sharing relationships require grid architecture,
32 because the technology identifies the fundamental system components, specifies
33 the purpose and function of these components, and indicates how these com-
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34 ponents interact with one another.

35 The operation of virtual organizations requires sharing relationships amongst
36 any potential participants. Interoperability is thus the central issue to be
37 addressed. In a networked environment, interoperability means common proto-
38 cols. Grid architecture is first and foremost a protocol architecture, with proto-
39 cols defining the basic mechanisms by which users and resources negotiate,
40 establish, manage and exploit sharing relationships.
41 Another CIP-related example would be an internal crisis management team
42 of a large chemical company responding to a chemical spill by using local
43 weather and soil models to estimate the spread of the spill, determining the
44 impact based on population location as well as geographic features such as
45 rivers and water supplies, creating a short-term mitigation plan (perhaps based
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94 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

on chemical reaction models), and tasking emergency response personnel by 1
planning and coordinating evacuation, notifying hospitals and so forth. The 2
technology enabling this crisis management team to negotiate and manage the 3
variety of information is the same technology that allowed the consortium of the 4
previous scenario to develop the feasibility study. Grid architecture, in this latter 5
case, allows the crisis management team to collect and evaluate a large amount 6
of data from various resources to model the damage of the chemical spill. 7
8
9
Scenario three: network security and Trusted Information Sharing
10
(TIS)
11
Just as a system is more than the sum of its parts, there is more to a network than 12

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nodes, hubs and connections (see Kelly’s definition of networks). Since 11 Sep- 13
tember 2001, we have witnessed the emergence of competing sources of power 14
in the shape of heteropolar networks, where different actors are able to produce 15
profound global effects through interconnectivity. Trusted information-sharing 16
and network security technologies help to prevent intrusion, whether from ter-
ON 17
rorists, competitors or state actors. Consider again the example of an industrial 18
consortium developing a feasibility study on the spatial modelling program for 19
bio-terrorist attacks and pandemics. Not only must this multidisciplinary and 20
multi-firm effort integrate various independent technologies and elements of 21
proprietary software, the consortium must also share important information to 22
help model the incident. For instance, one firm, which specializes in tracking 23
past disaster relief programmes, wants to contribute disaster relief models used 24
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in previous scenarios, but this firm wants only to share those models that are 25
specific to the incidents measured by the consortium. Trusted information- 26
sharing technology allows that firm to give the other members of the consortium 27
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access to data that the firm deems appropriate. For companies whose primary 28
commodity is knowledge, trusted information-sharing is crucial, because the 29
mediated distribution of information allows these companies to transfer know- 30
ledge efficiently without exposing the entirety of their data. 31
The introduction of trusted information-sharing technology in the preceding 32
example is different than in the more infamous cases of hacked systems. In 33
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2005, 40 million credit card accounts were jeopardized when computer data at 34
an Arizona company was stolen, and nearly four million customers of the Citi- 35
group financial services company were put at risk when UPS lost data tapes with 36
personal information (Fountain 2005). More recently, hackers have stolen credit 37
card accounts and other personal information from AT&T (Morphy 2006). In 38
these instances, trusted information investment is not really a means of protect- 39
ing data, but gives the impression or appearance of protection, which is, in many 40
ways, more important. For AT&T, Citigroup or UPS, the loss of personal 41
information does not really affect their operations. Those companies are far 42
more concerned with protecting information that may yield future monetary 43
gains, like patented applications or analytic programmes. Consumer faith in the 44
integrity of such companies is an issue of public relations. If a company invests 45
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Critical infrastructures 95
1 heavily in the protection of consumer data, that investment is worthless if it is
2 not publicized. Alternatively, if a company’s database containing consumer
3 information is hacked, the hack will not affect the company’s value if it is not
4 publicized. The distinction in the type of implementation of TIS is significant,
5 because in our discussion of CIP, determining what is actually ‘critical’ illumi-
6 nates the most powerful use of technology.
7
8
Scenario four: Maximum Availability Architectures (MAAs)
9
10 Maximum Availability Architectures (MAAs) are ways of configuring comput-
11 ers so that even if one or more servers should crash, data and functionality are
12 preserved. All hardware components of a storage array must be fully redundant,

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13 from physical interfaces to physical disks, including redundant power supplies
14 and connectivity to the array itself. The complete storage is replicated at the sec-
15 ondary site for adequate data protection. A highly available network infrastruc-
16 ture may include redundant devices, such as DNS servers, to allow routing
17 between primary and secondary sites, load balancers for routing to any available
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18 application servers, load balancers for routing to any available database node in
19 the cluster, and physical layer switches.
20 In August of 2003, a power outage in the US reportedly affected more than
21 50 million people, including in the New York, Detroit and Cleveland metropoli-
22 tan areas. Because New York City is a global financial centre, concern immedi-
23 ately arose about potential economic impacts of the outage. The power went out
24 just after the stock markets closed Thursday, and the New York Stock Exchange
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25 quickly moved to assure investors it would be open for business as usual on

26 Friday morning. While the attacks of 11 September 2001 brought disaster recov-
27 ery and the need for redundancy to the forefront for many enterprises, other
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28 companies have beefed up their ability to withstand outages for business

29 reasons. Despite the massive blackout in 2003, the Internet had enough redun-
30 dancy and resilience to withstand most problems. Nonetheless, eBay recently
31 signed a deal to outsource some of its web hosting to Intel in a bid to disperse its
32 servers and prevent the kind of downtime that had plagued the company in the
33 previous year, likely causing millions of US dollars in lost sales. The redun-
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34 dancy protocols that allowed the Internet and the World Wide Web to continue
35 to perform also enabled companies and information resources, like CNN, to
36 maintain their own individual services. The MAA implications for government
37 are evident, as energy sources, such as electric grids, are frequently pinpointed
38 as potential terrorist attack sites. In order to sustain operations in case of an
39 attack, the public sector needs to be able to shift virtual resources quickly and
40 flexibly from one location to another. In this way, MAA lends to the further vir-
41 tualization of information, detaching data from any specific physical site, and
42 transporting it to the ether of the information network.
43
44
45
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96 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

The desert of the real 1
2
Before pushing these technological trends further and trying to realize the true
3
potential of CIP technologies in the conflation of public and private sectors’
4
efforts to monitor and routinize behaviour, we want to turn our attention back to 5
the question of vulnerability and agency in networks. An early foray into this 6
critical aspect of networks was made by sociologist Charles Perrow. In his now- 7
classic book, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies, he deploys 8
the seemingly oxymoronic concept of the ‘normal accident’ to make sense of 9
how catastrophes are inherent features of complex technologies, like nuclear 10
power, petrochemical plants, the Space Shuttle and advanced weapon systems 11
(Perrow 1984). He is particularly interested in how non-linear, tightly-coupled 12

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systems can produce a ‘negative synergy’ built upon a false mimicry of human 13
decision-making. Perrow presents in detail how particular incidents escalate into 14
systemic disasters when contrived ‘solutions’ interact to produce a negative 15
synergy of increasingly complex problems. Might a similar effect be in opera- 16
tion when multiple networks – media, military and terrorist – become densely
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interconnected under the imperative of national security? In other words, is the 18
national security state, in its very effort to prepare against catastrophic risks, 19
actually increasing the probability of what could be called ‘planned disasters’? 20
Scenario-making, modelling and gaming might differ in terms of the degree 21
of abstraction and quantification involved, but what they have in common is a 22
belief in the power of simulation to reduce the contingencies of reality. This 23
faith might just be more dangerous than the dangers that simulations seek to 24
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anticipate and pre-empt. Do these technologies of representation actually con- 25

tribute to outcomes that they are supposedly only attempting to predict? Are 26
present dangers being constructed through the modelling of future threats? 27
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Channelling Jean Louis Borges (and in turn inspiring Morpheus’ soliloquy in the 28
movie The Matrix), Jean Baudrillard suggests that the simulation precedes and 29
engenders the reality it purports only to model: 30
31
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the 32
concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a 33
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substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a 34

hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It 35
is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra 36
– that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is 37
the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the 38
real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts 39
and that are not longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real 40
itself. 41
(Baudrillard 1994: 1) 42
43
This is not to deny that there are ‘real’ threats out there, including hostile actors 44
and dangerous weather patterns. Rather, we aim to expose the extent to which 45
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Critical infrastructures 97
1 present dangers are constructed through the simulation of future fears. This fear-
2 induced syncretism of simulation and reality bubbles to the surface with every
3 ‘ultra-catastrophe’, from 9/11 to Katrina to most recently the California wildfires
4 – to which FEMA notoriously responded with a simulated press conference pre-
5 sented as the real thing (Lipton 2007).
6
7
A cautionary tale: CIA Sim/Stim 1
8
9 At the cusp of the twenty-first century, in the year 2000, the CIA’s National
10 Intelligence Council organized a crystal-ball exercise called Global Trends
11 2015, which can serve as an example of threat-constructing simulations. Organ-
12 ized around a year-long series of workshops at think-tanks, war colleges and

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13 universities, GT-2015 was designed to be a ‘dialogue about the future among
14 non-governmental experts’. The last event, ‘Alternative Global Futures:
15 2000–2015’, was co-sponsored by the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelli-
16 gence, and although it took place inside the Washington beltway, it was very
17 much ‘out of the box’ based on the character of the participants.
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18 After a series of pedagogical warm-up exercises, the participants were
19 divided into break-out groups and asked to develop their own alternative future
20 scenarios. As one might suspect, no one came back with simultaneous aerial ter-
21 rorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. However, displaying
22 less reluctance than others to mix fiction and fact, one of the authors of this
23 chapter, James Der Derian (JDD) was selected to present the resulting scenario
24 to the re-convened group. Here is what JDD presented to the assembled group:
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25
26 An electrical power grid goes down, and a black-out quickly spreads
27 throughout the East Coast. President Warren Beatty publicly responds as if
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28 it is a catastrophic accident; but he is convinced by his National Security

29 Council that a terrorist cyber-attack is actually to blame. Retaliatory strikes
30 are ordered against suspected training camps in the Middle East; however, a
31 plane is shot down by Stinger missiles (accidental blowback from an earlier
32 struggle against the Soviet Union), a rescue mission is botched, and the situ-
33 ation quickly escalates into a shooting war. The kicker? It turns out after the
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34 fact that the originating cause of the electrical failure was neither intentional
35 or accidental, but the result of a local electrical company mistaking a simu-
36 lation training exercise of a terrorist attack as the real thing, leading to a
37 series of cascading network effects that quickly run of out of human control,
38 transforming a local accident into a global event.
39
40 If Arnold Schwarzenegger rather than Warren Beatty had been cast as the acting
41 president, perhaps the scenario would have made it into the final report.
42 However, a few years later JDD was ‘spooked’ – in both senses of the word –
43 after the November 2003 massive electrical power failure in the Northeast (set
44 off by a falling branch in Ohio and spread through a series of cascading power
45 surges), and which was bracketed – though this was not reported widely in the
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98 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

US media – by significant electrical grid failures in Spain and Italy (two of the 1
most prominent coalition partners of the US in Iraq). 2
Apart from making us wonder once again about technologies of representa- 3
tion and how they might actually contribute to outcomes that they are only pre- 4
dicting, there are four lessons that might be learned from the GT-2015 scenario 5
and JDD’s foray into world of scenarios: first, the networked nature of critical 6
infrastructures – from the Internet to the electrical grid to the jihadist cell – will 7
make it increasingly difficult to determine whether effects are the result of 8
attack, accident – or some quantum blurring of the two. This not only makes it 9
more difficult to map, game or simulate, but also to prevent, pre-empt and 10
effectively manage future critical infrastructure events. Second, every new crit- 11
ical infrastructure has hard-wired into it the potential for an accident as well as a 12

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vulnerability to attack. Like the Titanic, Chernobyl, the Challenger shuttle and 13
Wall Street, all new technologies produce disasters that can act as diagnoses for 14
improvement – or grounds for termination. Third, the densely networked nature 15
of critical infrastructures, even when taking into account redundancy and 16
resiliency, makes it increasingly difficult to isolate or contain a future failure or
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attack. Fourth, facing critical infrastructure failure and being unable to deliver 18
on its traditional promissory notes of safety, security and well-being, the sover- 19
eign state, even the US exercising state-of-emergency exceptions to reaffirm its 20
hegemonic status, must increasingly turn to regional, international or private 21
institutions to protect itself against and manage eventual attacks and failures. 22
This takes us into the apocalyptic – but suddenly more realistic – realm that 23
Paul Virilio refers to as the ‘integral accident’ (Virilio 2007). Traversing and 24
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transgressing multiple boundaries (territorial, demographic, ideological and, 25

most fundamentally, epistemological), triggering even more disastrous auto- 26
immune reactions through preventive measures and punitive attacks, offering 27
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states the means to deny their diminished significance as well as to evade their 28
public responsibility, the networked integral accident elevates the 11 September 29
2001 attacks on New York and Washington and the 7 July 2005 attack in 30
London, as well as the US military debacle in Iraq and the mishandling of the 31
Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, from singular episodes to an escalating contin- 32
uum of disasters. Or, as Virilio once put it: ‘The full-scale accident is now the 33
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prolongation of total war by other means’. 34

35
36
CIA Sim/Stim 2 and ‘The Cycle of Fear’
37
There is a flip side to Virilio’s conjecture that we have entered the age of acci- 38
dents. The full-scale accident is not just one of catastrophe or trauma, but of 39
non-accident. In 2003, the CIA followed up on its 2001 project with an updated 40
version of its future scenarios. The published document, Mapping the Global 41
Future: Report of The NIC’s 2020 Project, described four different futures for 42
the year 2020: Davos World, Pax Americana, A New Caliphate and A Cycle of 43
Fear (National Intelligence Council 2004). While the CIA’s dramatic flair 44
makes each simulation interesting in of itself, the most relevant appears to be A 45
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Critical infrastructures 99
1 Cycle of Fear. A Cycle of Fear imagines a world in which ‘fear begets fear’ –
2 nuclear proliferation runs rampant, and the ‘draconian measures implemented by
3 governments to stem proliferation and guard against terrorism’ have put the fear
4 of life into everyone. The text-message exchange between a ‘terrorist’ and an
5 ‘arms-dealer’ provides the context for this scenario. The two protagonists have
6 to evade technology that screens their communication; maintain the suspicion
7 that the other person on the line might be a mole; and elude the monitoring chip
8 that is embedded in people as a result of new post-PATRIOT Act laws.
9 Let’s push this scenario further by combining it with the CIP technology
10 trends identified above. Unlike the previous scenarios, there is no single event to
11 contextualize this scenario. The US and its allies experience a few minor terror-
12 ist attacks, but nothing so radical occurs that puts the nation in jeopardy. Instead,

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13 things appear to be steadily moving along in a peaceable manner. All individuals
14 are implanted at birth with a passive RFID chip that alerts authorities to their
15 whereabouts, ethnicity, address, criminal history, health history, marital status
16 and income. Imagine a continuously operable census that communicates with
17 the government at all times. Then there are the analytic programmes which
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18 process this information through advanced equations to determine life
19 expectancy and future criminal activity. In this way, authorities can pre-empt
20 future crimes, and monitor individuals and areas that ‘mathematically’ hold a
21 greater disposition towards violence or risk. These analytic programmes are
22 enabled by the grid computing systems set up amongst various corporate spon-
23 sors: one develops the equations to determine individual risk, one spatially maps
24 violent activity, one provides surveillance, and the last communicates with the
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25 police about individuals at risk. The public sector would not be able to introduce
26 this RFID technology without help from the private sector, so the government
27 leases out some of this personal data to corporations. Now, when customers
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28 enters a Wal-Mart, the RFID chip alerts the store to their buying patterns and
29 other personal information, which allows the employees to better service their
30 needs and anticipate their requirements.
31 In addition to functioning as an information-gathering device, the RFID chip
32 also works with trusted information-sharing technology to assign virtual and
33 physical access rights. In order to gain access to some communities, housing
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34 complexes or stores, one must have the appropriate access rights. This goes the
35 same for Internet activity. Since all interaction with computer systems requires
36 Internet dashboards, the moment one signs on, the computer communicates with
37 the RFID chip, and customizes the dashboard with rights appropriate to the user.
38 Children will automatically be directed to ‘safe sites’; violent individuals will be
39 restricted from contributing to and accessing inflammatory sites; sexual deviants
40 will be unable to access various pornography sites. Trusted information-sharing
41 technology is no longer the domain of corporations protecting knowledge, but
42 now that it is conflated with CIP, TIS becomes a matter of conditioning the
43 human mind.
44
45
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100 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

Juridical and biopolitical implications of CIP technology 1
2
The above scenarios illustrate the juridical and biopolitical repercussions of CIP
3
technology. We may return to the questions first asked in this paper concerning
4
the human implications of CIP: what is deemed critical? Who/what is being pro- 5
tected? And who is not being protected? To answer these questions, let us first 6
return to our discussion on the pathology of networks and relations of power. 7
There is something retrograde about CIP technologies. The diffusion of sur- 8
veillance technology and RFID chips recalls the panopticism that Michel Fou- 9
cault wrote was characteristic of the eighteenth century. From the time that the 10
first factories, schools, prisons, barracks and hospitals were constructed, surveil- 11
lance served to maintain the integrity, security and organization of social net- 12

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works. However, not all modern spaces were under surveillance – as RFID 13
technology has the potential to achieve. Modernity, according to Foucault, 14
involved the construction of a private subjectivity engendered by these panoptic 15
institutions. This private subjectivity was then reproduced in the public sphere. 16
Individuals would become normalized by submitting themselves to observation
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and discipline and, in that sense, prevent their own crimes before they might 18
happen. The penitentiary and panopticon produced the normal individual by also 19
producing its twin – the criminal or abnormal: 20
21
Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole 22
field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency. In 23
the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delin- 24
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quency. This delinquency, with its specificity, is a result of the system; but 25
it also becomes a part and an instrument of it. So that one should speak of 26
an ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one 27
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another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance pro- 28
vides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delin- 29
quents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly 30
send back a certain number of them to prison . . . Judges are the scarcely 31
resisting employees of this apparatus. They assist as far as they can in the 32
constitution of this delinquency, that is to say, in the differentiation of ille- 33
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galities, in the supervision, colonization and use of certain of these illegali- 34

ties by the illegality of the dominant class. 35
(Foucault 1995: 282) 36
37
The same institutional techniques that disciplined the individual through surveil- 38
lance also allowed for self-discipline by producing an Other by which ‘normal’ 39
individuals could measure their success and articulate their limitations. In other 40
words, a minority of delinquents was always necessary to re-encode the normal, 41
‘law-abiding’ individual when those disciplinary institutions failed to do so. 42
While CIP technology may resonate with this eighteenth-century network of 43
power relations, Foucault and, more prolifically, Gilles Deleuze argue that the 44
institutions of modernity (factories, schools, prisons, hospitals and barracks) are, 45
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Critical infrastructures 101

1 in fact, in a state of obsolescence. The moment of disciplinary power, though its
2 effects are still felt today, is long past. What Deleuze, following Foucault and
3 Virilio, named ‘the societies of control’, are now replacing the disciplinary societies.
4 In an observation that is significant for our purposes, Deleuze traces the dis-
5 continuities in the transition from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies,
6 and from disciplinary societies to control societies, by considering the evolution
7 of technology and the machine (see also Bonditti, Chapter 6, this volume):
8
9 It’s easy to set up a correspondence between any society and some kind of
10 machine, which isn’t to say that machines determine different kinds of
11 society, but that machines express the social forms capable of producing
12 them and making use of them. The old sovereign societies worked with

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13 simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; but recent disciplinary societies
14 were equipped with thermodynamic machines presenting the passive danger
15 of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; control societies function with
16 a third generation of machines, with information and technology and com-
17 puters, where the passive danger is noise, and the active danger is piracy
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18 and viral contamination. This technological development is more deeply
19 rooted in a mutation of capitalism.
20 (Deleuze 1997: 181)
21
22 A number of crucial points follow: first, CIP is representative of this third gener-
23 ation of machines. As we discussed previously, the discussion of what is deemed
24 critical in the public sphere is increasingly predicated on the private sector’s
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25 interests. This discourse is partly shaped by the reselling of private-sector tech-

26 nologies to the public sector in the form of CIP, so that interpretations of protec-
27 tion and criticality are transferred along with the exchange of funds. As a result,
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28 the private sector takes on greater power in its relations with the public. Deleuze
29 describes this mutation in capitalism as a shift from stricter, often government-
30 and police-based forms of confinement and discipline of the social body to more
31 flexible forms of control based in the corporation:
32
33 The mutation has been widely recognized and can be summarized as
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34 follows: nineteenth-century capitalism was concentrative, directed toward

35 production, and proprietorial. Thus it made the factory into a site of confine-
36 ment . . . But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward pro-
37 duction, which is often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even
38 in the case of complex operations like textile plants, steelworks, and oil
39 refineries. It’s directed toward metaproduction . . . It’s a capitalism no longer
40 directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or
41 markets . . . Family, school, army, and factory are no longer so many analo-
42 gous but different sites converging in an owner, whether the state or some
43 private power, but transmutable or transformable coded configurations of a
44 single business where the only people left are administrators.
45 (Deleuze 1997: 182)
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102 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

The new corporate methods of control are anticipated by such technologies like 1
RFID, but there are contemporary examples such as the analytics used by Inter- 2
net sites to track customer buying habits. Perhaps, RFID is the Internet taken out 3
into the actual streets rather than merely existing in virtual space. However, 4
what Deleuze may not have anticipated is this odd admixture of corporate 5
control and discipline. This appears to be the most unnerving aspect of CIP tech- 6
nologies: the increasing conflation of public and private-sector interests, which 7
obscures the usefulness of technology for individual humans. And in some way, 8
this conflation obscures the relationship between the virtual and the physical, 9
where humans are only viewed as so many gigabytes within a larger store of 10
data. 11
This brings us to our second point, which is the biopolitical implication of 12

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this third generation of machines. During the latter half of the nineteenth 13
century, Foucault describes a new technology of power which succeeds discipli- 14
nary power: ‘the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but 15
to the living man, to the man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as- 16
species’ (Foucault 2003: 242). The new technology addresses a multiplicity of
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humans, the ‘biopolitics’ of the human race: 18
19
Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political 20
problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological 21
problem and as power’s problem . . . In a word, security mechanisms have to 22
be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living 23
beings so as to optimize a state of life . . . it is, in a word, a matter of taking 24
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control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and of ensur- 25

ing that they are not disciplined, but regularized. 26
(Foucault 2003: 247) 27
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28
Biopolitics anticipates Virilio’s integral accident, but implicates humans, not 29
technology, as the culprit behind the fallout. Therefore, human behaviour must 30
not simply be disciplined, but kept apace with technology to prevent the acci- 31
dent. When we recall Deleuze’s discussion of the third generation of machines, 32
he mentions the active threat of viral contamination, which lends these virtual 33
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networks the quality of something biological. In our discussion of CIP, it is not 34

humans that must be protected, but rather the network and the human as a node 35
in the network that must be secured. Foucault understood biopolitics as illustra- 36
tive of a form state power identified with nationalism, but what CIP technologies 37
indicate is that biopolitics has evolved to a system of power where it is the 38
health of the network – ‘organic behavior in a technological matrix’ – that 39
becomes critical. It is not the body of the state that we must secure, but the con- 40
joined body of public and private-sector networks. 41
This interweaving of the public and private sectors marks the difference 42
between biopower in the post-disciplinary society and biopower in the control 43
society. Foucault refers to biopower in conjunction with the rise of ethno-nation- 44
alism and specifically National Socialism. In this way, biopower becomes linked 45
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Critical infrastructures 103

1 with racism, so that the state intervenes at this point by introducing a biological
2 continuum of the human race, fragmenting the field of biological controls.
3 Racism is:
4
5 in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population
6 that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that
7 population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species,
8 to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as
9 races.
10 (Foucault 2003: 255)
11
12 In this way, the continuity and the livelihood of the state are threatened by the

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13 invasion of inferior races – war is reintroduced or maintained in the political.
14 Racism establishes a relationship, a war set in biological terms: ‘the death of the
15 other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or abnor-
16 mal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer’
17 (Foucault 2003: 255). A good example is the recent evidence that the US census
ON
18 bureau reported Japanese Americans to US security agencies during the Second
19 World War.
20 Unlike the strict hierarchy of the state, the power of the network resides
21 partly in its ability to manage its perpetuation horizontally. Unlike the binary of
22 ‘inferior race’ and ‘übermensch’, networks allow for greater flexibility in regu-
23 lating controls and responsibilities – any one person can inhabit different roles in
24 different situations. For instance, while various minorities in the US may receive
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25 the short end of the stick in terms of job opportunities, governmental support
26 and political representation, those same minorities may occupy a more empow-
27 ered position while consuming and shopping. In this way, the state does not
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28 annihilate and is not compelled to annihilate ‘inferior races’, since those groups
29 are economically useful as consumers. It is this networked form of social organi-
30 zation that allows for these more mutable identities.
31 But the flexibility of networks does not mean that they are immune to racism,
32 and herein lies the greatest misconception about CIP technologies. Information
33 is never depoliticized, and while technologies like RFID may appear to accumu-
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34 late information objectively and apolitically, how that information is encoded,

35 articulated and interpreted is always political. It is important to remember that
36 the Nazis were among the first to employ IBM listing technology in order to
37 compute census data and to survey social threats. While CIP technology may
38 provide some potential good, we cannot disconnect it from the systems of
39 control and power that produced it.
40
41
Conclusion
42
43 If simulations and scenarios exacerbate rather than cure the pathology of net-
44 works, how are we to anticipate the next threat and protect our critical infra-
45 structures? No one understood this conundrum better than Jorge Luis Borges,
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104 J. Der Derian and J. Finkelstein

the great Argentinean writer on labyrinths and language. He once remarked that 1
‘that everything touches everything’ – and it does so through the ubiquity of 2
signs. Consider, then, that the modern systematic study of signs, or semiotics, 3
first emerged in the sixteenth century, strangely connecting the arts of war and 4
medicine. Semiotics referred not just to new methods of military manoeuvre 5
based on a system of visual signalling, but also to new medical techniques for 6
identifying symptoms of disease in humans. From the start, semiotics served to 7
kill as well as to cure. Just as information is ‘any difference that makes a dif- 8
ference’ (Bateson 1979: 242), networks differentiate the living (organic) from 9
the dead (inorganic). In the twenty-first century, in an age that is designated as 10
the ‘age of information’ one day and the ‘age of terror’ the next, labels that both 11
rely on interconnectivity, we need to recognize, to learn how to read the new 12

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semiotics of networks. We need to imagine the global politics of networks, as it 13
rapidly cycles from Ground Zero to Zeros and Ones and back again, not as 14
impending threat, but as ubiquitous code whose meaning can never be ‘cracked’ 15
by a single source. The heterodox nature of this language can appear as a threat 16
– or as an invitation to negotiate under conditions of heteropolarity differences
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of meaning with those who most radically differ from us. Otherwise, we will 18
continue to treat the most powerful effects as well as the most morbid symptoms 19
of networks with utopian schemes and morality plays, rather than reaching a 20
common understanding of the power and the pathology of complex networks 21
that become critical infrastructures. 22
23
24
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References 25
Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and Nature – A Necessary Unity, New York: E.P. Dutton. 26
27
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Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press. 28
Bush, G.W. (2001) Executive Order 13231: Critical Infrastructure Protection in the 29
Information Age, Washington, DC, 16 October 2001. 30
Caldwell, F. (2003) What’s Critical in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Online. Avail- 31
able at: www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=390753 (accessed 30 October 2007). 32
Clarke, A.C. (1961) Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, 33
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New York: Harper & Row. 34

CNN (2005a) ‘Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist. However, experts for years had 35
warned of threat to New Orleans’, CNN Online, 5 September 2005. Online. Available 36
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—— (2005b) ‘FBI spy chief asks private sector for help: Szady highlights threat of
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Chinese espionage’, CNN Online, 11 February 2005. Online. Available at:
edition.cnn.com/2005/US/02/10/fbi.espionage/index.html (accessed 30 October 2007).
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Deleuze, G. (1997) Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Colum- 40
bia University Press. 41
Foucault, M. (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 42
New York: Knopf Publishing Group. 43
—— (2003) Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey, New York: Picador USA. 44
Fountain, H. (2005) ‘Worry. But don’t stress out’, New York Times, 26 June 2005. 45
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1 Online. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/weekinreview/26fount.html
2 (accessed 30 October 2007).
3 Gilbert, A. (2004) ‘RFID goes to war’, CNET News.com, 22 March 2004. Online. Avail-
4 able at: www.news.com/RFID-goes-to-war/2008–1006_3–5176246.html (accessed 30
October 2007).
5
Kelly, K. (1999) New Rules for the New Economy, London: Fourth Estate.
6
Lipton, E. (2007) ‘FEMA fake news conference about wildfires’, New York Times, 30
7 October 2007. Online. Available HTTP: www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/washing-
8 ton/30fema.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin (accessed 30 October 2007).
9 McFadden, R.D. (2005) ‘Bush pledges more troops as evacuation grows’, New York
10 Times, 4 September 2005. Online. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/
11 national/nationalspecial/04storm.html (accessed 30 October 2007).
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13 30 August 2006. Online. Available at: www.technewsworld.com/story/52729.html
14 (accessed 30 October 2007).
15 National Intelligence Council (2004) Mapping the Global Future: Report of The NIC’s
2020 Project, Washington, DC, December 2004.
16
Perrow, C. (1984) Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, Princeton:
17 ON
Princeton University Press.
18 Virilio, P. (2007) Original Accident, Cambridge: Polity Press.
19 Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. (1998) Pure War, New York: Semiotext.
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Part II

Terrorism and the politics

of protecting the homeland

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1
2 5 Media, fear and the hyperreal
3
4 The construction of cyberterrorism as
5
6
the ultimate threat to critical
7 infrastructures
8
9
10
Maura Conway
11
12

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13 [Cyberterrorism] isn’t so much a threat to national security as a threat to civil-
14 ization.
15 (Paul Vixie, quoted in Adams and Guterl 2003)1
16
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18 More cyberterroristic than the cyberterrorists themselves, the cyberterror-induc-
ing media have the information world at their mercy.
19
(Debrix 2001)
20
21
22
23 A central element of the post-11 September 2001 efforts to beef up US ‘homeland
24 security’ has been an almost paranoid emphasis on the potentially catastrophic
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25 threats posed by cyberterrorism. A vast array of political, military, business, acade-

26 mic and media commentators have appeared on television and been quoted in news-
27 papers predicting deadly attacks by terrorists on (and with the help of) the
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28 computerized infrastructures that now constitute the critical underpinnings of every-

29 day urban life in the US. This depiction of computerized systems as a super-critical
30 infrastructure and thus the Achilles’ heel of advanced industrial societies, has been
31 further fuelled by the use of everyday urban infrastructures as both weapons and
32 targets of mass murder in the physical attacks of 2001 (Graham 2004).
33 Following the collapse of the USSR, a number of developments highlighted
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34 the growing influence of information technology in the realms of both national

35 and international security. Examples include the high level of IT capability dis-
36 played by US troops in the first Gulf War (1990–1) and the increasingly global
37 nature of media coverage, as demonstrated in the Somali (1993) and Balkan
38 conflicts (1992–9). More recently, increased systems failures resulting from the
39 activities of hackers, as evidenced by the cyber-attack(s) targeting Estonia in
40 May 2007 and the growing use of the Internet for ‘infowar’ purposes by al-
41 Qaida and a plethora of other sub-state political violence groups, have garnered
42 substantial attention. The growing dependence of states, particularly of the US,
43 on information technology was highlighted by these and other events, prompting
44 fears of a radically new security threat: the possibility of information systems
45 serving as both weapons and targets of attack.
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110 M. Conway
This cyber-threat became the object of increased attention from the US 1
federal government in the 1990s, in close connection with the more general crit- 2
ical infrastructure protection debate (see Dunn Cavelty, Chapter 2, this volume). 3
A particular concern was that enemies of the US, unable to defeat US forces on 4
the conventional battlefield, would pursue alternative approaches to inflicting 5
damage on the sole remaining superpower (Pollard 2004: 43). The events of 11 6
September 2001 were therefore doubly shocking for many US government offi- 7
cials: not only were the attacks appalling in themselves, but the conventional 8
(though asymmetric) nature of the attacks was also completely unexpected. Far 9
from reducing the fear of cyber-attack however, for many, the 2001 attacks only 10
served to increase the credibility of the cyber-threat. 11
According to a study released in June 2001, 75 per cent of Internet users 12

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worldwide believe in the existence of cyberterrorism. The survey conducted in 13
19 major cities around the world found that 45 per cent of respondents agreed 14
completely that ‘computer terrorism will be a growing problem’, while 35 per 15
cent of respondents agreed somewhat with the same statement (Poulsen 2001). 16
In a July 2002 survey conducted by the American Business Software Alliance,
ON 17
82 per cent of information technology professionals were said to believe that US 18
businesses were ill-equipped to deal with cyberterrorism (King 2002), while a 19
survey carried out by Federal Computer Week and the Pew Internet and Amer- 20
ican Life Project in 2003 found that about half of US citizens fear terrorists will 21
launch cyber-attacks on those critical infrastructures that operate the banking, 22
electrical, transportation and water systems, disrupting everyday life and crip- 23
pling economic activity (Pew Internet and American Life Project 2003).2 What 24
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these statistics show is that fear of cyberterror is in the zeitgeist. This chapter 25
seeks to show how this threat image took root there and eventually came to be 26
viewed as the ultimate threat to critical infrastructures. 27
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The chapter’s core argument is that US media outlets have been significant 28
contributors not just to the dissemination, but to the actual discursive construc- 29
tion of the contemporary cyberterrorist threat and, further, that it is their 30
emphasis on the (imagined) fatal connectivity between virtual networks and 31
physical infrastructures that makes the concept of cyberterror so powerful. The 32
chapter is divided into four sections. The first section explores the chapter’s 33
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theoretical underpinnings, particularly the important role of the mass media in 34

framing the threat and thus in agenda-setting. The second section focuses on 35
how fears associated with terrorism and technology are linked in so-called ‘shut- 36
down-the-power-grid scenarios’ to hype the threat to critical infrastructures from 37
cyberterrorists. In the third section, two popular analogies associated with the 38
cyberterror threat discourse are investigated: the possibility of an ‘electronic 39
Pearl Harbor’ and the equation of cyber-attack tools, so-called ‘weapons of mass 40
disruption’, with the threat from ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD). The 41
identification of specific antagonistic actors is crucial to successful threat con- 42
struction; the shift in media focus from terrorist hackers to hacker terrorists is 43
therefore at the centre of the fourth section. Finally, the conclusion looks at the 44
consequences the cyberterror threat image has for the critical infrastructure 45
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Media, fear and the hyperreal 111

1 debate, particularly the effects of cyberterror’s ‘hyperreal’ character as displayed
2 in the media and the interplay between threat construction, apocalyptic expecta-
3 tions and actual occurrences.
4
5
Theoretical underpinnings: threat politics
6
7 Traditional security studies views threat images as relatively unproblematic and
8 assumes that real-world threats are directly reflected in security policy. In the
9 last decade or so, practitioners of so-called ‘new security’ approaches have
10 argued, on the contrary, that there is no natural or self-evident correlation
11 between the substance of a threat image and whether it has an impact on the
12 political agenda (see Buzan 1991; Buzan et al. 1998). They argue instead that

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13 the formation of agendas depends on power and politics, particularly on the
14 ability of an actor or actors to ‘speak’ a threat into existence. Threat is first con-
15 structed in the individual consciousness; individuals view something as a threat.
16 The next step is for an actor or actors in the threatened society to give form to
17 the threat by talking or writing about it in public fora. That is, the threat assumes
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18 the trappings of language and is transformed into a topic of public debate. Very
19 often, this happens through the dissemination of newspaper stories, magazine
20 articles, television documentaries and, eventually, mass-market books and
21 movies.
22 In the context of mass media, this process of formulating problems, finding
23 scapegoats and coming up with solutions has been labelled ‘framing’. For
24 Robert Entman, ‘[t]o frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and
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25 make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a

26 particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or
27 treatment recommendation for the item described’ (1993: 52). Framing is a
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28 verbal expression of thought. Individuals perceive and interpret events; events

29 are never simply given. Perception and interpretation are usually followed by
30 verbalization: that is to say, actors give verbal form to their conceptions of
31 threats and risks. The movement is thus from thought to speech and from the
32 individual to the collective level of analysis. Generally, the choice of ‘speech
33 costume’ has a major impact on whether an issue makes it onto the political
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34 agenda (Eriksson and Noreen 2002: 10).

35 One of the most significant forms of ‘threat framing’ or ‘costuming’ is to
36 identify something as a ‘security’ threat. In the literature, this behaviour has
37 come to be called ‘securitization’. Security policy is often regarded as having
38 precedence over all other policy fields, while national security policy is invari-
39 ably viewed as the foundation of all security policy (Wæver 1995: 49). The
40 upshot of this is that security policy and associated threat images are extremely
41 loaded issues (Deibert 2002: 115). Exploitation of the politically loaded con-
42 cepts of security and threat may, therefore, make it easier to insert an issue into
43 the political agenda.
44
45
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112 M. Conway
Agenda-setting 1
2
The agenda-setting model of the media posits that the mass media have an influ-
3
ence on what the public recognizes as important issues, and the theory has been
4
supported by a wealth of empirical studies. There are two main approaches in this
5
area: one focuses on elites, and the other is pluralist-based. The elite approach
6
focuses on formal political power and highly-placed decision-makers, the second
7
approach broadens the concept of the ‘political agenda’ to include such factors as
8
the agenda(s) of the media. The contention here is that the US news media act as 9
the main source of political information for mass publics – both within the US, but 10
increasingly, due to the spread of satellite television and the Internet, also abroad – 11
and as the primary ‘transmission belt’ communicating public fears and desires to 12

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political elites and government actors. The ‘media establishment’ has been 13
described as a ‘major power broker’ which exerts ‘unprecedented power over the 14
dissemination of news’ (West 2001: viii). In fact, Timothy Cook identifies the 15
news media as a political institution in itself because it ‘engages, along with other 16
political institutions, in the authoritative allocation of values in American society’
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(1998: 85f.). Not only does it act as an intermediary between the mass public and 18
the government, but also within and among branches of government. Gronke and 19
Cook go even further when they posit that: 20
21
in a system of declining rates of affiliation with political parties and falling 22
levels of participation in community, civic, and other political organi- 23
zations, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the news media is the domin- 24
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ant intermediary organization in American democracy. 25

(2002: 1) 26
27
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As a purveyor of threat frames, therefore, the mass media is unparalleled. 28

29
Fear of technology, fear of terrorism 30
31
Frequently, it is our basic perceptions that determine how we conceive of an 32
issue, which is filtered through our prism of preconceived notions. A large 33
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amount of social psychological research has found that the uncertain and the 34
unknown generally produce fear and anxiety. This is the psychological basis of 35
the classic ghost story: the fear is greatest when you suspect something, but 36
you’re not certain what it is (Eriksson and Noreen 2002: 8). The term ‘cyberter- 37
rorism’ unites two significant modern fears: fear of technology and fear of ter- 38
rorism. Both of these fears are evidenced in this quote from Walter Laqueur, one 39
of the most well known scholars of terrorism: ‘The electronic age has now made 40
cyberterrorism possible. A onetime mainstay of science fiction, the doomsday 41
machine, looms as a real danger. The conjunction of technology and terrorism 42
make for an uncertain and frightening future’ (Laqueur 1999: 254). As signific- 43
ant uncertainties or unknowns, therefore, both technology and terrorism are per- 44
ceived as more ominous than known threats (Embar-Seddon 2002: 1034). 45
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Media, fear and the hyperreal 113

1 Fear of terrorism, conceived of as random, incomprehensible and uncontrol-
2 lable violence, may strike one as relatively ‘normal’; fear of technology perhaps
3 less so. However, as Mark Pollitt points out, for those unfamiliar with high
4 technology, it is arcane, complex, abstract and indirect in its impact on indi-
5 viduals. Many people are therefore fearful that technology will become the
6 master and humankind the servant. Couple this relatively new fear with the age-
7 old fears associated with apparently random violence and the result is a truly
8 heightened state of alarm. Pollitt contends that the media have further upped the
9 ante by hyping the concept of convergence (1998: 8): the idea that all of the
10 functions controlled by individual computers will connect to form a singular
11 system such that, eventually, our entire existence will be managed by an all-
12 powerful, but uncontrollable, network (see also Sandwell 2006: 47). The conver-

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13 gence represented by the reliance on uninterrupted systems of electrically
14 powered computer networks to support all other infrastructures makes attacks on
15 the electrical power grid, one of the key critical infrastructures of society, appear
16 particularly fearsome. The result is that many people now feel themselves to be
17 ‘hostages to electricity’ (as quoted in Graham 2004: 8). These feelings are rein-
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18 forced by the prevalence of so-called ‘shut-down-the-power-grid scenarios’ in
19 the mass media.3 Two of the best-known scenarios4 are those designed by the
20 prominent analyst of information warfare, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgradu-
21 ate School in Monterey, California and technology journalist Dan Verton.
22
23
Shut-down-the-power-grid scenarios
24
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25 John Arquilla’s ‘The great cyberwar of 2002’ first appeared in Wired magazine
26 in February 1998. In the scenario, ‘Liddy Dole faces the biggest crisis of her
27 presidency: the first global cyberwar, where the enemy is invisible, the battles
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28 virtual, and the casualties all too real’ (Arquilla 1998). The electric grid is one of
29 the first infrastructures to be targeted by the attackers and cascading power fail-
30 ures ensure that the body count escalates rapidly caused by everything from
31 traffic accidents to the explosion of a chemical plant. Who are the perpetrators of
32 this mayhem, according to Arquilla’s scenario? A group known as the Dove of
33 Jihad claim responsibility, but this is quickly dismissed; China and Russia are
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34 then held responsible, followed by a shadowy figure operating out of

35 Afghanistan(!). Eventually, however, the perpetrators are identified as a coali-
36 tion of states including North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Libya, aided by the Cali
37 drug cartel in Colombia and various Asian triads.
38 Arquilla’s scenario is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and eventually – the sce-
39 nario runs to over 20 printed pages – he identifies a coalition of states, and not
40 terrorists, as those responsible. This outcome is foreshadowed by the scenario’s
41 title: ‘The great cyberwar’. Arquilla and his collaborator David Ronfeldt distin-
42 guish in their work between ‘cyberwar’ and ‘Netwar’; ‘cyberwar’ is the domain
43 of states, while cyberterrorism may be viewed as a category of ‘Netwar’, which
44 is the domain of non-or sub-state actors (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1993, 1996).
45 Nonetheless, there is a cyberterror component to the scenario in that a number of
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114 M. Conway
real and fictional terrorist groups are mentioned, and the coalition of states that 1
is eventually found to be behind the attacks seeks to conceal itself by taking on 2
the name ‘People For a Free World’, which is reminiscent of the names of a 3
number of terrorist organizations, including the Weatherman group and the New 4
People’s Army, amongst others. 5
François Debrix’s choice of Fox TV documentary Dangers on the Internet 6
Highway: Cyberterror (broadcast in the US in autumn of 1999) to illustrate his 7
argument regarding the hype surrounding the subject of cyberterrorism is inter- 8
esting from our perspective because the programme is developed around the sce- 9
nario of ‘the world’s first cyber or Netwar’. The programme makers argue that 10
the US reliance on ICT is the country’s ‘Achilles’ heel’, insisting that ‘the cyber 11
frontier is the next venue for war’ and that ‘cyberwarfare is taking the Internet to 12

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its most lethal level’ (2001: 154). Various infowar specialists, including John 13
Arquilla, sketch the impacts of a hypothetical series of escalating cyber-attacks: 14
the collapse of air traffic control systems, resulting in multiple airplane crashes; 15
overloaded digital networks, resulting in the collapse of finance and e-commerce 16
networks; and collapsed power grids, non-functioning telephone networks,
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widespread car and train crashes, and nuclear meltdowns. In the television sce- 18
nario, even the US’s ability to fight a conventional war is wiped out due to the 19
coordinated hacker attacks. ‘Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the war remain 20
undetected behind their distant, encrypted terminals, free to bring the world’s 21
mightiest nation to its knees with a few keystrokes in total impunity’ (Graham 22
2004: 18). 23
Fox TV’s scenario bears some strong resemblances to Arquilla’s contribution 24
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to Wired just a few months earlier, but there are also some striking differences. 25
On the one hand, the described outcomes of the cyber-attack(s) are very similar. 26
On the other, while cyberterrorism is explicitly referred to in the programme’s 27
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title, the perpetrator of the attacks is unveiled as a little-known country previ- 28

ously thought to have little IT capacity. This does not square with Arquilla’s 29
academic analyses of potential cyber-threats, which make an explicit distinction 30
between the activities of hostile states (cyberwar) and those of sub-state organi- 31
zations (Netwar, a sub-set of which is cyberterrorism). 32
Over the course of the next few years, the emphasis in terms of the cyber- 33
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threat image shifts from states to terrorists and back again. Nobody in the media 34
seems quite sure whether states or terrorists pose the greater threat. Many jour- 35
nalists deliver a mixed message and warn that both types of actors are equally 36
threatening.5 In May 2001, no less august a publication than the New Yorker 37
assured its readers that ‘sophisticated terrorists (or hostile governments) now 38
have the ability to crash satellite systems, to wage economic warfare by unplug- 39
ging the Federal Reserve system from Wall Street, even to disrupt the move- 40
ments of ships at sea’ (Specter 2001). While in June 2001 an article in USA 41
Today entitled ‘Cyberspace: the next battlefield’ asserted that: 42
43
an adversary could use . . . viruses to launch a digital blitzkrieg against the 44
United States. It might send a worm to shut down the electric grid in 45
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Media, fear and the hyperreal 115

1 Chicago and air traffic control operations in Atlanta, a logic bomb to open
2 the floodgates of the Hoover Dam and a sniffer to gain access to the funds-
3 transfer networks of the Federal Reserve.
4 (Stone 2001)
5
6 After 11 September 2001, however, the spectre of cyberterror took on a new
7 urgency.
8 In 2003, Dan Verton, a technology journalist,6 wrote Black Ice: The Invisible
9 Threat of Cyberterrorism, an analysis of the cyberterrorist threat aimed at the
10 mass-market. The first chapter of Verton’s book describes a coordinated series
11 of virtual and physical attacks on critical infrastructures in the US Pacific North-
12 west (2003: 1–16). The attackers carry out a series of suicide bombings using

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13 conventional explosives and anthrax-laced powder, they unleash malicious soft-
14 ware code which targets Internet root servers and mobile phones, they deface the
15 webpages of a number of major news organizations, and they set off an electro-
16 magnetic pulse (EMP) bomb. Verton is clear as to the perpetrators: a collection
17 of sub-state actors comprising a core group of al-Qaida members, aided by
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18 Russian hackers and a number of disgruntled energy company employees with
19 right-wing sympathies. The effects of the attacks are described as lasting for
20 weeks in some areas, months in others. Emergency services, medical facilities,
21 businesses, banks, government offices, industrial plants and manufacturing firms
22 are all depicted as susceptible to failures and disruptions to such an extent that
23 some are forced to close their doors for good (Verton 2003: 14f.). One sceptical
24 reader describes Verton’s work as ‘paranoid speculation’ and lambastes Verton
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25 for his contention that ‘we can safely discard the opinions of those who argue
26 that cyberterrorism . . . is impossible’ (Greene 2004; Verton 2003: 96).7
27 However, such contentions are accepted and acceptable because in our media-
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28 saturated world, events can be at once true and false, real and fictional. Verton
29 concludes his scenario with the following observation:
30
31 This is the face of the new terrorism. It is a thinking man’s game that
32 applies the violent tactics of the old world to the realities and vulnerabilities
33 of the new high-tech world. Gone are the days when the only victims are
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34 those who are unfortunate enough to be standing within striking distance of

35 the blast. Terrorism is now about smart, well-planned indirect targeting of
36 the electronic sinews of a nation.
37 (Verton 2003: 15f.)
38
39 He thus transforms his imaginings from prediction to reality and evokes the ulti-
40 mate threat to the key assets of modern societies. In a similar fashion, the narra-
41 tor of Fox TV’s Dangers on the Internet Highway assures viewers that the
42 information contained therein ‘is not science fiction’ (Debrix 2001: 154), inti-
43 mating that it is thus ‘science fact’. Jean Baudrillard has labelled this condition
44 of undecidability of the event and uncertainty of meaning ‘hyperreal’ modernity.
45 Hyperreality occurs when the media uses its technological capabilities to paint
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116 M. Conway
something as being more true to life than the object it is purporting to represent 1
(Baudrillard 1983; see also Der Derian 1995: 37–41). 2
François Debrix suggests that Verton’s and Arquilla’s musings, along with 3
other, similar scenarios, give the impression that the next spectacular terrorist 4
act will occur both everywhere and nowhere at the same time through the use of 5
the Internet, which is presently employed as an object of leisure or a necessary 6
support for work, but which will very soon mutate into the world’s deadliest 7
weapon (2001: 156). Barry Sandwell concurs, adding that ‘the most extreme 8
manifestations of cyberfear are articulated around metaphors of boundary dis- 9
solving threats, intrusive alterities, and existential ambivalences created by the 10
erosion of binary distinctions and hierarchies that are assumed to be constitutive 11
principles of everyday life’ (2006: 40). Some of the distinctions that continue to 12

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be eroded and which are invoked in the media to justify the continued hyping of 13
the cyberterror threat include those separating the inside from the outside, the 14
offline versus the online world, and the ‘real’ or physical from the virtual or 15
imagined. This fits with Debrix’s assertion that popular fears have taken on a 16
new gravity and emergency responses have become everyday realities in media-
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saturated societies, but particularly in the US after 11 September 2001. Debrix 18
goes on to suggest that ‘in a generalised context of uncertainty, common anxiety 19
and more or less planned strategies of emergency give rise to social epiphenom- 20
ena like cyberterror, its at once real and imagined dangers, and its often paranoid 21
responses’ (2001: 153). In an age where information becomes knowledge, it is 22
increasingly difficult to distinguish cyberterrorism from its media representa- 23
tions. 24
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The exaggerated nature of the scenarios imagined by Verton, Arquilla and 25

others is further highlighted when one considers that blackout, failure and acci- 26
dent are part of the normal operating environment of networked computer and 27
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critical infrastructure systems. It is worth keeping in mind that system failures – 28

widespread water contamination, power failures, chronic flight disruptions and 29
other cyberterror scenarios – are events that occur routinely and without affect- 30
ing national security. In a relatively sober analysis that appeared in Jane’s Intel- 31
ligence Review in 1999, it was observed that: 32
33
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There is undoubtedly a lot of exaggeration in this field. If your system goes 34

down, it is a lot more interesting to say it was the work of a foreign govern- 35
ment rather than admit it was due to an American teenage ‘script-kiddy’ tin- 36
kering with a badly written CGI script. If the power goes out, people light a 37
candle and wait for it to return, but do not feel terrified. If their mobile 38
phones switch off, society does not instantly feel under attack. If someone 39
cracks a web site and changes the content, terror does not stalk the streets. 40
(Ingles-le Noble 1999) 41
42
Thus far, cyber-error has proved more frequent and more debilitating than 43
cyberterror. With respect to electrical power, most outages occur due to natural 44
phenomena such as severe weather, as attested, for example, by the impact of 45
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1 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. Nevertheless, the hitherto purely
2 speculative threat to critical infrastructures from politically motivated and cyber-
3 savvy foes continues to animate far more people than the proven, albeit non-pur-
4 poseful and even quotidian, destructive capacity of operator error, acts of nature,
5 and similar.
6
7
Reasoning by analogy
8
9 The importance of basic conceptions is illustrated, within cognitive research, by
10 explanation by analogy, which is a problem-solving method in which knowledge
11 of previous problems with allegedly similar structures is used to find the best
12 way to solve current problems. Within the cyberterror threat discourse, the most

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13 prevalent analogy is the possibility of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’. The compari-
14 son of so-called ‘weapons of mass disruption’ with ‘weapons of mass destruc-
15 tion’ is another popular play on words.
16
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Electronic Pearl Harbor
18
19 Winn Schwartau of infowar.com first used the term ‘Electronic Pearl Harbor’ in
20 testimony before the US Congress as early as 1991 (see Schwartau 1994: 43).8
21 The Pearl Harbor analogy has since been used with startling frequency in the
22 media as a shorthand description of the likely consequences of a cyberterrorist
23 attack on the US. A LexisNexis search of major world newspapers found 105
24 mentions of this and related terms9 in the ten years between 1994 and 2004. The
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25 function of this analogy is to link the cyber-security debate to a ‘real’ and suc-
26 cessful surprise attack on critical US military infrastructures during the Second
27 World War while, at the same time, warning against the idea of the US being
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28 invulnerable due to its geographical position. The analogy has immediate reson-
29 ance and attracts wide understanding, which is perhaps unsurprising given that
30 Pearl Harbor has become linked in popular consciousness with the events of 11
31 September 2001, to which it is often compared, which is again unsurprising con-
32 sidering that the story and visuals associated with the Japanese attack were
33 doubtless fresh in the minds of many Americans in September 2001 given the
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34 release of the blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor in May of that year. However,
35 while the Pearl Harbor analogy works very well, in terms of immediately con-
36 juring up images of a sudden crippling blow against critical infrastructures
37 resulting in chaos and destruction, it doesn’t actually explain anything about
38 cyberterrorism,10 but works instead to manufacture fear in the simplest and most
39 direct way possible.
40
41
Weapons of mass disruption
42
43 In the wake of 11 September 2001, threats to the integrity of the US information
44 infrastructure have been ascribed a level of urgency analogous to nuclear and
45 biological threats, which has galvanized the relationship between IT and security
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118 M. Conway
as a primary policy consideration in the US (Yould 2003: 75). In September 1
2002, Richard Clarke, former special White House adviser for Cyberspace 2
Security, told ABC News: ‘[Cyberterrorism is] much easier to do than building a 3
weapon of mass destruction. Cyberattacks are a weapon of mass disruption, and 4
they’re a lot cheaper and easier’ (Wallace 2002). Howard Schmidt, Clarke’s 5
one-time deputy, has also repeatedly referred to the threat from ‘weapons of 6
mass disruption’ (see, for example, McGray 2003). But even before 11 Septem- 7
ber 2001, the American ‘cyber-angst’ was palpable (Bendrath 2003).11 As early 8
as 1999, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania) had placed cyberterror- 9
ism at the top of his list of modern threats to the American way of life. Speaking 10
at the InfoWarCon conference to an audience of uniformed military personal, 11
corporate IT managers, computer security consultants, and at least one screen- 12

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writer, Weldon said: ‘In my opinion, neither missile proliferation nor weapons 13
of mass destruction are as serious as the threat [of cyberterrorism]’ (Poulsen 14
1999). In May 2001, Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah) stated that ‘[attacks 15
against the US banking system] would devastate the United States more than a 16
nuclear device let off over a major city’ (Porteus 2001). At around the same
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time, Michael Specter (2001), the author of The New Yorker article mentioned 18
above, predicted: ‘The Internet is waiting for its Chernobyl, and I don’t think we 19
will be waiting much longer’. 20
In her seminal article on the role of linguistic metaphors, puns and acronyms 21
in the field of nuclear defence strategy, Carol Cohn demonstrated how specific 22
uses of language were used to de-dramatize threats (see Cohn 1987). With 23
regard to the cyberterrorist threat, exactly the opposite is happening. Far from 24
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de-realizing the threat, the discourse of cyberterrorism mobilized by the media 25

and assorted ‘experts’ makes the threat seem real and palpable. Mediatized dis- 26
cussion of just about any topic fosters the formulation of buzzwords and catchy 27
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phrases. The designation of cyber-threats as ‘weapons of mass disruption’ 28

directly analogous to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – that is nuclear, biological 29
or chemical weapons – is, however, both inaccurate and unhelpful in terms of 30
advancing an understanding of the relationship between national security and IT. 31
This is true whether one believes such threats are imminent (see Yould 2003: 32
84–8) or is sceptical of the cyberterrorist threat. For sceptics, equating the 33
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effects of a cyber-attack on the US banking system with the effects of the Cher- 34
nobyl disaster is not only an exaggeration that defies corroboration, but is 35
extremely disingenuous, suggesting as it does that the physical (and continuing) 36
death of not just large numbers of people, but literally of an entire vast territory, 37
is less significant than its digital disconnection (see Cohen 2003: 9f.). 38
39
40
Identifying antagonistic actors
41
Exploring the mediation of threat construction also requires analysis of the identi- 42
fication of specific hostile actors. Traditionally, the focus in security policy analy- 43
sis has been on potentially threatening states or governments, but in debates about 44
terrorism and information warfare, it has been emphasized that non-state actors 45
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1 may also pose a threat. The idea that anonymous adversaries may attempt to pen-
2 etrate information systems from anywhere in the world breaks with the traditional
3 understanding of security – that the identity, location and goals of the enemy are
4 known – and increases the sense of fear and insecurity. ‘The introduction of non-
5 state enemies in security thinking implies opening up Pandora’s box, as the
6 number of potential enemies in “cyberspace” is virtually unlimited’ [italics in ori-
7 ginal] (Eriksson 2001: 218). In terms of IT security, Denning has posited six dif-
8 ferent types of antagonistic actors: insiders, hackers, criminals, corporations,
9 governments, and terrorists (1999: 26f.). The media have concerned themselves,
10 for the most part, with just two of these: hackers and terrorists.
11
12

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Terrorist hackers
13
14 In the cyberterror scenarios described here, governments and terrorists were por-
15 trayed as the main threats, but hackers were also mentioned. Before 11 Septem-
16 ber 2001, the media were fixated on hackers as antagonistic actors. Hackers,
17 conceived of as computer abusers, had a history of being demonized in movies,
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18 on TV and in the press. As ‘familiar, even archetypal characters’ (Entman 2000:
19 15), when the cyberterrorist threat image was being constructed, they were the
20 perfect candidates for identification as potential perpetrators. This development
21 constitutes a classic case of the emergence of ‘the worst-case result [out] of a
22 dialectic between what is observed and what is imagined’ (Lipschutz 1995: 2).
23 The threat of hackers infiltrating the world’s most sensitive military systems
24 is one of the most enduring and popular themes associated with hacking. It was
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25 first brought to the public’s attention by the 1983 film War Games. In the film, a
26 teenage boy hacks into the computer that monitors and controls the US nuclear
27 and defence system. Believing that it is simply a game-playing machine, the
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28 teenager begins a game with the computer. However, the computer believes the
29 game is ‘real’ and begins the countdown to a Third World War.
30
31 WIGAN (FBI): The kid claims he was looking for a toy company. Ha! Ha! That’s
32 great!
33 MCKITTRICK (SYSTEM MANAGER): There is no way a high school punk can put a
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34 dime in a telephone and break into our systems. He has got to be working
35 for someone else. He’s got to be!
36 WIGAN: He does fit the profile perfectly: he is intelligent but an underachiever,
37 alienated from his parents, has few friends, a classic case for recruitment by
38 the Soviets. Now what does this say about the state of our country? Have
39 you got any insight into why a bright boy like this would jeopardize the
40 lives of millions?
41 FBI AGENT: No, Sir, he says he does this sort of thing for fun!
42 (War Games 1983)
43
44 This scenario resonated deeply with the US public. On his arraignment on
45 charges related to hacking, Kevin Mitnick was denied access not only to
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120 M. Conway
computers, but also to a phone, because the judge believed that, with the aid of a 1
phone, Mitnick could set off a nuclear attack (Skibell 2002: 342; see also Ryan 2
2004: 8f.). 3
In his book Hackers, Paul Taylor describes a 1991 episode of the US chat show 4
Geraldo (1999: 178f.). The show’s introduction featured excerpts from the film 5
Die Hard II, in which terrorists take over the computers of an airport, while the 6
studio section of the show included an interview with Craig Niedorf (aka Knight 7
Lightning), who was the subject of a US court case for having allegedly received 8
the source code of the emergency services’ telephone computer programmes. 9
During the course of the programme, show host Geraldo Rivera repeatedly 10
referred to Niedorf as the ‘Mad Hacker’. The prosecuting attorney in Niedorf’s 11
case also appeared on the show. Below is an excerpt of the dialogue that ensued: 12

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13
RIVERA: Don, how do you respond to the feeling among so many hackers that 14
what they’re doing is a public service; they’re exposing the flaws in our 15
security systems? 16
PROSECUTOR: Right, and just like the people who rape a co-ed on campus are
ON 17
exposing the flaws in our nation’s higher education security. It’s absolute 18
nonsense. 19
20
And on the issue of punishment of hackers: 21
22
PROSECUTOR: I don’t think they’re being punished very much at all. We’re 23
having trouble even taking away their gear. I don’t know one of them [who] 24
F

has done hard time in a prison . . . even Mitnick who is a real electronic 25
Hannibal Lecter . . . did not get near any of the punishment that what he was 26
doing entitled him to. 27
OO

(as quoted in Taylor 1999: 178)12 28

29
At the very end of the show, Rivera asks the prosecutor to give a brief worst- 30
case scenario that could result from the activities of hackers. He replies: ‘They 31
wipe out our communications system. Rather easily done. Nobody talks to 32
anyone else, nothing moves, patients don’t get their medicine. We’re on our 33
PR

knees’ (as quoted in Taylor 1999: 179). 34

Hackers get a lot of bad press. In terms of the hyping of the cyberterrorist 35
threat, the portrayal of hackers as potential adversaries was not restricted to film 36
and television; they were also repeatedly identified in the press as the most 37
likely threat actors. The following quote from a 2003 Newsweek article entitled 38
‘Bringing down the Internet’ is typical: 39
40
If you wanted to write a science-fiction thriller about the day the Internet 41
crashed, you’d start with a computer geek. Armed with nothing but a laptop 42
and a high speed Internet connection, he releases a fast spreading computer 43
virus that in a matter of minutes gives him control of thousands, perhaps 44
millions, of personal computers and servers throughout the world. This 45
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1 drone army launches a silent and sustained attack on computers that are
2 crucial for sending around the billions of packets of data that keep e-mail,
3 the Web and other, more basic necessities of modern life humming. At first
4 the attack seems to be an inconvenience – e-mail traffic grinds to a halt,
5 Web browsing is impossible. But then the problems spread to services only
6 tangentially related to the Internet: automated-teller machines freeze up,
7 calls to emergency numbers fail to get routed to police stations and ambu-
8 lance services, airport- and train-reservation systems come down. After a
9 few hours, the slowdown starts to affect critical systems: the computers that
10 help run power grids, air-traffic control and telephone networks.
11 (Adams and Guterl 2003)
12

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13 According to the authors of this particular scenario, the cascading failures are
14 not just regional or national in scope, but global. And within a few lines of text,
15 the perpetrators morph from ‘hackers’ to ‘geeks’ to ‘terrorists’. The problem is
16 that even if ‘hackers’ managed such a feat, it would not constitute cyberterror-
17 ism unless they engaged in the act for political purposes. Most journalists are
ON
18 either unaware of this caveat or ignore it, with the result that the press have
19 labelled some unlikely acts of computer abuse as ‘cyberterrorism’.
20 According to newspaper reports, sending pornographic e-mails to minors,
21 posting offensive content on the Internet, defacing webpages, using a computer
22 to cause US$400 worth of damage, stealing credit card information, posting
23 credit card numbers on the Internet, and clandestinely redirecting Internet traffic
24 from one site to another all constitute instances of cyberterrorism (see Conway
F

25 2003: 34f.). And yet, none of these actions could be described as terrorism –
26 some of them are not even criminal – had they been accomplished without the
27 aid of computers (see Ross 2000: 255). Admittedly, terrorism is notoriously dif-
OO

28 ficult to define; however, the addition of computers to plain old crime certainly
29 does not fall in this category. So what then are the functions of these sorts of
30 reports? They result in a widening of the category of ‘cyberterrorism’, which is
31 crucial, as no ‘true’ act of cyberterrorism, narrowly defined, has ever yet
32 occurred. In order to make the cyberterrorist threat image credible, therefore, the
33 cyberterror scenarios must be represented as paroxysmal versions of a cyberter-
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34 ror that starts all the way from the teenage hacker.
35 It seems that even hackers themselves – albeit probably of the script kiddie
36 variety – have begun to be influenced by their portrayal in the media. The anony-
37 mous defacement of two US government websites, carried out in late November
38 2001, read as follows: ‘we are not hacker, we are just cyberterrorist’. Elsewhere,
39 the defacers referred to themselves as ‘mujihadeens’ and threatened ‘the greatest
40 cyberterrorist attack against American government’. The culprits were almost
41 certainly neither mujahideen nor terrorists, and were evidently more familiar with
42 media portrayals of cyberterrorism than with any ‘real’ cyberterrorists.
43 It has been observed that all the various ways of abusing computers and IT
44 can hardly be deemed existential threats to sovereign states (Erikkson 2001:
45 218). Nonetheless, the discourse surrounding computer hackers belabours the
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122 M. Conway
potentially catastrophic economic and national security threats posed by mali- 1
cious intruders, while for a long time identifying the subject of this threat as 2
young, self-trained computer geeks. This raised the fundamental question of 3
how obsessive, self-taught teenagers could overcome the security devised by 4
governments and corporations that together have spent billions of dollars 5
seeking to safeguard those same systems and cracking down on cyber-criminals 6
(Skibell 2002: 336)? In fact, more recently, the media have reassessed the 7
hacker-as-terrorist discourse, which had begun to appear increasingly uncon- 8
vincing, and in the wake of 11 September 2001, this discourse was superseded 9
by the terrorist-as-hacker approach. 10
11
12

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Hacker terrorists
13
The 11 September 2001 attacks resulted in a complete change in threat percep- 14
tions, both in terms of the threat from conventional terrorism and its cyber 15
dimension. Ralf Bendrath details how, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, 16
newspaper articles addressing the threat of cyberterrorism proliferated (2003:
ON 17
59f.). A LexisNexis search of major US newspapers showed that in the US 18
newspapers of record, the Washington Post and New York Times, mentions of 19
cyberterrorism doubled in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. The question on 20
many people’s lips was ‘Is Cyber Terror Next?’ (Denning 2001). 21
Once Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida had been fingered as the perpetrators of 22
the 11 September 2001 attacks, a steady stream of newspaper articles began to 23
appear suggesting that the latter were now engaged in planning a major cyberter- 24
F

rorist attack. So although there was no evidence available by which to measure 25

al-Qaida’s IT literacy, more and more people came to believe and fear that it 26
was substantial. This resulted in the creation of a hyper-mediated vicious circle: 27
OO

the media dramatized the intelligence estimates, and the politicians in turn 28
picked up media quotes, which they then relayed back in other media fora, and 29
so on. Within a very short time, unsubstantiated fears had transformed into fore- 30
casts (Bendrath 2003: 63). 31
In November 2001, an article appeared in Information Security magazine that 32
made the jump from ‘might’ or ‘could’ to ‘will certainly’: 33
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34
Though we have yet to see terrorist groups – such as Hizbollah, HAMAS, 35
Abu Nidal and Al Qaeda – employ hacking or malware to target critical 36
infrastructures, their reliance on information technology and acquisitions of 37
computer expertise are clear warning signs. While damage caused by hack- 38
tivists – and even cyberterrorists – has been minimal thus far, security 39
experts predict that the nation’s IT infrastructure will certainly be a target in 40
the future [my italics]. 41
(McAlearney 2001) 42
43
Furthermore, in May 2002, an article appeared in Newsweek that was headlined 44
‘Islamic cyberterror: not a matter of if, but of when’ (Hosenball 2002). In late 45
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1 June 2002, Roger Cressey, who was at that time chief of staff of the President’s
2 Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, made a (remarkably) similar claim: ‘Al
3 Qaeda spent more time mapping our vulnerabilities in cyberspace than we previ-
4 ously thought. An attack is a question of when, not if’ (Borger 2002; Gellman
5 2002a and 2002b). This statement resulted in a deluge of press reports musing
6 upon al-Qaida’s alleged cyber-attack plans in 2002:
7
8 • ‘Report: US fears possible Al Qaeda cyber attacks’. Reuters, 27 June.
9 • ‘Cyber-attacks by Al Qaeda feared’. Barton Gellman in the Washington
10 Post, 27 June.
11 • ‘US “fears al-Qaeda hack attack” ’. Kevin Anderson in BBC News Online,
12 27 June.

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13 • ‘Qaeda cyberterror called real peril’. Barton Gellman in the International
14 Herald Tribune, 28 June.
15 • ‘US fears al-Qaida will hit vital computer networks’. Julian Borger in The
16 Guardian (UK), 28 June.
17 • ‘Al Qaeda cyber alarm sounded’. William Mathews in Federal Computer
ON
18 Week, 25 July.13
19
20 William Matthews’ article in Federal Computer Week included a prediction by
21 Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) that ‘There is a 50 percent chance that the
22 next time al Qaeda terrorists strike in the United States, their attack will include
23 a cyberattack’.
24 The switch in the cyberterrorist threat image, from ‘terrorist hackers’ to
F

25 ‘hacker terrorists’, highlights two things: first, guarding against, as well as com-
26 bating, security threats is clearly made easier if one is able to identify the actors
27 responsible. It is suggested that the process of introducing a threat image onto
OO

28 the political agenda is facilitated by the ability to identify the actor or actors con-
29 stituting the threat (Livingston 1994: 4). Structurally-based threats have greater
30 difficulty attracting attention than those portrayed as actor-based (Eriksson and
31 Noreen 2002: 5f.). So while the identification of the cyberterrorist threat with an
32 amorphous category such as that of ‘hackers’ is preferable to the latter, the
33 ability to identify Osama bin Laden and/or al-Qaida as the source of the cybert-
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34 errorist threat is clearly preferable to both of these. Second, certain dramatic

35 events may also have an impact on the resonance of a threat image. The events
36 of 11 September 2001 acted as a trigger factor, revitalizing the cyberterrorist
37 threat discourse and the idea of the ‘hacker terrorist’ in particular.
38
39
Conclusion
40
41 Finally, what were some of the effects of the cyberterror threat image as con-
42 structed in the US media and described in the foregoing? While so-called
43 ‘cyberpanics’ may have imaginary origins, they can also have very real con-
44 sequences (Sandwell 2006: 46).
45 The risk of a massive conventional terrorist attack on the US was emphasized
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124 M. Conway
by a small number of academics and others before the events of 11 September 1
2001, but was dismissed by the media (see Nacos 2002: 1f.), which chose to 2
focus on cyberterrorism instead. Key decision-makers were therefore much 3
more attuned to the latter threat than the former. Marcus Sachs,14 who served in 4
the White House Office of Cyberspace Security and was a staff member of the 5
President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, had this to say in 2003 6
about the convergence of policy-makers’ fear of technology with their fear of 7
terrorism: 8
9
We were very shocked in the federal government that the attack didn’t come 10
from cyberspace . . . Based on what we knew at the time, the most likely 11
scenario was an attack from cyberspace, not airliners slamming into build- 12

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ings . . . We had spent a lot of time preparing for a cyber attack, not a phys- 13
ical attack. 14
(Poulsen 2003) 15
16
People’s sense of what issues are of political relevance is always an ongoing
ON 17
process, which requires an emphasis on how threat images are discursively con- 18
structed, maintained and altered. This points to why particular emphasis needs to 19
be placed upon the processes whereby (national) security issues communica- 20
tively emerge, and the central role of the media in such emergences. The polit- 21
ical communication/threat image environment shapes both the information 22
available and the ways in which not just ordinary people, but also political elites, 23
use it in thinking about politics and national security. 24
F

Demonstrating the effects of the media’s influence on publics and decision- 25

makers is always difficult due to the indirect and complex dynamics involved; 26
clearly, however, the US media has been highly successful in ‘speaking’ cyberter- 27
OO

rorism into existence. Their reliance on ‘(hyper-)reality-producing dramas’ 28

(Debrix 2001: 153), Pearl Harbor analogies, comparisons of the effects of cybert- 29
errorism with those of WMD, portrayal of hackers as a menace to national secur- 30
ity, and general widening of the concept of cyberterrorism, in conjunction with the 31
policy window opened by the events of 11 September 2001 and, consequently, the 32
ability to cast Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida as certain future cyberterrorists has 33
PR

resulted in the hyping of an (imagined) fatal connection between virtual networks 34

and critical infrastructures that, to date, has very little real form or substance. 35
This conclusion may not be quite as disturbing as it might first appear, 36
however, for François Debrix it suggests that all of the various apocalyptic sce- 37
narios, televised simulations and musings as to the greater lethality of virtual 38
over nuclear attacks have, in fact, ensured that a virtual Pearl Harbor will never 39
materialize. The reason is that the fear of cyberterrorism has been spread so 40
widely and with such success that should a ‘real’ attack ever occur, it couldn’t 41
match expectations: ‘Being conditioned to such a degree of generalised panic, 42
any real cyberterrorist attack that does not follow the simulated scenario and 43
produce the anticipated amount of casualties will fall short of being worthy of 44
people’s attention and worry’ (Debrix 2001: 156). 45
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1 Notes
2 1 Vixie was, at that time, president of the Internet Software Consortium (an industry
3 group). See Adams and Guterl 2003.
4 2 The survey was conducted before the blackout across the northern United States and
5 eastern Canada on 14 August 2003.
6 3 A number of academic analyses of cyberterrorism also include such scenarios, see
Collin 1998b; Devost et al. 1997.
7 4 Postmodernists prefer the term ‘simulations’ (see Baudrillard 1983).
8 5 In June 2001, Lawrence K. Gershwin, a top CIA official, took a similar stance in a
9 statement to the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. Gershwin told the
10 committee that foreign governments, rather than terrorists, were the most significant
11 threat to US computers for the next five to ten years. ‘Terrorists really like to make
sure that what they do works . . . They do very nicely with explosions, so we think
12

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largely that they’re working on that’. Nonetheless, Gershwin warned that a terrorist
13 organization could surprise intelligence officers and mount a cyber-attack within the
14 following six months (Joint Economic Committee 2001: 6–10).
15 6 This is not to suggest that all journalists, without exception, are guilty of hyping the
16 cyberterrorist threat. It is possible to point to the efforts of some journalists – techno-
logy journalists, in particular – to de-hype cyberterrorism. See, for example, Declan
17 McCullagh’s contributions to Wired and {C:Net} News; Thomas C. Greene and
ON
18 others in The Register; Bruce Schneier in his books, articles and Cryptogram newslet-
19 ter (http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html); and a significant amount of the
20 commentary on cyberterrorism produced by ZDnet (‘Information resources for IT
21 professionals’).
7 For an article which takes up many of the incidents outlined in the scenarios above,
22 interrogates the likelihood of their successful occurrence, and finds them wanting, see
23 Cohen 2003.
24 8 Ralf Bendrath describes Schwartau as ‘the rock manager turned preacher of “informa-
F

25 tion warfare” ’ (Bendrath 2003: 49). In the aftermath of 11 September 2001,

26 Schwartau re-released his 1991 novel Terminal Compromise under the new title Pearl
Harbor Dot Com. The following description of the novel is provided on
27
OO

Amazon.com:
28
29 It used to take an entire nation to wage a war. Today it takes only one man. Taki
Homosoto survived the hell of Hiroshima. Now, more than 50 years later, the time
30 has come for the Americans to feel the flames of his revenge, using his personal
31 army of terrorists and intelligence agents. The US Government and a network of
32 somewhat reluctant allies – invisible and anonymous hackers join forces to battle
33 this powerful enemy. The devastating climax of this one man’s plan . . . this
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34 powerful, bitter survivor of ayamachi, The Great Mistake, is certain to bring

global chaos and economic meltdown. A terrifying thought provoking tale.
35
36 9 The search was undertaken on 18 August 2004 and used the terms ‘electronic Pearl
Harbor’ (68), ‘digital Pearl Harbor’ (35) and ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ (2).
37 10 A team at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has pointed out that the
38 term ‘electronic Waterloo’ is more accurate, but it is much less used (see CSIS 1998:
39 2).
40 11 François Debrix uses the term ‘e-anxiety’ (Debrix 2001: 165), while Barry Sandwell
41 refers to ‘cyberphobia’, ‘cyberfear’ and ‘cyberparanoia’ (Sandwell 2006: 40 and 47).
12 In the movie Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal Lecter (as played by Anthony
42 Hopkins) is a respected psychiatrist turned murderous cannibal.
43 13 In The Register, Thomas C. Greene contributed the tongue-in-cheek article ‘Soon Al-
44 Qaeda will kill you on the Internet’ (Greene 2002).
45 14 Sachs collaborated on a fiction book entitled Zero-Day Exploit: Countdown to
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126 M. Conway
Darkness (Rob Shein 2004, Syngress Media) detailing yet another cyberterror sce- 1
nario. This time a 0-day vulnerability in a particular line of SCADA Master products 2
that are widely used in petrochemical facilities is exploited by attackers, resulting in
3
gas stations running out of gas, followed shortly by freight carriers, private indi-
viduals and local police and fire departments. Disaster can only be prevented by 4
Reuben, an elite cyber-security researcher who stumbles across the plot while con- 5
tracting for the federal government (from Amazon.com product description). 6
7
8
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lyfed/0501/051501td.htm (accessed 17 August 2007). 19
Poulsen, K. (1999) ‘Info war or electronic sabre rattling?’ ZDNet, 8 September 1999. 20
Online. Available at: zdnet.com.com/2100–11–515631.html?legacy=zdnn (accessed 17 21
August 2007). 22
—— (2001) ‘Cyber terror in the air’, SecurityFocus.com, 30 June 2001. Online. Avail- 23
able at: www.securityfocus.com/columnists/6 (accessed 17 August 2007). 24
F

—— (2003) ‘Official: Cyberterror fears missed real threat’, SecurityFocus.com, 31 July 25

2003. Online. Available at: www.securityfocus.com/news/6589 (accessed 17 August 26
2007).
27
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Ross, A. (2000) ‘Hacking away at the counter-culture’, in Bell, D. and Kennedy, B.M.
28
(eds) The Cybercultures Reader, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 254–67.
Ryan, P.S. (2004) ‘War, peace, or stalemate: wargames, wardialing, wardriving, and the 29
emerging market for hacker ethics’, Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, 9, 7: 1–57. 30
Online. Available at: ssrn.com/abstract=585867 (accessed 17 August 2007). 31
Sandwell, B. (2006) ‘Monsters in cyberspace: cyberphobia and cultural panic in the 32
information age’, Information, Communication & Society, 9, 1: 39–61. 33
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Schwartau, W. (ed.) (1994) Information Warfare. Cyberterrorism: Protecting Your Per- 34

sonal Security in the Electronic Age, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. 35
Skibell, R. (2002) ‘The myth of the computer hacker’, Information, Communication & 36
Society, 5, 3: 336–56. 37
Specter, M. (2001) ‘The doomsday click: how easily could a hacker bring the world to a
38
standstill?’, The New Yorker, 28 May 2001. Online. Available at: www.michael-
39
specter.com/ny/2001/2001_05_28_doomsday.html (accessed 16 October 2007).
Stone, A. (2001) ‘Cyberspace: the next battlefield’, USA Today, 16 June 2001. Online. 40
Available at: www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001–06–19-cyberwar-full.htm (accessed 41
17 August 2007). 42
Taylor, P.A. (1999) Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime, London: Routledge. 43
Verton, D. (2003) Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyberterrorism, New York: 44
McGraw Hill. 45
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1 Wæver, O. (1995) ‘Securitization and descuritization’, in Lipschutz, R. (ed.) On Security,
2 New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 48–55.
3 Wallace, C. (2002) ‘Internet as weapon: experts fear terrorists may attack through
4 cyberspace’, ABC News.com, 16 September 2002. Online. Available at: www.911
jobforums.com/archive/index.php/t-14870.html (accessed 23 September 2007).
5
West, D.M. (2001) The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment, New York:
6
Bedford/St. Martins.
7 Yould, R. (2003) ‘Beyond the American fortress: understanding homeland security in the
8 information age’, in Latham, R. (ed.) Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relation-
9 ship Between Information Technology and Security, New York: The New Press,
10 pp. 74–98.
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6 Homeland security through 2
3
traceability 4
5
Technologies of control as critical 6
infrastructures1 7
8
9
Philippe Bonditti 10
11
12

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Every war that the United States has fought has been different from the last, and 13
different from what defense planners had envisioned. 14
(Aspin 1993: section 3) 15
16
The major institutions of American national security were designed in a different
ON 17
era to meet different challenges. They must be transformed.
18
(The White House 2006: 43)
19
20
Since the mid-1990s, the issue of ‘critical infrastructure’ (CI) has become 21
increasingly security-centred in the US. Through the Presidential Directive 22
Decision 39 on Counter-Terrorism Policies (1995), President Bill Clinton first 23
ordered the creation of a cabinet committee to ‘review the vulnerability of 24
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government facilities in the United States and the nation’s critical infrastructure’ 25
(Clinton 1995). The group, chaired by Attorney General Janet Reno, identified 26
eight national critical infrastructures (telecommunications, transportation, emer- 27
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gency services, banking and finance, electrical power systems, water supply 28
systems, gas/oil storage and transportation, and continuity of government) and 29
two categories of threats to these infrastructures, ‘physical and cyber-threats’. 30
This led to the elaboration of a first national plan to defend the US against 31
cyber-attacks: Defending America’s Cyberspace. National Plan for Information 32
Systems Protection Version 1.0. An Invitation to a Dialogue. This document 33
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defines infrastructure protection as the sum of all ‘proactive risk management 34

actions intended to prevent a threat from attempting to or succeeding at destroy- 35
ing or incapacitating critical infrastructures’ (Clinton 2000: 148). 36
Two structuring elements still prevail today in any political decisions or com- 37
mitments in relation to the protection of CI. More than ever, CIs are dealt with 38
in close relation to ‘terrorism’ – even if not exclusively – and they remain 39
divided into these two categories of ‘physical and cyber’, being potential targets 40
of two major types of attacks: physical attacks, such as bombings against build- 41
ings, on the one hand, and electronic ‘cyber-’ attacks against computer systems 42
on the other. Two major documents relating to CIP recently published by the 43
White House still bear witness to these continuities. The first one, The National 44
Strategy to Secure Cyberspace (2003), deals with the protection of the particular 45
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1 space composed of computer systems, cables and flows of digital information
2 that is described as ‘the control system of [the] country’, ‘the nervous system’
3 (Bush 2003a: vii) of public and private institutions in the crucial sectors listed
4 above. This document is an extension of the National Plan for Information
5 Systems Protection issued in 2000.
6 The second document, the National Strategy for the Physical Protection of
7 Critical Infrastructure and Key Assets (2003), deals with the critical infrastruc-
8 ture in the wider sense of all physical infrastructures that facilitate the continuity
9 of work in the crucial sectors of agriculture and food, water, public health, emer-
10 gency services, the defence industrial base, telecommunications, energy, trans-
11 portation, banking and finance, chemicals and hazardous materials, postal
12 service, and shipping (Bush 2003b). Here, and following the initial propositions

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13 of the mid-1990s, critical infrastructures are defined as ranging from railroads,
14 highways and bridges to ports and historical buildings, and from pipelines and
15 dams to water, power and computer systems. In all of these documents, critical
16 infrastructures constitute both paths of communication and exchange, as well as
17 sites of production, distribution and redirection of various materials (food, elec-
ON
18 tricity, digital bytes etc.). Of all these critical infrastructures, the one we will
19 focus on in this chapter is the network of computing systems and databases
20 known as ‘cyberspace’, also defined in Annex D of the National Plan for
21 Information Systems Protection Version 1.0 as ‘the world of connected comput-
22 ers and the society that surrounds them. Commonly known as the INTERNET’
23 (Clinton 2000: 146).
24 The aim of the present chapter is to show that the convergence between the
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25 intensification of counter-terrorism policies on the one hand, and the progressive

26 rise of CI(P) issues on the other, has a deep impact both on the traditional spatio-
27 temporal demarcations that have hitherto prevailed and on the ‘art of governing
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28 people’. The progressive merging of the figure of the enemy with constructs of
29 unpredictable and shadowy ‘terrorist networks’ corresponds to the progressive
30 integration of the national defence and protection system in a networked assem-
31 blage connected through digital systems. This causes Western societies, which
32 are now at an intersection of strong ‘security-driven’ policies and deep processes
33 of digitalization, to move progressively toward a new mode of governmentality
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34 determined by traceability, the crucial tool of which is the digital trace. In this
35 chapter, it is argued that the current counter-terrorism policies, particularly when
36 juxtaposed with how critical infrastructure is conceptualized, can not only be
37 understood as functional responses to the transformation of transnational viol-
38 ence, i.e. so-called ‘terrorism’. They are also a particular actualization of the
39 underlying logics of inclusion and exclusion, which, as Michel Foucault
40 explained, have historically been rendered operative through two major tech-
41 nologies of power, positive and negative.
42 Two main ideas underline the arguments in this chapter. First, it is argued
43 that, as part of a long-term historical trend, the developments in counter-terror-
44 ism in the US accelerate and deepen the process of convergence in which coer-
45 cive agencies have long been engaged. Second, I argue that the bureaucratic
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132 P. Bonditti
dimension of the security assemblage, mainly in the application of authoritative 1
texts or claims, is experiencing a reconfiguration of its prerogatives, missions 2
and internal power struggles around the computer networks and the digital trace. 3
This process of reversing and changing the roles and activities of security agen- 4
cies (cf. Bigo 2000) is itself reinforced by two sets of elements: 5
6
1 the exchange of agents between agencies as a result of the establishment of 7
coordinating structures between them; 8
2 the progressive integration of various agencies’ databases and the sharing of 9
technical knowledge over which none of the agencies can pretend to have a 10
monopoly. 11
12

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An analysis of catalysts for all these convergences reveals the progressively net- 13
worked nature of a state apparatus now governed by a concern for information- 14
sharing and geared towards the protection of the homeland. 15
The first part of the chapter focuses on the Foucauldian perspective that is 16
adopted. I will argue for the use of the Foucauldian dispositif as a methodo-
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logical tool that helps to capture discursive formations, institutional adaptations 18
and technological insights as working together, and resonating with one another. 19
The aim of the second part is to show how narratives on terrorism have 20
attempted to spatialize transnational political violence, organizing particular and 21
specific conditions of possibility for the implementation of counter-strategies 22
that can be observed in the geo-spatial prerogatives of the counter-terrorist agen- 23
cies. While considering the sociological transformations at play in the bureau- 24
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cratic architecture specifically commissioned to fight transnational violence, the 25

chapter shows how the spatialization of the threat operated by linguistic prac- 26
tices actually resonates with that of the prerogatives of the state’s counter-terror- 27
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ism apparatus. 28
The approach of this chapter is derived from a reconciliation of the positions 29
of Bourdieu and Foucault, as highlighted by Deleuze (Deleuze 1986: 43) and re- 30
actualized for our problem by Didier Bigo (Bigo 2005). But it is also important 31
to focus on the technological aspects of the assemblage and to deal with all the 32
computing tools that security agencies are resorting to on a massive scale in the 33
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name of the sovereign. A ‘socio-technical study’ of the mechanisms at play is 34

required (Deleuze 2003b: 246). That is the purpose of the third part of the 35
chapter, in which I will highlight the recent transformation regarding counter- 36
terrorism in the US with a particular focus on some computer-based techniques, 37
such as biometrics and the massive resort to databases, so as to show how they 38
transform the sites and modalities of the sovereign power, re-centring and re- 39
spatializing the art of governing people around the digital trace. Subsequently, 40
the chapter aims to show how these technologies of the digital trace in them- 41
selves become critical infrastructures. 42
43
44
45
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1 Critical approach to security and methodology: Foucault and
2 the dispositif
3
The Foucauldian perspective adopted in this chapter helps to readjust the tradi-
4
5 tional debates, which are generally ‘security-centred’ and far too deeply rooted
6 in the discipline-structured form of the academic world. It not only helps to
7 highlight the evolution in narratives on ‘terrorism’/‘counter-terrorism’ and/or
8 ‘critical infrastructures’ on the one hand, or the organic transformation of the
9 state and of the particular modalities through which the legitimate use of viol-
10 ence is exercised, on the other, but is also useful for demonstrating how the sites
11 and modalities of the sovereign decision are reconfigured by computing tech-
12 nologies. This approach thus facilitates a better understanding of the multi-

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13 levelled and multifaceted transformation at play in the ‘art of governing people’.
14 Foucault proposed a particularly powerful theoretical framework for studying
15 what is generally discussed as security and more fundamentally the adaptations
16 in the practices of governmentality. His approach implies that security be com-
17 prehended not only in regard to the object/subject of security – establishing
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18 whether it is the state, the people, the individual, society, or another object that
19 must be secured (first) – or just as a series of speech acts and securitization
20 processes (Wæver 1995), but in terms of political technologies, space, and distri-
21 bution of heterogeneous elements in time and space. For Foucault, the particular
22 space of security is that of a series of probable events that will have to be regu-
23 lated. It refers to a certain temporality and a certain distribution of events in time
24 that must be inscribed in space through discursive and non-discursive formations
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25 to regulate singular events that constitute ruptures in everyday life.

26 A crucial notion in this task is what Foucault called the dispositif, which he
27 defines as a particular formation in a given historical sequence ‘a crucial func-
OO

28 tion of which is to respond to a particular emergency’ (Foucault 2001: 299). It is

29 a networked complex of heterogeneous elements linking discourses, institutions,
30 architectural dispositions, legal decisions, laws and administrative measures, as
31 well as scientific, philosophical or moral claims. The dispositif is a system of
32 light and shadow that illuminates pre-existing objects or situations in particular
33 ways and that must be closely correlated to the regimes of narratives it consti-
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34 tutes. It consists of lines of forces and lines of subjectivation through which

35 power operates and thus has to be closely correlated to what is constituted and
36 institutionalized as knowledge. Deleuze even talked about a ‘philosophy of the
37 dispositif’ with ‘a change in the orientation, which turns it away from the eternal
38 toward the new’ (Deleuze 2003a: 321). Clearly, the dispositif can be understood
39 as a complex and demultiplied apparatus by which power circulates and thus
40 operates.
41 Foucault’s notion of dispositif provides a systematic way of analysing ‘secur-
42 ity’ and the underlying transformations that is attentive to both its discursive and
43 non-discursive formations. It allows us to consider not only the rationalities at
44 play in securing and securitizing moves through discursive and non-discursive
45 practices, but also the lines along which they are developed and supported.
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134 P. Bonditti
Discursive formations and the performativity of language actually imply not 1
only observation of how they create conditions of possibilities for further devel- 2
opments, but also that they have material, physical, biological, technical, histor- 3
ical and social conditions of possibility. These possibilities need to be articulated 4
in our analysis in order to grasp their multifaceted aspects and to transcend the 5
state-centred framework of analysis. 6
Thinking in terms of the dispositif helps transcend the dualities between dis- 7
cursive and non-discursive formations and between theory and practice. It 8
allows us to take into account the crucial role of language and of narratives, 9
without reducing the world to textual and discursive procedures. It enables us to 10
analyse discursive and non-discursive formations through the relational or net- 11
worked space they constitute, and not just separately. The dispositif as concept 12

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enables us to observe how the demarcations established in various narratives 13
between the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, but also in the law 14
between the legal and the illegal, resonate and are implemented through particu- 15
lar architectural dispositions and specific computer-based technologies. This 16
helps us to understand in new ways how all these aspects allow specific know-
ON 17
how and techniques to surface, but also and more generally to grasp the produc- 18
tion of sense, meaning and knowledge in a particular historical sequence. 19
I propose to use the dispositif as an ontological and methodological tool. This 20
will help us to decipher contemporary realities by penetrating their mechanisms 21
and also enables us to engage with politics by not just observing it from a hypo- 22
thetical external point. In that sense, my proposal differs slightly from the pro- 23
posals of Didier Bigo, Thomas Mathiesen or David Lyon for the banopticon, the 24
F

synopticon and the superpanopticon respectively (Bigo 2008; Mathiesen 1997; 25

Lyon 1994). In my opinion, it is not only about actualizing, in the contemporary 26
era, the ‘dispositif panoptique’ (taken as the particular principle of political 27
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organization of the disciplinary societies); but also about making the dispositif 28
operational at the level of analysis by using it as a methodological tool. It is a 29
way to make theory a practice, a practice of resistance against power, by 30
‘making it visible where it is the less visible and the more insidious’ (Deleuze 31
2002: 290). It is no surprise that Foucault has never really been ‘classified’ and 32
that he always rejected any kind of affiliation with any particular discipline, 33
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defining himself primarily as a ‘demolition expert’.2 The analysis of the present 34

Foucault engages in (Veynes 1971), and the toolbox he provides (Lascoumes 35
1993; Davidson 1997), should thus help us to capture how power operates, both 36
at the micro levels and in the combination of these micro levels. 37
In the research for this chapter, various discourses and texts, congress hear- 38
ings and reports, laws, directives and administrative regulations as well as 39
organizational charts were analysed, all in relation to the fight against terrorism 40
and to CIP. These narratives and texts are seen as points of entry to the security 41
assemblage in the making. But they are also operational demarcations/distinc- 42
tions and/or associations/junctions that need to be contextualized to highlight 43
better how the jurisdictional, bureaucratic and technological evolutions resonate 44
with one another. I consider these narratives and texts as traces of those who 45
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1 have pronounced, written, supported and disseminated them so as to establish
2 their provenance; they are traces of the outside of language, traces of the non-
3 linguistic dimension of all those practices in relation to the fight against ‘terror-
4 ism’ and CIP issues. In this way, we follow another Foucauldian approach in a
5 freely interpretative way:
6
7 All these practices, these institutions and theories, I take at the level of
8 traces, that is, almost always at the level of verbal [textual] traces. The
9 ensemble of these traces constitutes a sort of domain considered as homo-
10 geneous: no differences are established a priori between traces, and the
11 problem thus is to find, between these traces of different order, enough
12 common traits to constitute what logicians call ‘classes’, aestheticians call

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13 ‘forms’, social scientists call ‘structures’, which are the invariant common
14 denominator of a certain number of those traces.
15 (Foucault 1966: 527)3
16
17 Discourses and texts are thus both objects and points of entry to the object of our
ON
18 study – active agents/discursive lines (Deleuze 2003a: 320) – and at the same
19 time, they constitute traces of other active agents of the security assemblage we
20 have considered. Beyond intertextuality, we are facing the necessity to come
21 back to social practices and sociological dispositions to highlight the very social
22 mechanics from which, and within which, those narratives surface, and not only
23 the performative capacity of language and discursive regimes.
24 In this chapter, the aim is to enter into the microphysics of power by explor-
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25 ing the structure of the bureaucratic apparatus and how it resonates with the
26 system of demarcation established in and by narratives. This chapter aims to
27 localize the speakers who produce those texts and discourses, in order to better
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28 visualize the bureaucratic dimension of the assemblage in its very dynamic and
29 in its hierarchical structure, to retrace the genealogy of those bureaucratic units,
30 and to establish the synaptic correspondences between linguistic and non-lin-
31 guistic practices, between enunciation procedures and the structural forms of the
32 state apparatus. Furthermore, I will try to bring to light the successive actualiza-
33 tion of the bureaucratic order so as to understand what kind of actualization of
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34 threats corresponds to it in the discursive order. The analysis therefore focuses

35 on the nature of the link that exists between these heterogeneous elements.
36 I do not pretend here to apply fully the above proposal of using the dispositif
37 as a tool. The objective is rather to highlight the heterogeneity of the elements
38 involved, which are, for now, homogenized by the normative security narratives.
39 This proposal works with broader implications and, first of all, demands that the
40 academic world abandon its traditions of axiomatic neutrality and of individual
41 research agendas for research engaging with politics and with collective work
42 (cf. C.A.S.E. Collective 2006). Indeed, this would contribute to advancing acad-
43 emia beyond its disciplinary structured – and at times confining – form. Opera-
44 tionalizing the dispositif would help to articulate perspectives in terms of
45 linguistic/discursive/textual analysis with a sociology of strategies (so as to
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136 P. Bonditti
highlight the sociological conditions that work with narration), with an anthro- 1
pology of the bureaucratic apparatus (which supports particular narratives, 2
know-how and power technologies), with law-oriented analysis that would help 3
highlight the legal dispositions, or for some more recent studies, like surveil- 4
lance studies, computer-oriented analysis to better understand the impact of the 5
increased recourse to computer language on the contemporary system of demar- 6
cations (algorithmic techniques in control matters, for example). 7
8
9
Linguistic and textual formations: claiming the particular
10
space of the terrorist threat and of the collective self before
11
11 September 2001
12

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Let us now examine the narratives on transnational political violence more 13
closely. Since the end of the 1960s, transnational political violence and the US 14
counter-terrorist state apparatus have usually followed the logics/rationale of ter- 15
ritorial mechanics. Until the mid-1990s, the terrorist threat was mainly regarded 16
through the inside/outside prism. A given act of violence was enounced, quali-
ON 17
fied and treated differently depending on whether it had occurred on the national 18
territory or abroad. This was partly due to ideological reasons, which had long 19
caused political violence to be conceived as being related to hostile activities of 20
the USSR during the Cold War, and subsequently as related to the so-called 21
Rogue State paradigm. From the mid-1990s onwards, however, the idea of a net- 22
worked threat became dominant in the narratives on terrorism. The paradigm of 23
globalization succeeded that of the inside/outside dichotomy, which is seriously 24
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challenged by the focus on new technologies and their de-territorialized nature. 25

This is not to say that these narratives are mutually exclusive. These two 26
trends have always co-existed in discourses and texts describing terrorism. The 27
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first one, which tends to territorialize the threat, to strongly associate it with geo- 28
graphical areas or specific countries, was dominant until the mid-1990s, while 29
the second, which deterritorializes the threat to connect it to social (terrorist 30
cells) or technical (cyberterrorism) networks, has had much more structuring 31
force since then. Corresponding to these two ways of spatializing the threat is an 32
extensive temporality that not only concerns the effectivity of political violence, 33
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but its potentiality as well. Most of the documents analysed expose a definition 34
of terrorism as ‘the threat or use of violence’: a distinction that not only opens 35
the possibility of reaction, but also of anticipation; in other words, the possibility 36
not only of reactive measures (police, investigation) against terrorism, but also 37
of proactive measures (surveillance). 38
It also becomes apparent that in the period between 1945 and 2006, the 39
attempt to localize (and not just spatialize) the terrorist threat, so as to anticipate 40
it, is all the stronger the more it is described in global terms, as existing virtually 41
anywhere at anytime. And the more the threat is said to be organized in the 42
particular form of the network, the more the bureaucratic structure itself 43
becomes involved in a networked dispersal of its bureaucratic units through the 44
massive resort to technology. 45
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1 Territorializing the threat, organizing the state apparatus for
2 collective self-defence
3
These spatio-temporal considerations on transnational political violence are sup-
4
ported by a large set of texts. They can be observed in the Patterns of Global
5
Terrorism series issued annually by the State Department (DoS); in the military
6
doctrine documents of the Pentagon (Department of Defense, DoD) and in the
7
National Security Strategies published by the White House. They can also be
8
9 observed in various administrative regulations (National Security Decisions,
10 Presidential Decision Directives), and even in law. In 1978, while defining the
11 threats that could justify domestic counter-intelligence activities by the Federal
12 Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against a supposed threat, Congress actually intro-

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13 duced for the first time a definition of international terrorism in the US Civil
14 Code:
15
16 ‘International terrorism’ means activities that . . . occur totally outside the
17 United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by
ON
18 which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to coerce or
19 intimidate, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.
20 (US Civil Code, Title 50, Chapter 36, subchapter 1, 1801)4
21
22 This nicely illustrates the particular way in which the US has traditionally per-
23 ceived itself in relation to terrorism. Under this definition, international terrorism
24 was understood to occur outside the US. This perception implicitly prevailed in
research programmes on terrorism initiated at the end of the 1960s at the RAND
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25
26 Corporation and within the CIA’s Office of Policy Research. These programmes
27 aimed at listing all ‘terrorist’ acts registered outside of the national territory. The
OO

28 CIA first issued the results of this research in 1976 in a document titled Inter-
29 national and Transnational Terrorism: Diagnosis and Prognosis. The produc-
30 tion of this document later became the responsibility of the Office for
31 Combating Terrorism of the State Department and is now a well-known annual
32 publication entitled Patterns of Global Terrorism.
33 These documents on terrorism drew a series of demarcations: first, between a
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34 relatively pacified national arena and a dangerous outside, and second, between
35 international terrorism and domestic terrorism. These divisions resonated with
36 the actors who had long governed the counter-terrorism state apparatus (and
37 more generally any state security apparatus in the Western world), and it is pre-
38 cisely these distinctions that are challenged by the various reforms initiated after
39 11 September 2001. From the early 1970s onwards, the structure of this counter-
40 terrorism state apparatus had been organized along those same traditional
41 demarcations, implemented by National Security Decisions (NSD) 30 and 207
42 respectively, which were issued in 1982 and 1986 by then-president Ronald
43 Reagan. These NSD designated the State Department as the lead agency for the
44 fight against international terrorism (i.e. terrorism occurring outside of the US),
45 the FBI as lead agency for the fight against domestic terrorism (i.e. terrorism
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138 P. Bonditti
occurring on the national ground), and the CIA as the lead agency for gathering 1
intelligence in relation to terrorism abroad. This reveals a mimetic relation 2
between the perceived threat and the counter-threat to be organized: the distinc- 3
tion established between international and domestic terrorism is mirrored by a 4
corresponding division between the entities of the state apparatus commissioned 5
to fight terrorism abroad and those tasked with fighting terrorism domestically. 6
The threat and the counter-threat are articulated on and within the spatial cat- 7
egories of sovereignty, and the mimetic relation that encompasses both of them 8
remained governed by the idea of the state and by the symbolic order of the line 9
taken as demarcation. 10
Another interesting aspect can be observed in this spatialization of the terror- 11
ist threat. It is particularly tangible when considering the State Department’s 12

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Patterns of Global Terrorism. This annual report aims at describing the evolu- 13
tion of so-called ‘terrorism’. On a statistical basis, the analysis is organized 14
around the main geographical areas (South America, Europe, Middle East, 15
Central Asia etc.) and identifies issues of major concern regarding political viol- 16
ence. During the 1980s, a hierarchy was established between them: the first three
ON 17
areas in order of importance were Europe, South America and the Middle East 18
until 1985; the Middle East, South America and Europe (the latter mainly as 19
affected by the ‘Middle East terrorism spillover’) in the late 1980s; and in the 20
1990s, the main focus was on the Middle East. A close reading of Patterns of 21
Global Terrorism reveals that the geographical space of terrorism progressively 22
moved from Europe to the ‘South’, and especially to the Middle East. In the 23
1980s, these analyses resonated with those developed within the Pentagon by 24
F

high-ranking military officials who were arguing for the necessity to adapt US 25
military forces to a new kind of war they called low-intensity conflicts (LIC) and 26
that were to be mainly located in the ‘unstable Third World’, or the ‘South’, 27
OO

which was perceived as being threatened by Soviet expansionist interests. In the 28

1980s, those high-ranking officials from the Pentagon reactivated the counter- 29
insurgency doctrine applied in Vietnam in the 1960s as part of the LIC doctrine, 30
in which counter-terrorism activities became one of the six fields of military 31
concern (Klare and Kornbluh 1987). 32
Taken together, those analyses drew the picture of a geographical shift that 33
PR

was supposed to correspond to a move from an ideological (Communism) to a 34

religious (Muslim) motivation of terrorism. This move was rendered possible by 35
a particular perception of transnational violence by US agencies that have long 36
tended to understand it as a tool of foreign policy. There was a tendency in the 37
late 1970s/early 1980s to accuse the USSR of being the main instigator of 38
worldwide terrorist attacks. From 1979, and under the requirement of the Export 39
Administration Act, the State Department identified so-called ‘State Sponsored 40
Terrorism’ in a list available in Patterns of Global Terrorism. Thus was institu- 41
tionalized a list of entities banned from the inter-state system because of their 42
support of ‘terrorism’. In addition to countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua or North 43
Korea, which were listed in the 1980s, four of the six states listed in 1990 were 44
Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya (in addition to Cuba and North 45
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1 Korea). These were subsequently designated as so-called ‘rogue states’, new
2 enemies of the free world in the globalized post-bipolar era of the 1990s. This
3 association between political violence and some particular states can be under-
4 stood as the product of the historical necessity that works with sovereignty. For
5 the military forces to be engaged in the fight against ‘terrorism’, the Pentagon
6 actually requires clear state enemies, just like the State Department requires
7 states to engage in a diplomatic process aiming at curbing political violence.
8 This is also our understanding of the designation of the Axis of Evil by President
9 George W. Bush after 11 September 2001 (see also Brunner, Chapter 7, this
10 volume).
11 Crucial evolutions within the Pentagon have to be considered in parallel to
12 the double move of the relocalization of the terrorist threat – from Europe to the

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13 Middle East, and from ideological to religion-based terrorism – that was
14 achieved by the promulgation of specific narratives. Two major military com-
15 mands were established within the Department of Defense in the 1980s: the
16 Central Command (USCENTCOM) and the Special Operations Command
17 (USSOCOM). USCENTCOM became the fourth geographical command in
ON
18 charge of the Middle East area. From the point of view of grand strategy, this
19 development marks a new concern for the Middle East. USSOCOM was created
20 to coordinate the special operations forces of the main US armed services (Air
21 Force, Navy, Marines and Army). It was to become the unified command of
22 smaller and more adaptive, highly trained and well-equipped forces that had
23 been built up in the 1950s and 1960s to face guerrillas and that were to intervene
24 in low-intensity conflicts later in the 1980s.
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25 The implementation of this new command in 1986 furthered a fundamental

26 strategic evolution that can be interpreted as the discretization of the battlefield.5
27 The discretization of the battlefield had been initiated within the Army during
OO

28 the 1950s in the Special Warfare Doctrine, which challenged the traditional
29 representation of war governed by the idea of a single linear frontline. This
30 representation still prevailed during the bipolar era, with a major front envisaged
31 in Europe against the military forces of the Warsaw Pact. At the turn of the
32 1990s, the Lake Doctrine marked a new step in this move by envisaging the
33 conduct of operations in not just one but two (and then four) major war theatres
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34 simultaneously in different parts of the world. As we will see, narratives on

35 Network Centric Warfare and Force Transformation later in the 1990s would
36 mark another step in the discretization of the front.
37
38
Deterritorializing the threat and re-organizing the collective self-
39
defence apparatus of the state
40
41 A second move is to be observed in those accounts that have attempted to
42 define, qualify and spatialize the terrorist threat. This is especially the case, even
43 if not exclusively, in Congressional hearings and reports by the representatives
44 of intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies (especially CIA and FBI).
45 Those accounts of the terrorist threat tend to deterritorialize it. This does not
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140 P. Bonditti
mean that it is removed from Euclidian space, but rather that these narratives re- 1
inscribed the threat in the mechanisms of the social order. They put the emphasis 2
on networks that allegedly linked terrorist cells dispersed around the world. In 3
addition to the list of ‘state-sponsored terrorism’, a list of terrorist organizations 4
has been issued annually since 1996 in a specific section. Narratives on violent 5
activities orchestrated by the USSR, the opposing force of the US during the 6
bipolar era, progressively merge into narratives on the threat of Muslim extrem- 7
ism embodied in the al-Qaida network, the networked antagonist of the state 8
apparatus claiming a monopoly on legitimate violence on a specific territory. 9
Since then, the geographical space is not necessarily and inevitably the tool 10
through which the terrorist threat can be apprehended. The rationality and 11
imagery of the network thus spread, informing the narratives about the ‘terrorist’ 12

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threat with the image of globalization. 13
During the 1990s, and particularly from the mid-1990s onwards, the rationale 14
of the network was extended and reinforced by the association progressively 15
established between terrorism and technology. Since then, the representation of 16
the threat has no longer only been geographical and informed by the territorial
ON 17
imagery rooted in the fifteenth century (Walker 1991), but by the technical 18
imagery governed by speed, invoking different spatial and temporal coordinates. 19
This later move not only articulates the threat against the structure of geographi- 20
cal borders, but also against that of computerized systems, which cause this 21
double characteristic to be both rooted in the physical order (servers, hard 22
drives, memory sticks, routers, detectors, captors, acquisition stations, scanners, 23
digital cameras located in buildings dispersed across multiple locations) and 24
F

completely emancipated from it at the same time. These systems actually gener- 25
ate non-Euclidian spaces of exchange and communication in which packets of 26
digital data circulate with high speed. Likewise, the terrorist threat consists not 27
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only of networked dispersed cells of people. In narratives and reports, the threat 28
of political violence is actualized in two different forms: the now almost clas- 29
sical ones like bombings, and the ones directed against the computer system as 30
such, like virus attacks. The idea that the US as a sovereign state, as well as its 31
citizens, being coextensive biological entities of the nation, is confronted by 32
transnational political violence exclusively outside of the national territory, is 33
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seriously challenged. Analysis of terrorism, driven by an ontology of the worst- 34

case scenario, now oscillates between the bacteriological threat and that of an 35
‘electronic Pearl Harbor’. 36
These developments are part of a wider evolution in the perception of threat 37
by security agencies that are increasingly taking into account the digital element. 38
In the early 1980s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Depart- 39
ment of Justice implemented the Lookout System to filter immigration to the 40
US, while the Department of State was setting up the TIPOFF programme. 41
Later, the FBI established the Computer Analysis and Response Team (CART), 42
and later in the 1990s set up the Critical Investigations and Infrastructure Threat 43
Assessment (CIITAT). It also developed computer-based surveillance pro- 44
grammes such as the Omnivore programme, regularly issued ‘Cyber notes’, and 45
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1 actively participated in the elaboration of a new category of crime: cyber-crime.
2 The military, which had been developing its own cybernetics strategies since the
3 end of the 1960s and the early years of the Defense Advanced Research
4 Program Agency (DARPA), uses its own idiosyncratic vocabulary, which is
5 centred on Information and Cybernetic Warfare. Both of these were developed
6 in addition to older types of warfare like Transnational Infrastructure Warfare
7 (TIW), Asymmetric Warfare and Asynchronous Warfare, all of which were
8 steps toward the current developments in Network Centric Warfare. In this
9 context, CIP became an issue of national security (see Dunn Cavelty, Chapter 2,
10 this volume). In 1998, following Presidential Directives 38 and 63, the National
11 Infrastructure Protection Center was set up within the FBI and a ‘National Coor-
12 dinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism’ was

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13 appointed. The following year, the White House issued Defending American
14 Cyberspace. The notion of cyber-attacks directed against digital systems co-
15 exists in the discourse with concepts of more conventional attacks directed
16 against critical infrastructures, seen here as technical support and structures of
17 ‘cyberspace’, which is conceived as consisting of waves and cables.
ON
18 But the threat that was actualized on 11 September 2001 was not at all like
19 the one that had been postulated in the previous years. The attacks consisted not
20 of an ‘Electronic Pearl Harbor’, nor of a bacteriological attack, but of three
21 hijacked planes that crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. In this
22 sense, a threat is always something potential, something virtual that finds a first
23 actualization in the linguistic and textual/verbal order (see also Conway, Chapter
24 5, this volume and Der Derian and Finkelstein, Chapter 4, this volume). This
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25 must be what then-secretary of defence Les Aspin meant in 1993 when he

26 wrote: ‘Every war that the United States has fought has been different from the
27 last, and different from what defense planners had envisioned’ (Aspin 1993). All
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28 claims about the source, the form, and the space of ‘terrorism’ after 11 Septem-
29 ber 2001 have accelerated and deepened these trends of de-territorialization and
30 ‘technologization’ of the threat that I have tried to highlight above. But the co-
31 existence of these two narratives implies the articulation of two different spatio-
32 temporal conceptions: the first one governed by fixity, geographical territory and
33 the skeleton of geographical borders in which lines work as lines of demarca-
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34 tion; the other governed by mobility/fluidity, the particular space of technology

35 made of digital bytes, the proper skeleton of computerized systems made of
36 cables and waves in which lines work as junction enabling the point as the
37 primary location for the exercise of the sovereign authority. It is at the cross-
38 roads of these two images that the current (re-)configuration process of the US
39 national counter-terrorism apparatus is to be located.
40
41
Organizing the defence of the homeland in the digital age:
42
networking the state apparatus and protecting cyberspace
43
44 The various National Security Strategy documents published by the White
45 House over the last five years, both individually and collectively, still bear
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142 P. Bonditti
witness to this historical and continuing pattern of spatialization and territorial- 1
ization of the threat. Like Patterns of Global Terrorism and the military doc- 2
trines, they give powerful expression to the permanent and continuous attempt to 3
articulate the threat. This pattern includes a discontinuous space that is to be 4
secured and is now centred on the geographical homeland extended beyond its 5
‘smart borders’ by its citizens, soldiers, civilian infrastructures, military bases 6
abroad, and by cyberspace. These new national security strategies entail signific- 7
ant and worrying transformations for the US administration due to the concern 8
for homeland security. 9
The notion of homeland security is not a new one. It had already surfaced in 10
various political arenas during the 1990s in relation to the diminished efficiency 11
of borders – here understood as the historical regulative technology of flows of 12

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people and goods. But the strong perception of the American territory as an 13
inviolate sanctuary had relegated these debates to the political background until 14
the conception was violently destroyed on 11 September 2001, after which it 15
was replaced by a perception of the nation’s territory as being extremely 16
vulnerable (see also Brunner, Chapter 7, this volume). Today, homeland secur-
ON 17
ity can be regarded as the protective dimension of the global US strategy 18
pursued in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. Defined as ‘a concerted 19
national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the US, reduce America’s vul- 20
nerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that 21
do occur’ (Office of the Homeland Security 2002: 2), homeland security as a 22
concept is the result of a focus on the vulnerability of the US that surfaced 23
under the Clinton administration. Homeland security is now the responsibility 24
F

of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which became the first major 25
bureaucracy in the world specifically commissioned to respond to uncertainty 26
and emergency. The DHS has been justified by the necessity to improve the 27
OO

protection of the national territory and the population through better 28

coordination of the agencies involved in this task. It is the result of an ‘exten- 29
sive rationalization’ of the activities aimed at reducing the vulnerability of the 30
US. It is extensive in that the territory is not only geographical, consisting of 31
soil, air and water, but also made up of cables and waves transporting digital 32
data and supported by integrated computer networks: the critical infrastructures 33
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of the digital age. This extensive rationalization operates on the underlying 34

logic of anticipation that fundamentally alters the modalities of sovereign 35
power in controlling people (pro-active policing, remote control, surveillance) 36
and in making war (pre-emptive war). 37
38
39
Integrating military force: transformation and the new modalities of
40
war
41
The changes in the US apparatus of national defense to adapt to the contempor- 42
ary necessities of protecting the homeland in the digital age are particularly 43
telling when trying to understand the adaptations as corresponding to narratives 44
about US territorial vulnerability and catastrophic terrorism. Two examples of 45
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1 these adaptations are the reorganization of the Unified Command Plan at the
2 Pentagon with the creation of a fifth geographical command, Northern
3 Command (NORTHCOM) in April 2002, and the creation of the Marines
4 Special Operation Command (MARSOC) within USSOCOM. NORTHCOM is
5 now in charge of the North American geographical area. It is responsible for the
6 territorial, aerospace and maritime defences of the US. It commands US forces
7 that operate within the territory of the US in support of civil authorities and act
8 as a coordinating organ. It is the agency, within the Pentagon, where the military
9 dimensions of homeland security activities (homeland defence) are conceived,
10 implemented and coordinated. It is presented as ‘an integral part of the rapidly
11 expanding interagency network supporting Homeland Defense’ (Myers 2003)
12 and is evidence of a powerful military investment in the defence of the national

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13 territory.
14 MARSOC is the major command of the Marine Special Forces. Its location
15 within the USSOCOM not only re-establishes a balance in the power struggle
16 between USSOCOM and the US Marine Corps. It is also a further step in the
17 reconceptualization of warfare. Established specifically to wage unconventional
ON
18 warfare in the 1950s, the Special Forces are now envisaged as the basis of non-
19 linear armies. The creation of MARSOC is a prime example of the long trend of
20 US military force transformation that works with an evolving perception of con-
21 flicts and war. It has to be understood in relation to the discretization of the front
22 mentioned above and the doctrinal adaptations known as Force Transformation,
23 which aim to integrate forces into a synchronous military apparatus. Trans-
24 formation is not an objective, but a method, the implementation process of the
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25 Revolution in Military Affairs. Supported by the Office of the Secretary of

26 Defense, the doctrine was developed by high-ranking military officers in the
27 second half of the 1990s (Cebrowski and Garstka 1998). It shows the move from
OO

28 a conception of war in terms of Platform Centric Warfare to a vision in terms of

29 Network Centric Warfare in which the linear front is substituted by potential
30 ‘points of confrontation’. Instantaneity and simultaneity are the keywords of
31 transformation, which puts information and the idea of networked forces at the
32 very heart of military strategies and tactics. It aims at ensuring that information
33 surfacing in a point p of the networked US military forces engaged in a theatre
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34 of war be instantaneously available in every point of the network. Today, this

35 programme intriguingly resonates with narratives on the new worldwide terrorist
36 enemy: ‘the Al-Qaida network is adaptive, flexible, and arguably more agile
37 than we are’ (Jacoby 2003: 3), which makes ‘the War on Terror a war against
38 networks and not nations’ (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs
39 2005). The underlying logic of the Pentagon is to network military forces in
40 order to better protect the homeland against a networked enemy. It challenges
41 scales and induces a progressive de-differentiation of strategy and tactics. It
42 makes a central and absolute necessity of gathering, keeping and providing rele-
43 vant information so as to make it instantaneously available on a large scale. This
44 necessity also drives the transformation of the intelligence community for the
45 particular purpose of the protection of the homeland.
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144 P. Bonditti
Integrating intelligence: information and the homogenization of 1
modalities of control and surveillance 2
3
Intelligence has always been perceived as the primary tool for the fight against
4
terrorism. Since the beginning of the 1970s, it was presented as the means of
5
gathering information so as to facilitate efficient protection against the terrorist
6
threat. Following the intelligence logic, being efficient when dealing with a
7
threat means being able to act before the threat is actualized. Therefore, the fun-
8
damental aim of the intelligence logic is anticipation. Because 11 September
9
2001 revealed the inability of the US intelligence community to deal with the 10
terrorist threat appropriately, the main issue now is that information-sharing 11
should make it possible for the relevant agency to anticipate and act in time. The 12

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Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to 13
Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act has eliminated judicial 14
control over intelligence activities and broken down the barriers between law 15
enforcement and intelligence established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveil- 16
lance Act (FISA) in 1978 (Cole and Dempsey 2002: 159–65). The integration of
ON 17
the FBI’s counter-intelligence and counter-terrorist divisions under a single 18
heading, the various bureaucratic units built up to bring together agents from the 19
various agencies of the intelligence community (like the NCTC), and the focus 20
on upgrading information technology are among the many measures recently 21
adopted to improve information-sharing. The keywords of these transformations 22
are information and integration. The circulation of information now has to be 23
ensured through the integration of bureaucracy, which is to be achieved through 24
two main avenues: the creation of coordination units and the upgrading of
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25
information technology. 26
27
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The reform of the intelligence community initiated after 11 September 2001 28

aimed at silencing power struggles by the creation of a new power position 29
above them. Indeed, the new director of National Intelligence, a position 30
until now occupied by the director of the CIA, currently reports directly to 31
the White House. This restructuring of the intelligence community with the 32
creation of a new superordinate power position also gives strong 33
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coordination prerogatives to the DNI and to key units such as the National 34
Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC). The NCTC is a mixed structure com- 35
posed of agents from the agencies of the intelligence community, including 36
the FBI, the CIA, the DHS, and the intelligence agencies of the DoD 37
(National Security Agency (NSA); Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); 38
National Geospatial Agency (NGA)). It now serves, in its own words, as the 39
primary organization in the United States Government for integrating and 40
analyzing all intelligence pertaining to terrorism possessed or acquired by 41
the United States Government (except purely domestic terrorism); as the 42
central and shared knowledge bank on terrorism information; it provides all- 43
source intelligence support to government-wide counterterrorism activities; 44
it establishes the information technology (IT) systems and architectures 45
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1 within the NCTC and between the NCTC and other agencies that enable
2 access to, as well as integration, dissemination, and use of terrorism
3 information.
4 (NCTC 2007)
5
6 The NCTC is the first modality through which integration is to be rendered oper-
7 ative: the setting up of close cooperation between agents whose daily work is
8 organized by and within a single coordination structure.
9 The other modality is the upgrading of information technology through which
10 these agents not only work together, but also share access to the same databases.
11 Within the NCTC, agents from the FBI, the CIA, the DHS and the DoD have
12 access to ‘NCTC online’, a classified repository which hosts 6,000 users and six

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13 million documents, and is used by over 60 contributing departments and agen-
14 cies. Within the DHS, the DHS Operation Center manages the HSIN, a com-
15 puter-based counter-terrorism communications system connecting all 50 states,
16 five territories, Washington, DC, and 50 major urban areas. The FBI has also
17 developed a new ‘Top Secret/Secret Compartmental Information (SCI)’ network
ON
18 known as ‘SCION’ which connects FBI headquarters and field offices to the
19 CIA and other members of the intelligence community (Office of the Inspector
20 General 2004). The use of such technical systems makes the question of their
21 compatibility a primary issue, which has caused the FBI to work in close rela-
22 tion with the DHS chief information officer while implementing its own
23 systems, and also to choose the ‘Oracle 9i Relational Database’ to make it com-
24 patible with the CIA systems (FBI 2005: 45). For eight of the major US admin-
F

25 istration networks, the DHS is also developing the Homeland Secure Data
26 Network (HSDN) connected to the Pentagon secured network (SIPRNET). The
27 HSDN is intended to facilitate secure sharing of classified information that
OO

28 would provide instantaneous knowledge at every point of a progressively net-

29 worked administration (GAO 2004).
30 While considering the upgrading of the information focus, particular atten-
31 tion should also be paid to such agencies as DARPA or the NSA. DARPA is
32 the central research and development organization of the DoD. It developed the
33 controversial Terrorism Information Awareness Program (TIA, initially called
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34 Total Information Awareness). TIA research and development efforts are sup-
35 posed to
36
37 demonstrate that some or all of the tools under development really do con-
38 tribute to the successful accomplishment of the counterterrorism mission –
39 in particular, dramatically improve the predictive assessments of the plans,
40 intentions, or capabilities of terrorists or terrorists groups. If successful, TIA
41 and its components tools would . . . enable ad hoc groups to form quickly
42 within and across agency boundaries to bring relevant data, diverse points
43 of view and experience to bear in solving the complex problems with coun-
44 tering terrorism.
45 (Poindexter 2003)
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146 P. Bonditti
The NSA is the Pentagon’s cryptology organization. It ‘must live on the network 1
to perform both its offensive and defensive mission’ (NSA/CSS 2000: 31). It is 2
currently in charge of the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), as part of which it 3
wiretaps the phone and e-mail communications of US citizens within the US. Such 4
surveillance programmes, informed by the vision of total technological control, 5
redesign the modalities through which intelligence-gathering is conducted. They 6
reinforce the move from Human Intelligence (HUMINT) to Technological Intelli- 7
gence (TECHINT), seriously challenging the inside/outside paradigm and the pro- 8
tection of individual privacy. But they also actively promote turning cyberspace 9
itself into a surveillance tool. The latter is becoming a digital area that needs to be 10
permanently scrutinized in search of suspicious communications and that also con- 11
tains databases full of information that security agencies gather on individuals 12

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while pretending to protect territory and populations. 13
14
15
Protecting the homeland: securing cyberspace
16
The protection of the nation is the main mission of the DHS. Among others
ON 17
tasks, such as the management of activities in case of natural catastrophes, the 18
DHS is in charge of collecting, treating and disseminating relevant information 19
about threats against the homeland. It manages border control (through the TSA 20
and the BCP), immigration policy (in close relation with the DoS and the FBI), 21
and the protection of critical infrastructures. Within the scope of its border 22
control and immigration control missions, the DHS also relies heavily on data- 23
bases in the three major programmes it manages. The first one of these, the 24
F

Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPSII), is a limited, 25

automated pre-screening system of passengers. The second one, the National 26
Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), establishes a national reg- 27
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istry for temporary foreign visitors (non-immigrant aliens) arriving from certain 28
countries, or who meet a combination of intelligence-based criteria, and are 29
identified as presenting an elevated national security concern. The programme 30
collects detailed information about the background and purpose of an indi- 31
vidual’s visit to the US, the periodic verification of their location and activities, 32
and departure confirmation. The third one, the US VISIT programme, is ‘a con- 33
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tinuum of security measures that begins overseas and continues through arrival 34
and departure from the United States to ensure the person crossing our border is 35
the same person who received the visa’ (DHS 2007). Through its Bureau of 36
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the DHS also conducts pro- 37
grammes such as the Student and Exchange Visitor System (SEVIS), and 38
through the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, which focuses on the 39
transit of people and goods across the border, it administers the personal data on 40
passengers (PNR) flying to the US and coming from the EU. 41
The combined analysis of the DoS and the DHS is very revealing in consider- 42
ing the main hypothesis of this chapter: that a progressive networking and re- 43
spatialization of the US anti-terrorism state apparatus is underway in order to 44
protect the territory ‘from a distance’. Through the Antiterrorism Assistance 45
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Homeland security through traceability 147

1 Program, which was established in the 1980s to train civilian security and law
2 enforcement personnel from friendly governments in police procedures that deal
3 with terrorism, the DoS now ‘helps with the implementation of biometric identi-
4 fication systems’.6 As one of the oldest agencies involved in counter-terrorism
5 and in immigration control, the DoS has progressively developed a large
6 panoply of programmes to control mobility at a distance. Through its wide-
7 spread network of employees, the DoS issues visas and manages the Consular
8 Consolidated Databases, the TIPPOFF Program and the Terrorist Interdiction
9 Program. It participates, both within and beyond the territory of the US, in the
10 accumulation of a massive reservoir of computerized knowledge on people
11 going to or simply passing through the US.
12 All of these developments work together in the US with reinforced visa pol-

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13 icies and new technological insights that support this logic of defending the
14 homeland. Here, biometry establishes the crucial link between the two skeletons
15 of the geographical borders and of computer systems, between the control of
16 people in a specific location and the digital databases in which referent identities
17 are registered, and to which the agencies are connected. These systems draw the
ON
18 lines of a multilevel assemblage of control over people; a control that allows the
19 enforcement of spatial demarcations by linking distant points of control through
20 the network of databases that work with biometrics. It is in this sense that the
21 term ‘globalized control’ must be understood. This illusion works on the
22 assumption that permanent control of people attempting to enter and exit a terri-
23 tory generates knowledge as to who precisely is inside. The complex computer-
24 based systems and huge digital databases containing information on people
F

25 allow for simultaneity in the act of controlling and the enforcement of sovereign
26 decisions. At the core of these developments are networked computer systems
27 that are fast becoming the most crucial tool through which the state security
OO

28 apparatus now protects territories and populations from the ‘new’, equally net-
29 worked terrorist threat. Those computer systems are entirely part of cyberspace
30 as the wired site of accumulation and conservation of the digitalized state know-
31 ledge on people. For this reason, cyberspace itself requires protection first and is
32 called on to become its own tool of protection (Bonditti 2004). The DHS now
33 also has the mission of integrating and securing the 34 major computer networks
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34 of the US administration, which are also considered part of the homeland. This
35 vision of a cyberspace to be secured first establishes a hierarchical relation
36 between the security of the homeland and that of cyberspace (Bonditti 2004;
37 Dillon 2003), the security of the latter becoming the condition of the security of
38 the first. Cyberspace becomes the most critical of critical infrastructures, being
39 in turn both part of, and differentiated from, the territorial homeland. Security by
40 traceability can only be achieved by mastering and securing cyberspace.
41
42
Conclusion
43
44 The above has described the forms of US counter-terrorism efforts, and these
45 forms actually mirror the state’s own description of terrorism. In other words,
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148 P. Bonditti
the counter-terrorism state apparatus is itself making a networking move. It is 1
connected to – and dependent upon – computerized networks, tasked with the 2
protection of the homeland at a distance and legitimized by a narrative on terror- 3
ism as a networked enemy. Therefore, homeland security is not just the reactiva- 4
tion of the symbolic and affective roots of patriotism in the US. It is a strong 5
sociological reality connected to a strange form of ‘overwhelming retreat’. It is 6
overwhelming in that the national space to be secured is not just geographical, 7
but also embodied in computerized networks and informational spaces of 8
exchange that need to be protected. It is overwhelming because the will to 9
protect these territories/spaces activates mechanisms to control people, through 10
efforts that are not only actualized within or at the limits of these territories, but 11
on a global scale. It also redesigns the modalities of war, now conceived as pre- 12

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emptive. It reflects a retreat in that it relocalizes and respatializes the collective 13
self, (re-)defining its limits while defining those of the homeland, and transform- 14
ing the border into a set of globally dispersed points, an ensemble of biometric 15
checkpoints. It creates possibilities for global traceability; a traceability aimed at 16
controlling potential realities in order to better anticipate their actuality. This
ON 17
works with a kind of politics progressively organized along the symbolic order 18
of the point of control (the discretization of the ‘front’ in warfare and the dis- 19
cretization of the border), to succeed the order following the line of 20
demarcation. 21
All these developments – which are to be observed in the US, but are also 22
partially visible in Europe – can be reinscribed in Foucault’s wider analysis of 23
the historical move of Western societies from a territorial pact to a security pact 24
F

between the state and the population. This slow drift draws on three successive 25
historical sequences. The first is one in which the state of justice is born from a 26
feudal territoriality where the crucial role of law and power is codified as the 27
OO

power to kill. The second sequence characterizes the administrative state that 28
surfaced during fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, marked by its administrative 29
regulations and the territoriality of sovereignty. The third sequence appeared at 30
the turn of the seventeenth century with the state of government and the ‘secur- 31
ity dispositifs’ as primary mechanisms of power and power codified as the 32
power ‘to make live’. The governmentalized state is not only defined by its terri- 33
PR

toriality, nor only by its administrative apparatus, but equally by the living popu- 34
lation with both volume and density which it manages in its biological 35
determinant. In each of these historical periods, power has operated through dif- 36
ferent techniques: mainly legal and juridictional techniques for the first one, dis- 37
ciplinary techniques for the second, and techniques of security for the third. This 38
is not to say, as Foucault explains, that security techniques have replaced the 39
techniques of discipline, which in turn have replaced the legal and juridictional 40
mechanisms. Foucault distinguishes the mechanisms or techniques from the 41
political technologies, so that in attempting to catch those transformations, all 42
these singular mechanisms tell particular stories. However, they simultaneously 43
tell the wider story of how they have come to work together, each of these sin- 44
gular mechanisms integrating and (re)activating, in their own logic, different 45
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Homeland security through traceability 149

1 elements of the others. As for the mechanisms, Foucault analysed those of cellu-
2 lar confinement – hospitals, barracks, industrial firms, prisons and schools – to
3 observe disciplinary effects of power. While considering current political tech-
4 nologies, the challenge is to observe a network so as to decipher how various
5 techniques work together, how they resonate with one another, and how the acti-
6 vation of one particular technique induces adaptations in the others.
7 The move described by Foucault from a territorial to a security pact works
8 through a process of nomadization, which is the reverse process of the sedenta-
9 rization process that gave rise to the territorial pact (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).
10 It is a move that tends to allow for mobility and even nomadism, but under the
11 condition of the security of flows (flows of people, goods and capital) that are
12 vital to capitalism and increasingly secured through the technology of traceabil-

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13 ity. It is thus no surprise if the major figure of the threat is now presented in the
14 particular form of the network, and it is no surprise that the modalities of the
15 counter-threat are now progressively networked. These elements do not work
16 univocally, however. There is strong resistance to this move, which explains
17 why the terrorist threat can still be territorialized in some narratives (rogue
ON
18 states, state-sponsored terrorism, ‘Axis of Evil’), while being deterritorialized in
19 others (networked terrorist cells) and even abstracted from the geographic coor-
20 dinates (cyberterrorism). Two main political rationalities hang in the balance
21 here: the traditional and historical Western one on the one hand, in which lines
22 primarily work as demarcations (borders), and the technological one on the
23 other, in which lines primarily work as junctions. This is what we have to
24 observe and understand in order to catch the meaning of what Foucault called
F

25 ‘security societies’ (Foucault 2004: 12), in which critical infrastructure, espe-

26 cially computer systems, are seen as the central nervous system. Critical
27 information infrastructure expresses both the potential and the actual, the territo-
OO

28 rialized and the deterritorialized. It is located at the conjunction between the ter-
29 ritorial and the security governmentalities of Foucault. This is what we have to
30 analyse to understand what is progressively replacing disciplinary societies that
31 are going through a critical historical sequence (Deleuze 2003b: 246). While
32 Western human institutions structured in the particular form of closed entities –
33 from the state itself to the psychiatric hospital – which enact political demarca-
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34 tions delineating the inside from the outside, the normal from the abnormal, the
35 threatened from the threat, the identical from the different, are imploding every-
36 where, we think such a perspective will help to grasp the actualization of what
37 has historically been discussed as security, and from which counter-terrorism
38 efforts based on and in close relation with CIP policies are now proliferating.
39
40 Notes
41
42 1 My thanks to Andrew Neal and Chris Findlay for turning the chapter from virtual to
actual English and to Christian Olsson for the permanent and stimulating discussion.
43 2 Michel Foucault (1975) in an interview with Roger Pol Droit: ‘I am a bomb demolition
44 expert (artificier). I built something that ultimately serves for a siege, a war, destruc-
45 tion. I am not for destruction, but I defend the idea that one should be able to go
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150 P. Bonditti
through, to go ahead, that one should be able to make the walls crumble’ [my transla- 1
tion]. 2
3 My translation; for an alternative translation, see Foucault et al. (1998).
3
4 This definition has been introduced by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of
1978. 4
5 In mathematics, ‘discretisation concerns the process of transferring continuous models 5
and equations into discrete counterparts. This process is usually carried out as a first 6
step toward making them suitable for numerical evaluation and implementation on 7
digital computers’ (see Wikipedia, 2007, s.v. ‘discretisation’).
8
6 Interview with a high-ranking official of the State Department (November 2003): ‘all
our efforts are now guided by the worry to catch the threat before it reaches the 9
national territory’. 10
11
12

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Security, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 46–87.
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22
23
24
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25
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7 The gendered narratives of

homeland security
Anarchy at the front door makes home
a haven
Elgin M. Brunner

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It is commonly acknowledged in both theory and practice that the logic of secur-
ity is undergoing significant change. The longstanding and inherently binary
organizing principles of security are under pressure or even in the process of dis-
solving. It is increasingly difficult to unambiguously identify both the enemy
and the subject of security, to distinguish between civilian and military tools and
ON
targets, to separate peace from war and defensive from offensive means, and to
assure civil liberties as well as to provide protection from potential terrorist
attacks. Most fundamentally – and cutting across all these elements – the delin-
eation between the inside and the outside is crumbling. From these observations,
the following question arises: if ‘security politics is located right on the border
between inside and outside and is therefore involved in keeping the distinction’
(Hansen 1997: 329), what does it mean for the politics of security that the delin-
F

eation between inside and outside is becoming increasingly volatile? Specifi-

cally, and in the context of this volume, how are such efforts crystallized in what
can be called the politics of securing the homeland?
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It is another commonplace observation that dichotomous organizing prin-

ciples that have traditionally been constitutive of discourses and practices of
security, statehood and identity are pervasively gendered. They reinforce mutual
hostilities through gendered and radicalized depictions of friend and foe
(Tickner 2002), they generate support on the ‘home front’ and motivate soldiers
for combat (Goldstein 2001), they warrant ‘differentiated forms of carnage and
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destruction’ (Milliken and Sylvan 1996: 323), they prevent gendered insecurities
from being noticed as either the consequence of an incapacity to voice insecurity
or as the consequence of the intimate inter-linkage between the subject’s gen-
dered identity and other aspects of its identity, such as religion (Hansen 2000).
However, if – as a consequence of the changing setting of security becoming
manifest in the politics of securing the homeland – these dichotomies are break-
ing down, one could expect that the resulting ‘new’ security discourses and
practices would simultaneously undergo change as regards their gendered under-
pinnings. In the following, we will examine whether that is in fact the case.
Based on the combination of these two sets of problems, the analysis under-
taken in this chapter strives to answer two related sets of questions. First, how
are the characteristics of the changing logic of security manifested in the US
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154 E.M. Brunner

narratives constitutive of the practices that aim to reestablish ‘homeland secur- 1
ity’ in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001? 2
Related to this question, the chapter will enquire how the commonly assumed 3
erosion of the conceptual boundaries between inside and outside, civil and mili- 4
tary, peace and war, normal and exceptional is discernible in the speeches advo- 5
cating the major recent institutional change undertaken in order to secure the US 6
homeland, namely the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 7
This chapter thus looks at one defining moment in the history of critical infra- 8
structure protection (CIP), understood broadly as a central part of ‘homeland 9
security’. This helps us to understand how CIP is situated in the wider discourse 10
of homeland security and how ‘9/11’ as a defining moment has shaped the direc- 11
tion of CIP. Second, this chapter will discuss whether the changing logic of 12

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security transforms its gendered underpinnings to become less virulent. It will 13
attempt to establish whether and how these narratives draw on gendered tropes, 14
and whether and how they rely on, refer to, and thereby instantiate stereotypical 15
conceptions of gender and power. It is the contention of the chapter that the 16
argumentative interlocking of the official ‘9/11’ narrative with the discursive
ON 17
endorsement of the DHS moves the ‘new’ practices of security into the domestic 18
space while drawing on ‘old’ gender stereotypes. 19
On the one hand, the current transformation of the practices of security is 20
widely recognized, and a wide range of theoretical and practical attempts are 21
being undertaken to cope with this development – as shown in the contributions 22
in this volume. On the other hand, the gendered aspects of this discourse have 23
not yet come under widespread scrutiny, and the extant analyses (e.g. Young 24
F

2003; Hunt and Rygiel 2006; Shepherd 2006) remain relatively marginalized, 25
notwithstanding the pervasive importance of gender issues for societal security 26
narratives. A particularly striking example of the latter is this extract from an 27
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editorial of the Wall Street Journal: 28

29
. . . men are back . . . I am speaking of masculine men . . . Men who are 30
welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen . . . we are 31
experiencing a new respect for their physical courage, for strength and for 32
the willingness to use both for the good of others . . . I think that sense is 33
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coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very 34
good for our country. Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts 35
plus brains and spirit win wars. 36
(Noonan 2001, emphasis added) 37
38
Such stories often go unnoticed and unexamined in the mainstream debate about 39
the politics of securing the homeland. Moreover, in the unfolding of the so- 40
called homeland security discourse after 11 September 2001, the constitutive 41
productivity of discourse – the endowment of the world with meaning – or, as 42
defined by Fairclough, ‘the text’s [and/or speeches’ . . .] effects upon . . . people 43
(beliefs, attitudes, etc.), actions, social relations, and the material world’ (2003: 44
8), also remains relatively unappreciated. Therefore, it is apposite to analyse 45
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Gendered narratives of homeland security 155

1 how the narratives of ‘9/11’ link to the practices of homeland security, and what
2 logic is followed by the discursively created meanings of the homeland security
3 concept.
4 Hence, this contribution undertakes a discourse analysis of the high-level
5 policy-narratives of ‘9/11’ and of the endorsement of the DHS. It aspires to
6 unmask some of the gendered constructions within the early stories about the
7 securing of the homeland. Due to the constitutive consequentiality of discourse,
8 such an analysis enables us to make propositions about the gendered practices of
9 homeland security. If, as Gregory holds, ‘the mistake that logocentrism makes is
10 in not seeing the cultural contingency of its philosophical categories’ (1989: xvi)
11 that makes ‘meaning’ a dynamic process, it is argued that this mistake further
12 includes the refusal to see the androcentric contingency of these very categories.

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13 Therefore, it is the aim of this chapter to ‘expose the constructed, but [suppos-
14 edly] effective, character of masculine hegemony’ (Zalewski 1998: 5) in the dis-
15 cursive construction of the practices of homeland security between the
16 immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001 and the creation of the DHS. Such
17 an analysis of ‘discourses as systems of meaning production’ (Shepherd 2006:
ON
18 20) is suitable for unmasking one of the intimate linkages between ‘storytelling’
19 and the practices of power. While this link is at the core of patriarchy and its
20 reproduction, it also points to the contingency of the latter. Sharing with Kris-
21 tensen (Chapter 3, this volume) the observation that security practices are shift-
22 ing into society, this contribution focuses on how gendered narratives are in fact
23 underpinning this very move and thereby proposes a complementary insight to
24 the ‘important consequences for how to make security strategies’. The difference
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25 to Kristensen’s contribution is that this chapter looks at how the ‘external’ and
26 the allusion to the overwhelming threat of terrorism is used to push for ‘internal’
27 measures securing ‘the homeland’, whereas Kristensen looks at the domestic
OO

28 CIP discourse. Thus, in a way, the two are complementary: the external dis-
29 course is a pre-condition for what Kristensen looks at.
30 The chapter first briefly establishes the empirical setting of the changing poli-
31 tics of homeland security, in order to develop the appropriate analytical tools,
32 namely the concepts of discursive agency and of gender. Against this theoretical
33 backdrop, the second section reconstructs in a compact manner the two separate
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34 bodies of narrative evidence under scrutiny: the discourses establishing the

35 ‘9/11’ story and those endorsing the DHS. The third section analyses how these
36 narratives are argumentatively interlocked and how they draw on gendered con-
37 structions. In the context of this argument, it becomes evident that many binaries
38 of the security logic are crumbling, while the gendered underpinnings of the
39 same very logic are strengthened. This allows us to conclude that the securitiza-
40 tion of the political space ‘inside’ rests on gendered dichotomies. In other words,
41 the attempt to effectively ‘manage’ the crumbling of the other dichotomies does
42 depoliticize the problematization of gender.
43
44
45
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156 E.M. Brunner

The setting of homeland security politics, discursive agency, 1
and gender 2
3
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks and the shocking experience
4
of crucial vulnerability within the nation’s borders, homeland security as a 5
keyword and concept gained a highly politicized profile in the US almost 6
overnight.1 On 20 September 2001, the president, in his seminal ‘freedom and 7
fear at war’ speech (Bush 2001i), announced the creation of the Office of 8
Homeland Security (OHS) and the appointment of Pennsylvania Governor 9
Tom Ridge as its director in order to improve the security of the US homeland. 10
Ridge was sworn in three weeks later to head the institution that was respons- 11
ible for ‘the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the 12

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United States from terrorist threats and attacks’ (Bush 2001k). In July 2002, 13
the National Strategy for Homeland Security elaborated by the OHS was ready 14
for publication. While the president in his preface alleges that ‘the need for 15
homeland security is not tied solely to today’s terrorist threat’ (Bush 2002c), it 16
is nevertheless precisely this terrorist threat that forges the document’s stra-
ON 17
tegic objectives: first, to prevent terrorist attacks within the US; second, to 18
reduce the vulnerability of the US to terrorism; and third, to minimize the 19
damage and allow the nation to recover as quickly as possible from attacks that 20
do occur (OHS 2002). Hence, as a consequence of ‘9/11’, the focus of provid- 21
ing security at home shifted almost entirely towards protection from terrorism. 22
One year after the attacks had occurred, the OHS was merged into the DHS, 23
which was created by the Homeland Security Act 2002 (White House 2002). In 24
F

parallel to the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council was 25
established. 26
The creation of the Department of Homeland Security can indeed be regarded 27
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as the ‘most extensive reorganization of the federal government in the past fifty 28
years’ (OHS 2002). It is often characterized as representing the acknowledgment 29
that the provision of security no longer follows the logic of the conceptual pairs 30
of inside/outside, war/peace, civil/military or normal/exceptional, which have 31
traditionally been constitutive of discourses and practices of security, statehood 32
and identity. Due to the duly internalized claim that the US is ‘today a nation at 33
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risk to a new and changing threat’ (Bush 2001c) that is both deadly and 34
omnipresent, it is now easier for policy-makers to take recourse to extraordinary 35
means for combating this threat. This mechanism is due to what Hansen (2006: 36
35) calls the dual political dynamic of security discourses: ‘they invest those 37
enacting security policies with the legitimate power to undertake decisive and 38
otherwise exceptional actions, but they also construct those actors with a 39
responsibility for doing so’. As a consequence, the term ‘homeland security’ has 40
become an expression that is representative of changing security practices as 41
exemplified by CIP, insofar as its specific undertakings increasingly operate 42
across the blurred boundaries between the military and the civilian domains, 43
adopting both measures that traditionally are seen as defensive as well as such 44
that are regarded as offensive, semantically confusing the terminologies between 45
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Gendered narratives of homeland security 157

1 the state of war and the state of peace, and notably operating in close coopera-
2 tion with both private and public entities.
3 On the practical level, it often is argued, the terrorist attacks on New York
4 and Washington have made it clear to ‘the West’ that indeed, the traditional and
5 exclusively military practices of security projected abroad are no longer suffi-
6 cient. Instead, in the face of terrorism, new practices concurring with the above-
7 mentioned characteristics have to be developed and implemented.2 The stronger
8 focus on the protection of critical infrastructures can be seen as a practical gov-
9 ernmental attempt to adapt to the changing security environment and to the vul-
10 nerabilities generated by its linkage with the so-called information revolution.
11 While the process of conceptually rescheduling security has been under way at
12 least since the end of the Cold War, this change has only relatively recently

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13 gained high-profile attention in the political establishment, and increasingly, this
14 transformation is politically instrumentalized. In the realm of military doctrine,
15 the blurring of delimitations can be observed mainly with regard to the delin-
16 eations between war and peacetime operations (civilian/military), on the one
17 hand, and with regard to the subjects/objects (as in critical infrastructures) tar-
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18 geted in these operations (home/abroad), on the other. The US doctrine on psy-
19 chological operations, which is explicitly designed to ‘influence attitudes,
20 perceptions and behaviors . . . during peacetime and in times of conflict’ (USAF
21 2003: ixf., emphasis added), may serve as a showcase example of such doctrinal
22 and operational blurring. On the theoretical level, the concept of societal secur-
23 ity tries to seize the new challenges and threats that stem from the changing
24 environment. The labelling of society’s identity as being ‘relevant in itself and
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25 not only as an element of state security’ (Wæver 1993: 27) can be understood as
26 the absorption of the enhanced awareness that military threats represent only one
27 dimension of the threat landscape (Hamilton 2005). Having briefly displayed the
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28 empirical context of this analysis, the following section will sketch the theo-
29 retical backdrop by outlining the major analytical tools, namely the concepts of
30 discursive agency and of gender.
31
32
Discursive agency
33
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34 There are different ways of paying tribute to the importance of written and/or
35 spoken language in social science research, but a common feature is the focus on
36 the defining moment of interrelatedness between power, knowledge and dis-
37 course. This interrelatedness is manifested in different ways, such as in the
38 establishment and maintenance (disciplining) of knowledgeable practices
39 (norms) or in the development of commonly accepted historical narratives.
40 The phenomenon of ‘discourses as being productive (or reproductive) of
41 things defined by the discourse’ (Milliken 1999: 229) includes a complex
42 process in which knowledgeable practices are defined and where disciplining
43 techniques and practices are elaborated and applied. The societal production of
44 meaning (truth) is the nexus linking power and discourse; to be the holder of dis-
45 cursive agency is empowering.3 It is the linguistic practice of discursive framing
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158 E.M. Brunner

that mediates meaning between objects and subjects (Der Derian 1992, cited in 1
Huysmans 1997). Frames are to be understood as central basic perception cat- 2
egories and structures through which actors perceive their environment and the 3
world (Dunn and Mauer 2006). These categories have a pre-existence in the per- 4
ception of collective culture and in the memory of the actors. Therefore, the 5
actors attribute meaning to the things they recognize as corresponding to the pre- 6
viously structured world (Donati 2001). In short, discursive framing is the rhet- 7
orical (written and spoken) allusion to such pre-existing cognitive models, while 8
simultaneously, through these iterative references, the particular cognitive 9
models are shaped and perpetuated. When this is done successfully – with reson- 10
ance – discursive framing leaves an impression on social reality. To put it differ- 11
ently, through the framing mechanism, discourse imparts meaning to the 12

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material world by paying tribute to the earlier absorbed meanings. In this way, 13
discourse is constitutive of reality. 14
Equally important, because discourses ‘work to define and to enable, and also 15
to silence and to exclude . . . by . . . endorsing a certain common sense, but 16
making other modes of categorizing and judging meaningless, impracticable,
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inadequate or otherwise disqualified’ (Milliken 2001: 139), the analytical rele- 18
vance of such mechanisms becomes evident. By exposing them, the analysis has 19
the potential to denaturalize dominant meanings and practices and to disclose 20
their contingency. The constitutive consequentiality, or performativity, of dis- 21
course points to the importance of examining both the homeland security narrat- 22
ive and the role of gendered underpinnings therein. 23
24
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25
Conceptualizing gender
26
Like wars, ‘gender norms . . . help . . . to constitute the norms of statecraft’ 27
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(Campbell 1992: 11). The analogy is significant: since the body – which is 28
traditionally conceived of as an essential aspect of the gendering of identity – 29
has to be ‘understood as historically well-established analog for the constitution 30
of state identity’ (Campbell 1992: 11), the gendered body has an evident value 31
for an analytical examination of how identity is forged (not only) in times of 32
war. The concept of gender builds on the general understanding that opposes 33
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gender to sex, in that it refers to the social classifications of what is ‘feminine’ 34

and what is ‘masculine’.4 While the latter relates to the physiological distinction 35
between men and women, gender is conceived of as a ‘set of variable, but 36
socially and culturally constructed relational characteristics’ (Tickner 2002: 37
336). These characteristics are dichotomous and often mutually exclusive: 38
notions such as power, autonomy, rationality, activity and the public sphere are 39
stereotypically associated with the masculine, while their opposites, such as 40
weakness, dependence, emotionality, passivity and the private sphere are associ- 41
ated with the feminine. What has seduced men and women to accept the ratio- 42
nale of war since times immemorial has been the very fundamental gender 43
formulation of ‘beautiful souls’ and ‘just warriors’, according to which women 44
are seen as life-givers and men as life-takers (Elshtain 1987). This shows that 45
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1 ‘men and women, protectors and protected, are constructed in relation to each
2 other, just as, or as part of, the related construction of masculinity and feminin-
3 ity’ (Pettman 1996: 99). It is inherent to the characteristics stereotypically asso-
4 ciated with masculinity and femininity that they construct a hierarchical
5 gendered social relationship between the ‘male’ and the ‘female’. This culturally
6 original dichotomy imparts a qualificative character to all dichotomies, which
7 are always, even if implicitly, hierarchical (Derrida 1972; Hansen 1997; Mil-
8 liken 1999). Thus, gender is used here to ‘refer to a symbolic system, a central
9 organizing discourse of culture, one that not only shapes how we experience and
10 understand ourselves as men and women, but that also interweaves with other
11 discourses and shapes them’ (Cohn 1993: 228). It is this interweaving of the
12 stereotyped and binary gender conceptions with other discourses that produces a

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13 gendered discourse. By iteratively referring to explicit and implicit gender
14 stereotypes, these discourses establish qualificative dichotomies empowering the
15 one side and disempowering the other, valorizing and devalorizing, and thereby
16 constitutively reproduce a relation of power and subordination along the lines of
17 unproblematized gender stereotypes. ON
18 This depiction of the concept of gender points to yet another relevant feature,
19 which is the inherent aim to strive towards democratic gender relations, defined
20 by Connell (2000) as moving toward equality, non-violence and mutual respect.
21 Since identities – including gender – are susceptible to shaping, the exposure of
22 the often pervasively stereotypical referencing is indispensable for the forging of
23 identity. Nonetheless, ‘gender identities are neither totally self-created nor com-
24 pletely determined . . . nor can they be separated from other factors of identity
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25 formation; notably, class, race, and sexuality’ (Hooper 2001: 38). Moreover,
26 such conceptions and identities are neither static nor monolithic. As Hooper
27 shows, gender identities are ‘fluid and always in the process of being produced
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28 through the interaction between . . . the three dimensions’ of embodiment, insti-

29 tutional practices, and language/discourse (Hooper 2001: 40). Simultaneously,
30 the dichotomously gendered identities mask ‘more complex social realities and
31 reinforce . . . stereotypes’ (Hooper 2001: 45). The alternative is to document the
32 diversity of both femininities and masculinities (Connell 2005) in order to tran-
33 scend one of the pervasive origins of dichotomous thinking, while avoiding the
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34 essentialist attempt to proceed to the reverse assessment within the very same
35 dichotomies.
36 This chapter – by adopting gender as a central category of analysis – thus
37 looks at the US discourse that was creative of the homeland security practices in
38 the aftermath of 11 September 2001. It aspires to unmask some of the gendered
39 narratives underpinning the changing practices of security. It is argued that these
40 narratives disclose how the longstanding conceptual pairs of security are disinte-
41 grating. In particular, the concepts of inside/outside, civil/military and
42 defence/offence become semantically and argumentatively intertwined. The nar-
43 ratives of security take over the domestic space. While one aspect hereof is
44 indeed the privatization of security (Dunn Cavelty, Chapter 2, this volume),
45 another is that simultaneously, the private is securitized (Kristensen, Chapter 3,
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160 E.M. Brunner

this volume). Focusing on this latter feature reveals that the crumbling of the 1
longstanding conceptual pairs of security does not transform the ‘new’ security 2
narratives to become less gendered. While moving the practices of security into 3
the domestic space, and thereby contributing to the semantic militarization of the 4
inside, the ‘new’ narratives of security draw on ‘old’ gender stereotypes and 5
manifold unproblematized gendered dichotomies. 6
7
8
Interlocking narratives of securing ‘the homeland’
9
This analysis focuses on two ‘clusters’ of public utterances by the US president 10
that were jointly constitutive of the homeland security discourse. The first 11
engages the statements of George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 11 12

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September 2001. The second is made up of instances of presidential speeches 13
arguing in favour of judicial and institutional homeland security initiatives – the 14
creation of the Office of Homeland Security, the adoption of the USA PATRIOT 15
Act, the publication of the National Strategy for Homeland Security and the cre- 16
ation of the DHS through the Homeland Security Act of November 2002. In the
ON 17
following sections, both the discourses establishing the ‘9/11’ narrative and 18
those advocating the creation of the DHS are reconstructed in condensed form 19
and displayed separately. 20
21
22
The ‘9/11’ narrative
23
Events are imbued with meaning and acquire a long-term existence through the 24
F

way in which they are narrated. There can be no question that as a consequence 25
of the events of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington, international 26
terrorism immediately became perceived as the single most threatening feature 27
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to the national security of the US. Hence, the narration of terrorism as the single 28
most threatening feature is intimately bound to the way in which the subjects 29
authorized to speak and act told the story of ‘9/11’. 30
On 11 September 2001 at 8:30 p.m., US President George W. Bush addressed 31
the nation. This statement is the very first official interpretation5 of what had 32
happened that day. To a nation under shock and in deep grief, the US president 33
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expresses a sense of ‘disbelief, terrible sadness’, but also ‘a quiet, unyielding 34

anger’. Moreover, the president claims that ‘these acts of mass murder were 35
intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our 36
country is strong’. And, further on, in a fitting play of words, he notes that ‘these 37
acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve’. In the 38
face of ‘evil, the very worst of human nature . . . we responded with the best of 39
America – with the daring of our rescue workers’. Moreover, Bush declares that 40
‘our military is powerful, and it’s prepared . . . We will make no distinction 41
between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them . . . 42
we stand together to win the war against terrorism’ (Bush 2001a). Only one day 43
later, on 12 September, the ‘acts of mass murder’ have changed into ‘more than 44
acts of terror. They were acts of war’. The perpetrators of the attacks are ‘a dif- 45
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1 ferent enemy than we ever faced. This enemy hides in shadows, and has no
2 regard for human life . . . an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting
3 people, then runs for cover . . . tries to hide’ (Bush 2001b). In short, this enemy is
4 composed of ‘faceless cowards’ (Bush 2001c). But, since ‘we will be steadfast
5 in our determination’, the united nation will win this new and ‘monumental
6 struggle of good versus evil’ (Bush 2001b). For the US, the heroes at hand are
7 the police, the firemen and the rescue workers, whom the president thanks from
8 atop a burned-out fire truck (Mral 2004: 26) ‘for your hard work . . . and for
9 making the nation proud’ (Bush 2001d) by ‘running up the stairs and into the
10 fires to help others’ (Bush 2001e), letting the US and the world ‘see our national
11 character in rescuers working past exhaustion . . . and in eloquent acts of sacrifice
12 [such as] one man who could have saved himself [but] stayed until the end at the

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13 side of his quadriplegic friend’. Such behaviour is supposed to show ‘an abiding
14 love for our country’, whose ‘responsibility to history is already clear: to answer
15 these attacks and rid the world of evil’. The war ‘waged against us by stealth and
16 deceit and murder’ provokes this ‘peaceful nation [to become . . .] fierce when
17 stirred to anger’ (Bush 2001e). On 15 September, a new wording with regard to
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18 the self and the enemy other, which would prove to be highly persistent, was
19 introduced: on the one hand, ‘we will find those who did it; we will smoke them
20 out of their holes; we will get them running’ (Bush 2001f), making clear that, on
21 the other hand, ‘this was an assault not just against the United States, but against
22 civilization’ (Powell in Bush 2001f), ‘this is the fight of all who believe in
23 progress’ (Bush 2001i).
24 The phrasing was largely in place by 15 September. Nevertheless, the words
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25 would still undergo some elaboration and, of course, they would be repeated
26 constantly. In this view, the ‘amazing spirit of sacrifice and patriotism and defi-
27 ance’ is as important as the definition of ‘American courage – [as] the courage
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28 of firefighters and police officers’ (Bush 2001g). At the same time, the enemy is
29 cast increasingly as being cowardly and cruel. Not only is the adversary ‘an
30 enemy that likes to hide and burrow in . . . [but there are also] no rules. It’s bar-
31 baric behavior. They slit throats of women . . . they like to hit, and then they like
32 to hide out’, but again it is stated that ‘we’re going to smoke them out’ since
33 ‘this is a fight for freedom . . . and we will not allow ourselves to be terrorized by
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34 someone who thinks they can hit and hide in some cave’ (Bush 2001h).
35
36
Advocating the creation of homeland security institutions
37
38 The themes and frames established in the narratives of 11 September 2001
39 prominently reverberate in the discourses framing the internal measures in reac-
40 tion to the terrorist attacks and thereby reveal how the supposed firmly distinct
41 inside and outside intertwine, how defence and offence blur, and how a military
42 logic and vocabulary conquers the domestic space. Moreover, it will become
43 clear that, while these traditional dichotomies of the security logic crumble, the
44 binary and gendered stereotypization does persist.
45 On 8 October 2001, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge was sworn in to lead
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162 E.M. Brunner

the Office of Homeland Security. In his speech at the ceremony (Bush 2001j), 1
the US president elaborates on the main themes that will determine the home- 2
land-security discourse. Not only does he contend that ‘the best defense against 3
terror is a global offensive against terror’ in order to promote the start of the 4
‘war on terror’ abroad with the conventional military operation which the US 5
began at this very moment in Afghanistan, but he also praises Secretary of 6
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as 7
George Tenet (CIA) and Bob Mueller (FBI) for working aggressively and being 8
‘fine Americans who understand the nature of the conflict, and [who] are pre- 9
pared to join me in doing whatever it takes to win the war’. Only then does he 10
turn to the domestic aspect of so-called ‘homeland security’ by first thanking 11
Ridge and his family for ‘your sacrifice’ to America in accepting the post, and 12

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then praises Ridge as a ‘patriot who has heard the sound of battle’, since he is a 13
‘decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War’. Moreover, as the US ‘face[s] 14
new threats and, therefore . . . need[s] new defenses’, this is the right man. His 15
mission will be ‘to design a comprehensive, coordinated national strategy to 16
fight terror here at home’. On the same occasion, remarks by Ridge himself sim-
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ilarly blur the spaces in which the ‘war on terror’ takes place as he encourages 18
the entire American people to be grateful to those ‘men and women in uniform, 19
who are courageously defending our nation today’. They represent the very best 20
of America’s ‘shared sense of duty and mission’. He proclaims that the effort of 21
assuring the security of the homeland ‘will begin here [and] it will require the 22
involvement of America at every level’ (Ridge in Bush 2001j). 23
On 26 October 2001, Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act. On this occasion, 24
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he addresses the public and announces that ‘this law will give intelligence and 25
law enforcement officials important new tools to fight the present dangers’ 26
(Bush 2001l) and to face a ‘threat like no other nation has ever faced’. The ter- 27
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rorists who ‘recognize no barrier of morality . . . have no conscience . . . [and] 28

cannot be reasoned with . . . must be pursued, they must be defeated, and they 29
must be brought to justice’. Moreover, the president presents what he identifies 30
as the linchpins of the new law: it changes ‘the laws governing information- 31
sharing’, it ‘will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, 32
including e-mails, the Internet, and cell phones’, it enables the US to ‘better 33
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meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications 34

technology’, and ‘finally, the new legislation greatly enhances the penalties that 35
will fall on terrorists’. It is important to the argumentation of the president that 36
‘this legislation is essential not only to pursuing and punishing terrorists, but 37
also [for] preventing more atrocities in the hands of the evil ones. This govern- 38
ment will enforce this law with all the urgency of a nation at war’ (Bush 2001l). 39
In June 2002, the administration began its campaign pushing for the estab- 40
lishment of the Department of Homeland Security. In an address to the federal 41
employees working in the area of homeland security, the president states: 42
43
You know, the amazing thing about America is our nation is stronger today 44
than it was before the enemy hit. I like to remind people, they must have not 45
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1 understood who they were dealing with. They probably thought we might
2 file a lawsuit or two – (laughter) – but they didn’t understand the character
3 of the American people, the strength and resolve of our great land.
4 (Bush 2002a)
5
6 In a way that is identical to the ‘9/11’ narrative, he draws a picture of the ‘outside’
7 as being populated by barbaric killers hiding in caves and shadows: ‘we’re hunting
8 down these killers wherever they try to hide’. This task is heroically pursued by
9 ‘our great military’. Quite casually, the president addresses the issues of the inside:
10 ‘we’re making progress overseas, we’re making progress at home’. Without
11 further elaboration, he lists the measures taken – increased aviation security, the
12 tightening of the borders, the stockpiling of medicines against biological agents,

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13 the improvement of information-sharing and new steps to protect critical infra-
14 structure – only in order to insist again on the overall theme of the ‘war on terror’,
15 which ‘we will win . . . thanks to the heroism of our fighting troops, and thanks to
16 the patriotism of our people’. This patriotism is exemplified in actions such as
17 those of a member of the armed forces, of whom Bush claims that ‘in the mist of
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18 chaos, he was a calm and steady soldier, at one point carrying a woman to the
19 safety of a nearby emergency vehicle’. Those working for the newly created DHS
20 ‘understand, that a full life is one that serves something greater than yourself . . .
21 and that something is the greatest country on the face of earth’ (Bush 2002a).
22 Releasing the National Strategy for Homeland Security, the US president
23 argues that, in the face of a threat that is deadly and omnipresent, ‘the current
24 structure of our government is a patchwork, to put it best, of overlapping
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25 responsibilities and it really does hinder6 our ability to protect the homeland’
26 (Bush 2002b). It follows that there is need for a strategy that ‘can deal with the
27 true threats of the 21st century’. Moreover, in order to achieve this goal, ‘our
OO

28 unity is a great weapon in this fight’. Nevertheless, because ‘we’re in new times
29 in America, and that requires new thinking . . . this new Department must have
30 every tool it needs to secure the homeland’ (Bush 2002d). As the creation of the
31 DHS approaches, the president takes recourse to strong words as he declares that
32 ‘America now is the battlefield’ (Bush 2002e). In view of this semantic milita-
33 rization of the home front, it is no surprise that he addresses the chief of police
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34 of Washington, DC, by stating that ‘you and your troops do a fabulous job here’.
35 As more than a year has passed since the attacks occurred, the reiteration of the
36 war theme is prominent in the series of six consecutive phrases:
37
38 our nation was confronted by a new kind of war. See, we’re at war. This is a
39 war. This isn’t a single isolated incident. We are now in the first war of the
40 21st century. And it’s a different kind of war than we’re used to. I explained
41 part of the difference is the fact that the battlefield is now here at home.
42 (Bush 2002e)
43
44 Similarly, the images of courage and sacrifice recur, as does the unprecedented
45 nature of the war and the allegation that ‘[t]he threats to the Homeland are
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164 E.M. Brunner

growing threats’. This establishes the rationales that ‘to meet the threats to our 1
country, a President must have authority . . . to waive certain rights for national 2
security purposes . . . [because] it makes no sense in a time of war to diminish 3
the capacity of the President’. Of course, it is no coincidence that the argument 4
that ‘you are either with us or with the enemy’ follows immediately. When Bush 5
finally discusses the imminent creation of the DHS by the adoption of the 6
Homeland Security Act in his weekly radio address, he even introduces the ‘dis- 7
armament’ of Iraq in order to display the advantages of the new department, 8
because ‘we’re committed to defending the nation. Yet wars are not won on the 9
defensive’ (Bush 2002f). On 25 November 2002, finally, he states that America 10
is ‘taking historic action to defend the United States and protect our citizens 11
against the dangers of a new era’ (Bush 2002g). The president repeatedly reca- 12

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pitulates that: 13
14
we recognize our greatest security is found in the relentless pursuit of these 15
cold-blooded killers. Yet . . . the front of the new war is here in America . . . 16
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 takes the next critical steps in defend-
ON 17
ing our country. The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass 18
murder on our own soil will be met with a unified, effective response. 19
20
Note that the second set of statements examined as evidence in this part is 21
explicitly uttered in relation to the measures required at home in order to re- 22
establish homeland security. 23
24
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25
Battlefield America – the semantic militarization of the
26
domestic space
27
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These two bodies of reconstructed and condensed discursive evidence demon- 28

strate that the changing practices of security are manifest in the presidential dis- 29
courses both of the immediate aftermath of ‘9/11’ and of the narrative 30
endorsement of so-called homeland security, and that these discourses simultan- 31
eously rest on unproblematized gender stereotypes and gendered dichotomies. 32
The following section will highlight the commonalities of the two discourses 33
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separately displayed above, as well as discrepancies between them, in order to 34

show how they are argumentatively intertwined while drawing on gendered 35
underpinnings. 36
It is the argument of this chapter that the binary organizing principles of 37
security are in a process of dissolution. This is also apparent in the presidential 38
discourses. The domestic scene of the attacks is particularly important. One of 39
the founding binaries – the safe inside (home) as opposed to the anarchic and 40
dangerous outside (abroad) – has crumbled. The homeland is no longer a safe 41
haven. The anarchic and dangerous outside has intruded. This experience causes 42
the US president to state that the US is confronted with a declaration of war. The 43
reciprocal declaration of the ‘war on terror’ does, at first sight, operate within 44
the clearly drawn boundary separating peacetime from conditions of war. But it 45
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1 has also become clear immediately that this is no traditional war. The repetitive
2 insistence on the novelty of both the war and the threat not only creates a situ-
3 ation of emergency, but also one of exceptionality, and thereby establishes a
4 rationale that calls for the application of new means and measures in order to
5 face the danger, i.e. it demands the acceptance of ‘whatever it takes to win the
6 war’. This observation applies on both levels, at home and abroad; the rationale
7 of exceptionality is invoked by the US in order to legitimize the transgression of
8 norms and rules of both international and domestic law.
9 While the second body of evidence examined here constitutes the primary
10 adoption of domestic measures in order to restore ‘homeland security’ to the
11 US, it is striking how the external realm is used in order to promote and
12 legitimate these very measures at home. Offence is explicitly proposed as the

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13 best defence, and Ridge’s military experience in Vietnam is invoked as the
14 central qualifying characteristic for the leader of the Office of Homeland Secur-
15 ity. Furthermore, the semantic interweaving of military and civilian terms
16 becomes evident in certain moments such as when the US president refers to
17 the Washington police force as troops, or to a firefighter as a soldier who hero-
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18 ically saved a helpless woman by carrying her to the nearby emergency vehicle.
19 Such phrasing, which seems legitimate in times of exceptional strain, is also
20 indicative of how easily the supposed neutrality, and institutional benevolence,
21 of police forces in liberal states evaporates at critical historical moments and
22 gives way to a hegemonic militarized response. Military language seizes the
23 inside and conquers the domestic space. As President Bush puts it: America is
24 now the battlefield; the front of the new war is here in America. In such a situ-
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25 ation, of course, no one would want to obstruct the government’s ability to

26 protect the homeland – hence, who would deny the president the authority to
27 waive certain rights for national security purposes? Because the war is won
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28 through the patriotism and the unity of the American people, it is clear that
29 someone who is not ‘with us’ can only be with the enemy. Such utterances not
30 only ‘discipline’ the objects of security (the population), but also do they raise
31 the pressure on the private sector to cooperate (see, e.g. Kristensen, Chapter 3,
32 this volume). The rationale of exceptional circumstances allows for the seman-
33 tic militarization of the domestic space and simultaneously forestalls any poten-
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34 tial challenge to the narrative chosen and the responses adopted. In sum, the
35 traditional binary pairs structuring discourses of security – exemplified in the
36 homeland security discourse – have indeed come under pressure: inside and
37 outside are argumentatively intertwined, offensive measures are undertaken in
38 the name of defence, and military language and logic is increasingly intruding
39 into the civilian domestic space by invoking the rationale of exceptional
40 circumstances.
41 Simultaneously, these narratives draw on manifold hierarchical gendered
42 dichotomies and dualistic metaphors in their attempt to encapsulate the events
43 they refer to. Predominantly, these are grouped into the categories of ‘us’, who
44 are civilized, progressive (since ‘our’ women are free from oppression), techno-
45 logically advanced, cultured, courageous, benign, strong and firm, and ‘them’,
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166 E.M. Brunner

who are barbarian, uncivilized, morally and developmentally retarded, and 1
cowardly but brutal. Besides the establishment of an explicit and morally satu- 2
rated hierarchy, these classifications also correspond to the differing temporal 3
perspectives that are characteristic of the inside and the outside. Inside, the tem- 4
poral conception is governed by progress, while outside, the progressive project 5
is indefinitely delayed, since the reign of anarchy leads to conflict and war 6
(Walker 1993; Hansen 1997). There can be no doubt that dualistic thinking is 7
deeply rooted in our cognitive strategies in general, and in structuring discourses 8
in particular. Binary oppositions such as normal/pathological, educated/ignorant, 9
modern/traditional are only a few of the pairs that structure our perception of the 10
world. As discursive framing must refer to pre-existent perception categories, 11
dichotomies and dualistic concepts are predestined for structuring our framing 12

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mechanisms. Dichotomous thinking and framing proceeds through a double 13
move of homogenization within the categories and a simultaneous insistence on 14
the (supposedly qualitative) differences between the categories. As indicated 15
above, the focus on such dichotomies is essential for the analysis of gender 16
aspects. In the discourses analysed here, dichotomous framing complements the
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mechanisms driving the rationale of exceptional circumstances and unambigu- 18
ously establishes which feature is preferable over the other, which meaning or 19
interpretation is more valuable, and which response should be adopted and 20
which one dismissed. Thus, in instantiating the hegemonic discourse, both the 21
exceptionality mechanism and the dichotomous framing mechanism are dis- 22
cernible in the official narrative that attempts to seize ‘9/11’, its aftermath, and 23
the consequences drawn in order to endorse the measures of securing the home- 24
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land. Both processes are highly relevant for facilitating the chosen policy 25
responses. 26
The moral evaluation of the events that is palpable in the discourses analysed 27
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here is established in highly qualifying terms, the framing of the self and the 28
other, and the depiction of the necessary response. The US national identity is 29
intimately linked to the actors framed as having ‘saved us on 9/11’. The glorifi- 30
cation of an ethos of masculine bravery and action, sacrifice, brotherhood, and 31
responsibility is implicitly contrasted against a pre-‘9/11’ identity supposedly 32
inspired by personal gain and decadence. The fact that the role of men as heroic 33
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protectors regained its full force within US society as a consequence of ‘9/11’ is 34

manifested in the image of firefighters, police officers, politicians and defence 35
specialists, and soldiers. These images of a stereotypical form of hegemonic 36
masculinity represent the ‘inherent force of good’ and strength of the US nation. 37
These official narratives show that: 38
39
hardly anyone is confused about gender anymore. It’s men we’re sending 40
into alien landscapes of Afghanistan, and we’re praying they’re tough and 41
strong and mean. There’s no confusion about leadership either. It’s George 42
W. Bush and his battle-savvy Cabinet we’re grateful for, and we pray 43
they’re tough, strong and mean enough too. 44
(Parker 2001) 45
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1 This shows that the stereotype of masculinized toughness is again elevated ‘to
2 the status of an enshrined good’ (Enloe 2000), implying not only the use of mili-
3 tary means as the most appropriate response, but also the semantic militarization
4 of internal police forces, firefighters and homeland security workers, since they
5 call for conformity with the ideals of the stereotypical hegemonic masculinity –
6 toughness, strength and sacrifice. In accordance with this finding of what we
7 could call a ‘remasculinization’ of US official discourse as an immediate con-
8 sequence of the events of 11 September 2001, Tickner judges that ‘given the
9 massive sense of insecurity generated by the first foreign terrorist attack on
10 American civilians at home, there is something reassuring about “our” men pro-
11 tecting us from “other men” ’ (2002: 339). This is apparently even more true
12 when these others are barbarians, uncivilized, primitive and evil – hence brutally

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13 hypermasculine – and capable of hitting anywhere at anytime, which facilitates
14 the rationale of exceptional circumstances, before cowardly hiding in caves –
15 exposing their defective manhood.
16 The concept of war – the novel quality and military language of which has
17 intruded into the inside through the promotion of the ‘war’ paradigm – inherently
ON
18 draws on dichotomous thinking. It needs to do so in order to establish the rationale
19 that the political purpose of securing the homeland can be achieved through violent
20 means, namely through the ‘war on terror’. Not only is war as opposed to peace the
21 most efficient legitimation of the exceptionality rationale, but its ‘us versus them’
22 dichotomy is also a fundamental precondition for gaining support when nations
23 fight an ‘other’. Both of the major characteristics of dichotomous thinking, the
24 homogenizing within the one category – the ‘us’ – and the insistence upon the
F

25 qualitative difference between the categories – the assigning of inferiority to the

26 ‘them’ – are conducive to conflict. What makes these rationales gendered is their
27 operation through the mechanisms of pervasive referencing to, and the instrumen-
OO

28 talization of, unproblematized gender stereotypes – as elaborated above. By sepa-

29 rating the mechanisms in such a way, a differentiation can be introduced between
30 how the measures of security are recurrently gendered and the gendering of the
31 concepts of both war and peace, which through its essentializing draws on the very
32 same (gendered) dichotomies.7 As Goldstein (2001) has shown, the ‘war system’
33 and the unproblematized ‘gender system’ are mutually constitutive of each other;
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34 they illustrate the nature of the relation between foreign policy – the ‘war system’ –
35 and identity – the ‘gender system’ – in poststructuralist theory (Hansen 2006). The
36 ‘beautiful souls/just warriors’ formulation (Elshtain 1987) simultaneously requires
37 war and gains legitimacy through the occurrence of wars. The gendered and
38 dichotomized US narrative of ‘9/11’, its aftermath, and the narrative endorsement
39 of the ‘new’ politics of securing the homeland can therefore be qualified as being
40 closely linked to the recourse to war in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 Sep-
41 tember 2001. It represents the standard hegemonic action in times of crisis. As
42 David Campbell puts it:
43
44 the response of the war machine is consistent with the logic of previous
45 state responses to crises. The response that would have changed the world
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168 E.M. Brunner

would have seen Presidents and Prime Ministers stand before the cameras 1
and say that because it was the principle of respect for civilian life that had 2
been assaulted, we would unite with others in the laborious, step-by-step, 3
time-consuming task of justice [to capture indicted suspects and bring them 4
to an international tribunal], so that our actions would not be the ones which 5
validated the terrorist logic of ends justifying means. 6
(Campbell 2002: 165) 7
8
This option, which is often mistaken as more ‘feminine’, whereas it is simply 9
less gendered – two fundamentally different assertions – is explicitly ridiculed 10
by the US president. On the one hand, in nearly every single utterance relating to 11
the 11 September 2001 attacks, he claims that the ‘evildoers’ need to be brought 12

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to justice. In a democratic political system resting on the principle of the rule of 13
law, such rhetorical framing unambiguously evokes the holding of a regular 14
court trial. On the other hand, another phrase that recurs in manifold utterances 15
of the US president in relation to homeland security is the following, which 16
makes an obvious mockery of the rule of law concept: ‘they probably thought
ON 17
we might file a lawsuit or two’. Each time, this phrase is followed by laughter 18
(mentioned in the transcript). Not only is such silencing of alternative policy 19
options powerful, but it also ridicules the principle of due legal process as a tool 20
for the ‘weak’ that is incompatible with the ‘strong and independent’ self. 21
The changing security narratives exhibit another feature that operates through 22
the constant references to the state of emergency while resting on a pervasively 23
gendered binary, and which concerns the relation between the state and its cit- 24
F

izens. The concept of so-called masculinist protection rests on multiple premises 25

that determine the relationship between the protected (stereotypically the woman 26
and children at home/inside) and the protector (stereotypically the man dealing 27
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with the anarchic and therefore dangerous environment/outside). This relation- 28

ship rests as much on the willingness to make a sacrifice for the sake of others, 29
and the related sense of gratitude, as it does on overt domination and claims of 30
superiority. Moreover, it is a relationship that encapsulates the prevalent hege- 31
monic gender relations. The prototypical unit that it is based upon is, of course, 32
the nuclear family. In a ‘Hobbesian’ environment ‘masculine protection is 33
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needed to make a home a haven . . . in return . . . the woman concedes critical dis- 34
tance from decision-making autonomy’ (Young 2003: 4). The logic also applies 35
to the relationship between the US state and its citizens as regards the adoption 36
of the multiple measures which aim at re-establishing the security of the home- 37
land in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks. The constant reference to 38
a condition of emergency – the evocation of a situation of ‘Hobbesian’ anarchy 39
– serves to mobilize fear and thereby establishes the rationale according to 40
which special measures such as surveillance, obedience and unity, to name but a 41
few, are necessary in order to ensure protection. This protection is conditional 42
on obedience; the populace has to concede critical distance from decision- 43
making and succumb to the bargain inherent to the principle of masculinist pro- 44
tection. As Hunt and Rygiel (2006: 15) formulate it, gendered war ‘stories are 45
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Gendered narratives of homeland security 169

1 used to camouflage a politics of control’. The narrative instantiating these meas-
2 ures of homeland security unambiguously shows how ‘the Bush administration
3 has repeatedly appealed to the primacy of its role as protector of innocent cit-
4 izens and liberator of women and children to justify consolidating and centraliz-
5 ing executive power at home and dominative war abroad’ (Young 2003: 10).
6 But, as this analysis shows, the borders between home and abroad have been
7 dislocated in this ‘novel’ war. If the battlefield is in the US, anarchy is no longer
8 relegated to the international arena, but has come to the front door, causing the
9 ‘inside’ to go private. Hence, in addition to the framing of the collective self as
10 concurring with stereotypical masculinity, the definition of the collective self
11 through the technological policies of control (Bonditti, Chapter 6, in this
12 volume), also rests on the gendered principle of masculinist protection.

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13
14
Conclusions
15
16 On the one hand, changing practices of security are indeed manifested; long-
17 standing conceptual pairs that structure discourses of security, statehood, and
ON
18 identity are in the process of dissolving, as becomes apparent in the early narra-
19 tives establishing the measures for restoring the security of the US homeland.
20 The narrative that is constitutive of the practices of homeland security shows
21 how the crumbling boundaries between war and peace, inside and outside, and
22 civil and military have contributed to moving the practices of security into
23 domestic space and thereby lead to a semantic militarization thereof; the excep-
24 tional has become increasingly normal, which accounts for the demise of many
F

25 of the traditional security binaries. In this part of the security discourse, multiple
26 stereotypes of hegemonic masculinity are discernible. On the other hand and
27 simultaneously, other equally longstanding and overtly gendered binary pairs are
OO

28 still constitutive of the security rationale underpinning the narrative endorsement

29 of homeland security, including the civilized/barbarian, war/peace, and
30 normal/exceptional dichotomies necessary for sustaining the stereotypical hege-
31 monic masculinity and its ‘protection’ principle. This part of the analysis has
32 shown that the mechanisms of framing ‘9/11’, its aftermath, and the instantiation
33 of homeland security by the US establish a (dis-)qualifying relation of power. I
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34 claim that, by doing so, these mechanisms utilized by the current US govern-
35 ment generate a masculinized discursive hegemony over the definition of power.
36 This masculinized hegemony over the definition of power is expressed in an
37 exemplary manner in a statement by Susan Sontag (2001): ‘ “Our country is
38 strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling.
39 Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be’. As
40 shown, the tenets of heteronormative patriarchy are identifiable at multiple
41 instances in these discourses. They define what is normal and what constitutes a
42 deviation from the norm. The heroes are the strong and courageous soldiers,
43 police officers and firefighters, and they represent the very best of the entire
44 nation because they protect the people, depicted as being organized in the
45 nuclear family unit. We might ask with Habermas (2004): who needs these
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170 E.M. Brunner

‘heroes’, and why? We may also do well to absorb his reference to Brecht’s 1
warning: ‘Woe betide the country that needs heroes’. The hegemonic masculin- 2
ity that is enforced time and again is a proxy for the steady reproduction of the 3
gendered stereotypes, which are even more powerful in times of crisis and war. 4
By linking the constant reference to a state of emergency (Agamben 2002) with 5
the supposed male specialization in security (Young 2003), the instantiation of 6
such stereotypical hegemonic masculinities powerfully secures the ‘masculine’ 7
social construction of power. 8
While the problematization of gendered constructions is not nearly as main- 9
streamed as other critiques of hegemonic discourses of peace, war and security, 10
the very same mechanisms apply when it comes to the silencing of dissent. The 11
hegemonic attribution of meaning to ‘9/11’ served not only to disqualify altern- 12

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ative interpretations, but also to foreclose certain questions. On the one hand, 13
Judith Butler’s pithy observation applies: 14
15
the raw public mockery of the peace movement, the characterization of anti- 16
war demonstrations as anachronistic or nostalgic, work to produce a consen-
ON 17
sus of public opinion that profoundly marginalizes anti-war sentiment and 18
analysis, putting into question in a very strong way the very value of dissent 19
as part of contemporary U.S. democratic culture. 20
(Butler 2002: 1) 21
22
On the other hand, it is the constant reference to the existential nature of the 23
threat that makes such proceedings possible in the first place. The mobilization 24
F

of fear, operationalized by what Zehfuss (2003) has identified as the exhortation 25

to remember, provokes widespread and unquestioned acceptance of the meas- 26
ures displayed in order to eradicate the source of the existential threat, and 27
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simultaneously serves to close the ranks and isolate those who dare to disturb 28
the sense of unanimity. I agree with Zehfuss’ view that, when the US president 29
asked the citizens of his country on 20 September 2001 to ‘live your lives and 30
hug your children’ (Bush 2001i), this implied a secondary level of meaning: 31
‘Concentrate on your families. Do not concern yourselves with the difficult busi- 32
ness of politics. The state will provide security’ (Zehfuss 2003: 525). This 33
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double message represents both the heteronormative model about how to live 34
private life and the urge not to meddle with the concrete task of restoring secur- 35
ity. By acquiescing to this appeal, the public agrees to abide by the principle of 36
masculinist protection provided by the ensuing security state ‘that wages war 37
abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home’ (Young 2003: 2), only that 38
this war has come inside; the battlefield is at the front door. The politicization of 39
gender falls by the wayside in this securitization of the domestic, ‘inside’ polit- 40
ical space. This analysis has shown that, while gender is at the centre of secur- 41
ity-related policies, the US politics of securing the ‘homeland’ have 42
depoliticized the problematization of gender. The disciplinary power of ‘home- 43
land security’ is intimately entwined with the continued naturalization of gen- 44
dered dichotomies. 45
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1 Notes
2 1 The latest major official published evidence of this development is the Joint Publica-
3 tion 3–27, Homeland Defense of 12 July 2007.
4 2 Such as the surveillance of citizens (wiretaps) at home without judicial oversight, or
5 the creation of the allegedly new legal category of ‘unlawful combatants’ for hostile
6 actors captured in the war abroad.
3 Logocentrism – derived form the Greek word logos meaning word, reason and spirit –
7
has been ‘the dominant operation for constructing meaning in Western thought’
8 (Gregory 1989: xvi) from Ancient Greek philosophy through to present time. It refers
9 to the belief that the assumed underlying bases of reality can be revealed by pure
10 reason and truth, and it therefore implies a conflation and monopolizing of both truth
11 and its production.
12 4 The articulation of the debate problematizing this dichotomy (Butler 1990 and 1993)

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goes beyond the scope of the present analysis.
13 5 An immediate interpretation was also, of course, provided by the media through the
14 manner and words chosen while covering the events. In this particular case, the form-
15 ative influence on the global perception of what had happened can be considered strik-
16 ing. The framing influence of the CNN headline ‘America under attack’ would be
17 highly interesting for analysis – however, it goes beyond the scope of the issue treated
ON
here.
18 6 Only six days previous, it was stated that the country was stronger than before the
19 enemy had struck.
20 7 I am convinced that this mechanism should absolutely be avoided, since it does not
21 aim at transcending the power relations between the gendered individuals of both
22 sexes, but at the inversion of the still stereotyped relation of power. This, I would
argue, is neither desirable nor sustainable.
23
24
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USAF (United States Air Force) (2003) Joint Publication 3–53 Doctrine for Joint Psy- 37
chological Operations, 5 September 2003. Online. Available at: www.gwu.edu/
38
~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB177/02_psyop-jp-3–53.pdf (accessed 3 August 2007).
39
—— (2007) Joint Publication 3–27 Homeland Defense, 12 July 2007. Online. Available
at: www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_27.pdf (accessed 11 August 2007). 40
Wæver, O. (1993) ‘Societal security: the concept’, in Waever, O., Buzan, B., Kelstrup, 41
M. and Lemaitre, P. (eds) Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe, 42
London: Pinter, pp. 17–40. 43
Walker, R.B.J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cam- 44
bridge: Cambridge University Press. 45
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Gendered narratives of homeland security 175

1 White House, The (2001) Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate
2 Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, adopted 24
3 October 2001. Online. Available at: thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.3162.
4 ENR:/ (accessed 3 August 2007).
—— (2002) A Bill to Establish the US Department of Homeland Security, and for Other
5
Purposes, adopted 25 November 2002. Online. Available at: www.whitehouse.gov/
6
deptofhomeland/bill/hsl-bill.pdf (accessed 3 August 2007).
7 Young, I.M. (2003) ‘The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current secur-
8 ity state’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29, 1: 1–25.
9 Zalewski, M. (1998) ‘Introduction: From the “woman” question to the “man” question in
10 International Relations’, in Zalewski, M. and Parpart, J. (eds) The ‘Man’ Question in
11 International Relations, Boulder/Oxford: Westview Press, pp. 1–15.
12 Zehfuss, M. (2003) ‘Forget September 11’, Third World Quarterly, 24, 2: 513–28.

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8 Conclusion 2
3
The biopolitics of critical 4
5
infrastructure protection 6
7
Julian Reid 8
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This volume breaks new ground in contextualising the development of Critical 13
Infrastructure Protection (CIP) historically, politically and strategically. The 14
practices and techniques of, and the thinking that fuels the desire for, CIP, did 15
not emerge from a vacuum. Nor do they constitute some kind of revolution in 16
the thought, practice and technicalities of security. Strategically, Chapter 1 by
ON 17
Collier and Lakoff shows, CIP is underpinned by a way of thinking about 18
security that has a vexed history, encompassing genealogical relations with 19
techniques of warfare that emerged in the early twentieth century. Historically, 20
as Chapters 2 and 5 by Dunn Cavelty and Conway show, it cannot be explained 21
without reference to the processes of global interdependence, and especially the 22
technological innovations that have fostered the growing transnationalisation of 23
Western states and societies. And Brunner’s contribution (Chapter 7) points to 24
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the fact that the ‘new practices’ associated with homeland security are not so 25
new after all, especially if we analyse their gendered underpinnings. In political 26
terms, it is related to a way of problematising security that is distinctly liberal. 27
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Chapter 3 by Kristensen provides a cutting-edge analysis of how CIP is enact- 28

ing a shift in the security practices of Western states, leading from a concern 29
with securing territorial borders to a concern with promoting a ‘society-wide 30
state of security’ by working on the inside, ‘with the grain of society’, as Kris- 31
tensen expresses it. As Bonditti’s demonstrates in Chapter 6, the origins of the 32
CIP approach can be traced to the eighteenth century with the rise of distinctly 33
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liberal approaches to the problems of security and governance, in which the life 34
of individuals and populations became new targets for intervention and regula- 35
tion on account of the desire to strengthen the vitality of the state. As Der 36
Derian and Finkelstein show (Chapter 4), the strategies through which that 37
vitality is being pursued today are constitutive of a condition wherein ‘it is not 38
humans that must be protected, but the network and the human as a node in the 39
network that must be secured’. Liberalism, a political philosophy and a set of 40
governmental practices based on a fundamental claim as to the capacity to 41
protect the qualities of a distinctly human way of living, has given rise to 42
regimes that privilege the security of their informational infrastructures over, 43
and sometimes in direct conflict with, the human life that otherwise might be 44
seen to depend on them. 45
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Conclusion 177
1 As the volume also discusses in depth, and as the introductory chapter makes
2 especially clear, we ought therefore to be circumspect about claims as to the dis-
3 tinctiveness of CIP as a response to new forms of threat, particularly that of
4 terror. CIP is best understood not as a response to the emergence of terror.
5 Rather, the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ has provided liberal regimes with
6 an opportunity to extend, and invest more deeply in, approaches to the problem
7 of security that have a substantial history. Nevertheless, in concluding this
8 volume, it seems necessary to stress the importance of the inflections given to
9 the phenomenon of critical infrastructure by the development of terrorism and
10 the responses of liberal regimes to it. For it can be said that the tactical targeting
11 of infrastructures by terrorist groups such as al-Qaida marks a fairly new era in
12 terrorist strategy. What renders the new forms of terrorism distinct from previ-

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13 ous forms is their dedicated targeting of the architectures of organisation, which
14 is to say the critical infrastructures, of liberal regimes. The groups that liberal
15 regimes aim to secure themselves against are regarded as significant threats pre-
16 cisely because they deliberately target the critical infrastructures that enable the
17 liberality of these regimes, rather than simply the human beings that inhabit
ON
18 them. Indeed, intelligence agencies such as the FBI report that groups like al-
19 Qaida are making the targeting of critical infrastructures their tactical priority
20 (Likosky 2006: 89). In Iraq, the insurgency is defined by similar strategies
21 involving the targeting of key infrastructure projects.
22 It is true that the targeting of infrastructures by political violence movements
23 also has a long history. The Irish Republican Army conducted a campaign directly
24 targeted against the transport and financial infrastructures of Britain during the late
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25 twentieth century (Belton 2006). However, infrastructure was targeted in that con-
26 flict primarily because it provided a means of applying violence by indirect means
27 without substantial loss of life. In the case of the new forms of terrorism, critical
OO

28 infrastructures are choice targets for violent destruction. It is specifically these

29 infrastructures, so fundamental to the capacities of liberal regimes and their soci-
30 eties to function in accordance with their own self-understandings of the quality of
31 life and how to secure it, which terrorist groups such as al-Qaieda are seeking to
32 destroy, significantly on both strategic and moral grounds. The political representa-
33 tives of liberal regimes, such as Tony Blair in Britain and George W. Bush in the
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34 US, were absolutely correct therefore, when they ascribed such vital stakes to the
35 war on terror. For this is indeed, as both these state leaders asserted, a conflict over
36 essential questions of ‘how to live’ and the propriety of different ‘ways of life’
37 (Blair 2005; Bush 2001). Not simply, however, one way of life defined by a
38 commitment to essential liberties and freedoms versus another way of life defined
39 by systems of oppression and prohibition. But a conflict between regimes empow-
40 ered by their investment in the biological stuff of population versus political move-
41 ments opposed on principal to the governance of societies via such materialist
42 understandings of the conditions for life’s security. Key ideologues of the current of
43 political Islam that inspires these movements speak explicitly of this cleavage in
44 their account of what they describe with enmity as ‘Jahiliyyah’ societies (see Qutb
45 2005: 46–51).
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178 J. Reid
Therefore, the contemporary reification of critical infrastructure as an object 1
for protection owes a significant debt to the development of new forms of polit- 2
ical agency concerned with attacking liberal regimes by undermining specifi- 3
cally liberal sources of security and governance. All of these developments only 4
serve to fuel liberal representations of the war on terror as a struggle between 5
regimes tasked with promoting security for human life against enemies dedic- 6
ated to its nihilistic destruction. Why would anyone seek to destroy infrastruc- 7
ture other than out of a profound antipathy for the fundamental conditions which 8
human life requires for its prosperity and security? This volume, in opening up 9
the debate on CIP to allow for the examination of the dehumanising dimensions 10
and implications of the practices involved in CIP, and objectives at stake in it, 11
throws a spanner into the works of such modes of representation. This is espe- 12

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cially true for the chapters by Der Derian and Finkelstein (Chapter 4) as well as 13
Bonditti (Chapter 6), both of which extend Michel Foucault’s seminal analysis 14
of the origins of liberal regimes in practices of discipline and biopolitics where- 15
upon infrastructure was first objectified as a fundamental source of security to 16
the state. Both of these chapters demonstrate in different ways why the rationali-
ON 17
ties informing CIP cannot be understood in simplistic terms of a desire for the 18
protection of human beings from the risk of violent death at the hands of terror- 19
ists, but express a more technocratic will to defend infrastructures even at the 20
cost and to the detriment of distinctly human capacities. Second they underline 21
the fact that the waging of this war involves the deployment of tactics which, 22
rather than simply securing the life of populations imperilled by terrorist tactics, 23
deliberately target it with newly insidious techniques of discipline and control, 24
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all in the name of infrastructure protection. In doing so, the volume highlights 25
what can justly be described as the biopolitical dimensions of the war on terror 26
and the broader security strategies of liberal regimes that have been developed to 27
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prosecute it. 28
In concluding this volume, then, I would like to extend and draw out what I 29
read as being its most valuable contribution to our knowledge of this lugubrious 30
phenomenon. If we believe our governments and most of the academic literature 31
on the subject, both the security and quality of life is inextricably dependent on 32
the protection of the critical infrastructures through which liberal regimes are 33
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organised. But the provision of such infrastructure protection requires the delib- 34
erate targeting of the human life that inhabits critical infrastructures with 35
increasingly invasive techniques of governance. As a consequence of the decla- 36
ration of the war on terror, and more especially as a result of the ways in which 37
the threat of terrorism is being interpreted and understood by its proponents, the 38
investment of regimes in the development of new techniques and technologies 39
for the control of human life is increasing rapidly. Strategies for critical infra- 40
structure protection are affording significant advances in the development of 41
scientific knowledge and technological control of the evolutionary capacities 42
and adaptive capabilities of the human. Amid the creation of plans for the provi- 43
sion of critical infrastructure protection, and in the establishment of new govern- 44
mental agencies for the execution of those plans, the biological sciences in 45
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Conclusion 179
1 particular are undergoing a major renaissance (Cooper 2006). The implications
2 of these new forms of knowledge and security technologies for the quality of
3 human life are profoundly paradoxical. Human beings themselves do, of course,
4 rely significantly on the operability and maintenance of infrastructures them-
5 selves. But it is a fact that human beings within critical infrastructures are also
6 regarded as posing the greatest danger to them (Dunn 2005). In this context, the
7 human can be seen to have become both the rogue element against which liberal
8 regimes are today seeking to secure themselves, as well as the central resource
9 on which they are attempting to draw in pursuit of their security.
10 In order to afford their own protection, liberal regimes have learned histori-
11 cally to govern human life via its reduction to what I have called ‘logistical
12 life’. This term is apt because the techniques and practices of social control

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13 through which regimes of the eighteenth century learned to govern were drawn
14 directly from the domains of war, military strategy, tactics and organisation
15 (Reid 2006: 17–39). Logistical life is a life lived under the duress of the
16 command to be efficient, to communicate one’s purposes transparently in rela-
17 tion to others, to be positioned where one is required, to use time economically,
ON
18 to be able to move when and where one is told to, and crucially, to be able to
19 extol these capacities as the values for which one will agree to kill and die for
20 (Reid 2006: 13). In the eighteenth century, the deployment of techniques with
21 which to increase the logistical efficiencies of societies was legitimised by
22 regimes through the claim that it was necessary for the exceptional defence of
23 the civil domain of society from its external enemies. Increased military effi-
24 ciency and discipline was said to be necessary and beneficial to forms of civil
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25 life, the ‘quality’ of which was defined by their distinction from the warlike
26 conditions that were said to prevail beyond the boundaries of the state. It is in
27 critique of this type of legitimisation that Foucault’s analysis, in its demonstra-
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28 tion of the ways in which techniques for the increase of the logistical efficiency
29 of armed forces impacted directly upon the everyday order of life within the
30 civil domain of society, is so powerful. He exposes how the methods with
31 which liberal regimes historically prepared for war with external enemies pro-
32 vided model templates with which to subject the life of their civilian popula-
33 tions to new insidious forms of control and manipulation, and how, in turn,
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34 liberal regimes have sought to legitimise their wars in the name of the defence
35 and development of the very forms of logistical ways of living they were busy
36 inculcating within and among their subjects.
37 Now, in the twenty-first century and in the context of the war on terror, we
38 are witnessing precisely the same methods of legitimisation being employed by
39 liberal regimes, but with a radical twist. Today, the argument being deployed is
40 not, as it was in the eighteenth century, that the increase of the logistical effi-
41 ciency of societies is a necessary sacrifice in the interest of defending an other-
42 wise distinctly civilian population. Today, it is deemed necessary to defend the
43 logistical life of society from enemies that are deemed dangerous precisely
44 because they target life in its logistical dimensions. Amid the global campaign
45 against terrorism, the capacities of societies to practice a logistical way of life
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180 J. Reid
have become indistinguishable from conceptions of the ‘quality of life’ for 1
human beings. Throughout, for example, the seminal US National Plan for 2
Research and Development in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection, one 3
finds the quality of human life construed in terms of its logistical capacities. The 4
docility and plasticity of human bodies, the manipulability of human disposi- 5
tions, and the many ways in which human behaviour can be subjected to tech- 6
niques of control, are conceptualised not just as a means for the protection of 7
liberal societies, but as qualities that distinguish the uniqueness of the human 8
species. As the Plan for Research and Development states: 9
10
Part of the challenge of infrastructure protection is how to take full advant- 11
age of human capabilities. The Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) 12

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Working Group in the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is 13
focused on scientific research in the areas of sensory, motor, cognitive and 14
adaptive capability of the human. Currently, the brain is unmatched by any 15
technological system. The human brain is a semi-quantitative supercom- 16
puter that is programmable and reprogrammable by explicit training, previ-
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ous experience, and on-going observations on a real-time, virtually 18
instantaneous basis. 19
(Department of Homeland Security 2004: 63) 20
21
The quality of human life, we are told in forthright terms, is reducible to its 22
superior amenability to logistical transformation. Its greater capacity for adapta- 23
tion and transformation is what distinguishes it from other life forms. 24
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Contemporary accounts of this form of human superiority, understood in terms 25

of humans’ amenability to logistical techniques of transformation, recall in their 26
depth and specificity the expressions of wonderment at life’s malleability to be 27
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found in military texts of the eighteenth century that Foucault’s original explo- 28
ration of the disciplinary and biopolitical underpinnings of liberal modernity first 29
exposed (1991: 135–69). 30
31
Human eyes are capable of high-resolution, stereo-optical vision with 32
immense range, and, integrated with a highly plastic brain, make humans 33
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uniquely capable of discovery, integration, and complex pattern recognition. 34

Human hands constitute a dexterous, sensitive biomechanical system that, 35
integrated with the brains and eyes, are unmatched by current and near- 36
future robotic technologies. Humans operate in groups synergistically and 37
dynamically, adjusting perceptions, relationships and connections as needed 38
on a real-time and virtually instantaneous basis. Human language cap- 39
abilities exist and operate within a dimensional space that is far more 40
complex and fluid than any known artificial architectures. 41
(Department of Homeland Security 2004: 63) 42
43
As Foucault’s original analysis of the development of liberal regimes of power 44
revealed, the emergence of the military sciences in the eighteenth century was 45
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Conclusion 181
1 allied to as well as constitutive of the broader development of the life sciences.
2 Developments in modern military science have consistently fed off and con-
3 tributed to changes in the life sciences more generally. Now, in the twenty-first
4 century, we can see this alliance being cemented in the development of new
5 methods for the defence of liberal regimes in what is known as ‘human factors
6 engineering’, or HF/E. HF/E is, as the National Plan describes, ‘both a science
7 of human performance and an engineering discipline, concerned with the design
8 of systems for both efficiency and safety’ (Department of Homeland Security
9 2004: 64). Developed since before the Second World War, its aim is to harness
10 the ‘cognitive, emotional and social capabilities of the human’ in order to design
11 more secure systems for the defence of critical infrastructures and to invest in
12 such human capabilities with a view to creating systems of infrastructure that are

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13 resilient to ‘deceptive behaviors’, ‘rogue activities’, and to ‘insider threats’ said
14 to endanger critical infrastructures (Department of Homeland Security 2004:
15 42).
16 But in engineering, the means with which to secure infrastructures against the
17 ‘deceptions’, ‘rogues’ and ‘insider threats’ aimed at it, human life today faces
ON
18 increasingly intense threats to its integrity. The radical indeterminacy of the
19 human, its capacity for error, its creative capacities for thought and expression,
20 are directly endangered by the increasingly insidious forms of control being
21 wielded and asserted in strategies for the securing of critical infrastructures
22 against terrorism. As the Plan informs its readership, ‘Anyone can be presumed
23 to be a candidate for insider threat’ (Department of Homeland Security 2004:
24 43). Indeed, everyone is suspect of constituting this form of threat. Research and
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25 development in response to the fear of insider threats is aimed at the creation of

26 what is called a ‘National Common Operating Picture for Critical Infrastructure’
27 (COP) not simply in order to ‘sense rogue behavior’ in pre-identified sources of
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28 threats to life, but in order to be able to ‘sense rogue behaviour in a trusted

29 resource or anticipate that they may be a candidate threat’ (Department of
30 Homeland Security 2004: 41). It is therefore deemed necessary ‘that we presume
31 any insider could conduct unauthorised or rogue activities’ (Department of
32 Homeland Security 2004: 42). Consequently, the movement of human life, each
33 and every possible human disposition and expression, is becoming the target of
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34 strategies construed paradoxically for the defence of human well-being. In this

35 context, any action or thought that borders on abnormality is to be targeted as a
36 potential source of threat. As the Plan states, ‘the same anticipation of overt
37 damaging action by a purposeful threat can be used to anticipate an unfortunate
38 excursion in thought or action by a well-meaning actor’ (Department of Home-
39 land Security 2004: 44).
40 The development of technologies and techniques for the analysis of ‘what
41 people do’ and their ‘deceptive behaviours’ runs the risk not simply of outlaw-
42 ing fundamental conditions for quality of human life. It creates and indeed
43 instantiates the risk of the violent destruction of forms of life, of human popula-
44 tions and individuals, who through no fault of their own are deemed to exhibit
45 signs of anomalous and threatening behaviour. The deliberate murder of Jean
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182 J. Reid
Charles de Menezes, killed with five gunshots to the head fired at point-blank 1
range by British police on 22 July 2005, is a case in point. This human being, 2
described as an ‘unidentified male’ with ‘dark hair beard/stubble’, was targeted 3
on account of the fact that his ‘description and demeanour’ ‘matched the identity 4
of a bomber suspect’. The simple fact of his leaving an apartment block thought 5
to have been used by terrorist suspects, the simple fact that on his subsequent 6
journey, he exited and re-entered the bus on which he travelled, and in spite of 7
the facts that he walked and did not run, showed no sign of possessing weapons 8
of destruction, and gave no signal of intent of any sort, was nevertheless deemed 9
to represent a divergence from a normal pattern of behaviour so serious that he 10
was targeted and killed with the most deliberate violence. In spite of the scale 11
and intensity with which the aim of a complete mapping of human dispositions 12

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and behaviours has been pursued, and in spite of the urgency with which today it 13
is being implemented, the most banal and everyday expressions of life continue 14
to fall, tragically, outside its grasp. 15
As it was in the eighteenth century that the fantasy of a society which func- 16
tions as a type of socio-military machine, and ‘that would cover the whole terri-
ON 17
tory of the nation and in which each individual would be occupied without 18
interruption but in a different way according to the evolutive segment, the 19
genetic sequence in which he finds himself’ (Foucault 1991: 165) emerged, so at 20
the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can see that fantasy being given 21
new forms in the shape of critical infrastructure protection. Making sense of 22
what is at stake in this phenomenon requires a complete reversal of the terms in 23
which its utility is currently being articulated by liberal regimes of power. 24
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Rather than conceptualise this present struggle in terms of a war on terror in the 25
defence of a common humanity against an enemy that is inimical to life, we can 26
better conceptualise it as a conflict over the political constitution of life itself. 27
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When the methods with which regimes are seeking to secure the life of their 28
societies demand an incremental targeting of life, to the point where the most 29
ordinary expressions of life are rendered objects of strategic intervention, it is 30
necessary to question the ways of valorising life that create such paradoxical 31
conditions. This volume, in my reading, creates important openings for the 32
further exploration of such a line of questioning. 33
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34
35
References
36
Belton, P. (2006) ‘Lessons to be learned from the British experience in critical infrastruc- 37
ture protection’, in Forest, J.J.F. (ed.) Homeland Security: Protecting America’s 38
Targets, Westport: Praeger Security International. 39
Blair, T. (2005) ‘Statement from Downing Street’, 7 July 2005. Online. Available at: 40
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4659953.stm (accessed 19 November 2007).
41
Bush, G.W. (2001) Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,
Washington, DC, 20 September 2001. Online. Available at: www.whitehouse.gov/
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news/releases/2001/09/20010920–8.html (accessed 19 November 2007). 43
Cooper, M. (2006) ‘Pre-empting emergence: the biological turn in the War on Terror’, 44
Theory, Culture & Society, 23, 4: 113–35. 45
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1 Department of Homeland Security (2004) The National Plan for Research and Develop-
2 ment in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection, Washington, DC: Department of
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4 NCIP_RD_PlanFINALApr05.pdf (accessed 19 November 2007).
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protection (CIIP)’, International Journal of Critical Infrastructure, 1, 2/3: 258–68.
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Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin.
7 Likosky, M.B. (2006) Law, Infrastructure, and Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge
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10 Reid, J. (2006) The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity
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