Preemptive Security Research Articles

Digital Security Governance and Risk Anticipation: What About the Role of Security Officials in Privacy Protection?

The anticipatory turn in managing security and safety relies not only on innovative technological tools, but also on social practice. New information and communication technology, for instance, facilitates digital security governance which entails the collection, processing, storage, and sharing of digital personal data for risk profiling, but little is known about the role of security officials in preemptive security. Although people, or “data subjects,” are categorized according to a (predefined) level of potential threat on the basis of digital data, it is often unclear which actor or agency was responsible for this categorization. This is especially unclear when information was shared across the globe between several security agencies and/or private companies. Nonetheless, as the assessment of risk or dangerousness affects someone's real-life opportunities, privacy rights or claims to something or someone are likely to be evoked. Thus, ethical dilemmas arise in relation to preemptive surveillance. Consider, for example, the basis on which algorithms of risk profiles for travelers are constructed? Or, how state actors deal with the outcome of (semi-)automated risk profiles? As Mitsilegas argues, one of the features of preemptive surveillance is that its privatization has allowed state actors considerable access to databases. How does this affect privacy? What happens if someone is erroneously labeled as a high risk or a dangerous person on the basis of incorrect personal information, which has been automatically generated by a private company? Even if the potential suspect knew the cause of the digital error, does he or she have the right to correct the information that led to, for example, a travel restriction? Will a security official or a state agency inform the potential suspect of a right to seek redress (Gaugnin et al. 2012)? Or should these data subject turn to the private company? While digital security governance is currently a hot issue, there is still a gap in research about how, in reality, security officials apply risk knowledge and protect privacy. Therefore, this contribution focuses on the role of security officials who implement preemptive surveillance and how they should protect privacy.

Data Protection, with Love

How to engage with the politics of privacy in the age of preemptive security? My suggestion is to start with data protection. Which, following De Hert and Gutwirth (2006), is not exactly the same of privacy. Extrapolating from their analysis of the two as different “legal tools”, I would say that privacy and data protection are two slightly different rationales of power relations: the one of privacy based on the “opacity of the individual”, and the one of data protection on the “transparency and accountability of the powerful” (Gutwirth and De Hert 2008: 275, emphasis in original). These rationales (attempt to) orientate two different loose dispositifs, each formed by a composite ensemble of elements. Some of these elements are peculiar to each dispositif, while others are shared or encompassed by both.

The Politics of Privacy in the Age of Preemptive Security

In August 2013, a report was leaked to the Washington Post in which it was revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) violated its own privacy rules 2,776 times over a one-year period (Gellman 2013). The privacy violations documented in the report range from technical errors to serious violations such as operations without consent from the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance (FISA) court and breach of the five-year data retention period. Other breaches are described as “broad syntax” errors, which are related to imprecise queries. This type of fault is presumed reducible “if analysts had more complete and consistent information available about … targets.” Following the recent disclosures concerning the NSA's PRISM program, which has the capacity to search and connect numerous social network databases in the name of security, the importance of the publication of this privacy report cannot be overestimated. While much of the public discussion concerning PRISM has so far focused on the person of Edward Snowden and his unlikely journeys to Hong Kong and Russia, relatively few questions have been raised about the value and legitimacy of the PRISM program itself. The Washington Post revelations concerning the NSA privacy breaches have grabbed the headlines and may lead to Congressional Hearings (Blake 2013). As with other security and surveillance programs, privacy is a key anchor for critical questioning and public debate (for example, Lyon 2003; Salter 2007; Bigo and Tsoulaka 2008). At the same time, however, the discussions concerning the privacy violations of the NSA demonstrate the problems and limits of critiquing data-led security through privacy. In a reply to the leaked report, the NSA stated that most of the incidents “were in a category that did not involve Americans” and that the number of errors attributable to human analysts was excessively small in …

Between Law and the Exception: The UN 1267 Ombudsperson as a Hybrid Model of Legal Expertise

AbstractSecurity measures taken in the name of the ‘war on terror’ have frequently been understood to operate through a domain of exception, defined as an extra-legal space of intervention where normal rules of juridical protection and due process are suspended. Yet whilst most analyses of the exception are critically reliant on notions of legal threshold, they are largely dismissive of the potentially productive nature of legal contestation. This article inquires into the dynamic confrontation between law and exception in the context of the UN 1267 sanctions system, focusing on the Office of the Ombudsperson as an institutional experiment designed to remedy the fundamental rights deficiencies of the regime. Drawing on Agamben's analysis of the exception as a ‘hybrid space’ and Dyzenhaus's concept of the ‘legal grey hole’, our analysis of the Ombudsperson demonstrates the emergence of novel, hybrid procedures and evidentiary standards being deployed in the 1267 delisting process. First, we assess the Ombudsperson's logics of decision-making and argue that their appeals to fairness hinge on the production of a temporal chasm that legitimizes the deployment of intelligence material in listing cases. Second, we show that the Ombudsperson is in the process of carving out novel evidential standards that are more attentive to notions of inference and speculation than conventional standards of proof. These standards serve to fortify the use of sanctions as a pre-emptive security measure and do not, in principle, appear to exclude material that may be obtained by torture.

Imagined futures and exceptional presents: a conceptual critique of ‘pre-emptive security’

This article critically considers what is at stake with the emergence of a ‘pre-emptive’ politics of security based upon governing the future through anticipatory interventions in the present. It begins by developing a detailed account of how the idea of pre-emption has come to inform the global governance of (in)security in the post-9/11 era. It then turns to a discussion of the logic of pre-emptive security itself. Here it is argued that its focus upon the future implies a prioritization of the imagination in its decisional logic, which has the effect of enhancing the degree of discretionary subjectivity granted to state authorities under a pre-emptive approach. The article then expands upon this claim by considering how it suggests an important conceptual link between a politics of pre-emption and political exceptionalism. It then concludes that the very notion of pre-emptive security can be seen as conceptually incoherent, since this link serves to compromise its capacity to produce a condition congruent with the understanding of ‘security’ presupposed by its own normative framework. Accordingly, the practical viability and political legitimacy of pre-emption as a rationality for (in)security governance can be seriously called into question.

Suspicious encounters: Ordinary preemption and the securitization of photography

Photographers have become common targets of security practice in the public spaces of US and UK cities. The securitization of photography – where photographers are commonly stopped, questioned, told to surrender film or delete photos, and in some cases arrested – rests upon the invocation of a post-9/11 context and the preemptive security logics that characterize the ‘war on terror’. Here, the spatio-temporality of the photograph and the photo-taking subject are in tension with preemptive security stances in which everyday, ordinary actions – such as photography – are rendered suspicious and worthy of potential intervention. Using examples of specific encounters between photographers and security personnel, this article interrogates the conduct of these interventions and the preemptive security stance that scopes ordinary actions and everyday urban spaces through flexible and dispersed acts. Finally, the article considers how this uncoordinated and dispersed practice travels across a wide variety of actors without clear, causal linkages. The practice is a mobile, circuitous one, and through its analysis the article argues for more attention to be paid to everyday, embodied, and dispersed practices of preemption.

Data Derivatives

In a quiet London office, a software designer muses on the algorithms that will make possible the risk flags to be visualized on the screens of border guards from Heathrow to St Pancras International. There is, he says, ‘real time decision making’ – to detain, to deport, to secondarily question or search – but there is also the ‘offline team who run the analytics and work out the best set of rules’. Writing the code that will decide the association rules between items of data, prosaic and mundane – flight route, payment type, passport – the analysts derive a novel preemptive security measure. This paper proposes the analytic of the data derivative – a visualized risk flag or score drawn from an amalgam of disaggregated fragments of data, inferred from across the gaps between data and projected onto an array of uncertain futures. In contrast to disciplinary and enclosed techniques of collecting data to govern population, the data derivative functions via ‘differential curves of normality’, imagining a range of potential futures through the association rule, thus ‘opening up to let things happen’ ( Foucault 2007 ). In some senses akin to the risk orientation of the financial derivative, itself indifferent to actual underlying people, places or events by virtue of modulated norms, the contemporary security derivative is not centred on who we are, nor even on what our data say about us, but on what can be imagined and inferred about who we might be – on our very proclivities and potentialities.

The Politics of Preemption and the War on Terror in Europe

In the midst of the war on terror and unilateral US security politics, many observers look to Europe for alternatives. It is argued that Europe is particularly opposed to preemptive security practice, and prefers instead to rely on the rule of law. This article examines the meaning of preemption in the war on terror, and analyses three aspects of European counter-terror policy. It becomes clear that, with respect to a number of policies that play a key role in preemptive security practice, including criminalizing terrorist support, data retention, and asset freezing, the European Union is world leader rather than reluctant follower. Instead of relying on images that position Europe as inherently critical of preemptive security, debate concerning the legitimacy and desirability of such practices must be actively fostered within European public space.

Israel's Closure Policy: an Ineffective Strategy of Containment and Repression

This article examines the Israeli policy of closure from its introduction in 1991 through its consolidation under Oslo, when its devastating potential was heightened by an intermeshing with Oslo II's division of the occupied territories into zones of Israeli and Palestinian control. The author argues that closure, first applied as a military-bureaucratic preemptive security measure, crystallized with Oslo intoa conscious political goal: demographic separation without meaningful political separation. Despite the absence of an organized Palestinian resistance to closure, the reasons for which are explored here, a spirit of resilience and defiance has enabled the population to bear up under closure's intensification during the present uprising, when virtually all movement is banned and the territories are under siege.

Corporate Dividend Policy and Preemptive Security Issues

FO R some time the question of how a firm's dividend policy can be expected to influence the value of its shares has been of interest to businessmen, investors, and economists. And yet, until quite recently there existed no well-developed theory (or theories) of the relationship between dividend policy and share valuation. In the past several years, however, the work of Miller and Modigliani, Gordon, Lintner, and others has largely eliminated this deficiency.' This paper is concerned with the question of how dividend policy and share valuation are related for the case of firms that concurrently pay dividends and raise capital through the sale of preemptive security issues. The importance of this question is highlighted by the fact that a significant number of major corporations continue paying dividends while floating preemptive issues. Table 1, for example, shows a sampling of corporations that have recently issued securities to shareholders at the same time that dividends were being paid. In this paper we will argue that, given the current regulations governing the taxation of personal income, there are strong reasons to believe that a reduction in dividend payments by firms that are raising capital by preemptive security issues could lead to an increase in common share values. This general point is, we believe, implicit in several previous papers dealing with dividend policy. Nevertheless, because the argument has not hitherto been stated formally, the magnitude and implications for the theory of share valuation have been largely neglected. Our conclusions relative to the dividend policy of firms that are not anticipating acquiring funds from their stockholders are less easy to prove; nevertheless, there is some carry-over from the particular case that is studied in detail. In particular, it will become apparent that dividend policy can affect the valuation of stock in the presence of personal income taxes that distinguish between ordinary income and long-term capital gains. The present tax law allows deferral of tax payment (or complete avoidance) on capital gains, and recognized gains may be taxed at different rates from ordinary income.2