Julian Reid: RE: Open Source Destruction, Weak Discipline, War Infrastructure
The War on Terror is defined by a growing concern with the protection of what is described as the 'critical infrastructures' of liberal regimes. In the US, Bush has provided a series of presidential directives in response to the attacks of 9/11 for the development of a National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). The response to the directive is expressed in The National Plan for Research and Development in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection published by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2004. In Europe, the European Union is pursuing a European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) 'to enhance European prevention, preparedness and response to terrorist attacks involving critical infrastructures'. The United Nations is seeking meanwhile to identify the critical infrastructure needs of liberal regimes globally, as well as continuing to explore ways to facilitate the dissemination of best practices with regard to critical infrastructure protection.
In the European context critical infrastructure is defined as 'those physical resources, services, and information technology facilities, networks and infrastructure assets, which, if disrupted or destroyed would have a serious impact on (the) health, safety, security, economic or social well-being'. In the United States it is defined similarly as the 'various human, cyber, and physical components that must work effectively together to sustain the reliable flow of goods, people and information vital to quality of life'. Others point also to the importance of critical infrastructure for the maintenance of the 'good governance' of societies. The defence of critical infrastructure is, therefore, not about the mundane protection of human life from the risk of violent death at the hands of terrorists, but a more profound defence of the combined physical and technological infrastructures on which global liberal regimes have come to depend for their sustenance and development in recent years. 'Quality of life' is deemed inextricably dependent in these documents on the existence of critical infrastructures. Terrorism is a threat to these regimes precisely because it targets the critical infrastructures which enable the liberality of their way of life rather than simply the human beings which inhabit them.
In actual fact the development of these plans for the defence of critical infrastructures serves only to subject human populations to newly invasive techniques of discipline and control. In order to remove the threat of terror from society, liberal regimes are set on transforming the life of their societies into what I call logistical life. Logistical life is a life lived under the duress of the command to be efficient, to communicate one's purposes transparently in relation to others, to be positioned where one is required, to use time economically, to be able to move when and where one is told to, and crucially, to be able to extol these capacities as the values for which one would, if necessary, kill and die for.
Amid the War on Terror, the capacities of societies to practice a logistical way of life have become indistinguishable from conceptions of the 'quality of life' for human beings. Throughout The National Plan for Research and Development in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection, one discovers the quality of life being construed in terms of logistical capacities. The docility and plasticity of human bodies, the manipulability of human dispositions, and the many ways in which human behaviour can be subjected to techniques of control, is conceptualised not just as a means for the protection of liberal societies, but as that which must be defended. As the Plan states:
Part of the challenge of infrastructure protection is how to take full advantage of human capabilities. The Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Working Group in the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is focused on scientific research in the areas of sensory, motor, cognitive and adaptive capability of the human. Currently, the brain is unmatched by any technological system. The human brain is a semi-quantitative supercomputer that is programmable and reprogrammable by explicit training, previous experience, and on-going observations on a real-time, virtually instantaneous basis (NPRDSCIP 2004: 63).
The quality of human life, we are told in forthright terms, is reducible to its superior amenability to logistical transformation. Its greater capacity for adaptation and transformation is what differentiates it from other life forms. Accounts today of this form of human superiority understood in terms of amenability to logistical techniques of transformation recall in their depth and specificity the expressions of wonderment at life's malleability to be found in those military texts of the eighteenth century that Foucault's original exploration of the martial underpinnings of the disciplinary model first exposed.
Human eyes are capable of high-resolution, stereo-optical vision with immense range, and, integrated with a highly plastic brain, make humans uniquely capable of discovery, integration, and complex pattern recognition. Human hands constitute a dexterous, sensitive biomechanical system that, integrated with the brains and eyes, are unmatched by current and near-future robotic technologies. Humans operate in groups synergistically and dynamically, adjusting perceptions, relationships and connections as needed on a real-time and virtually instantaneous basis. Human language capabilities exist and operate within a dimensional space that is far more complex and fluid than any known artificial architectures (NPRDSCIP 2004: 63).
As Foucault's analysis of the development of liberal power over life documented, the emergence of the military sciences in the eighteenth century was part of as well as constitutive of the broader development of the life sciences. Developments in military science have always been intimately allied to developments in the life sciences more generally. In the twenty-first century context of the War on Terror we can see this alliance being cemented in the development of new methods for the defence of liberal regimes in what is known as 'human factors engineering' or HF/E as it is abbreviated. HF/E is, as the National Plan for the defence of critical infrastructure describes, 'both a science of human performance and an engineering discipline, concerned with the design of systems for both efficiency and safety.' Developing since before World War II, its aim is to harness the 'cognitive, emotional and social capabilities of the human' in order to design more secure systems for the defence of the critical infrastructures of logistical life. To invest in such human capabilities with a view to creating systems of infrastructure resilient to 'deceptive behaviours', 'rogue activities', and to 'insider threats' which endanger critical infrastructures.
In engineering the means with which to secure infrastructures against deceptions, rogues and insider threats aimed at it, life is today facing an unprecedented danger. It is life itself, in its indeterminacy, its tendencies toward error, its creative capacities for thought and expression, which are most endangered by the unprecedented forms of control being wielded and asserted in strategies for the securing of logistical infrastructures against terrorism. 'Anyone can be' the Plan informs its readership, 'presumed to be a candidate for insider threat'. And indeed everyone is the candidate of this form of threat. Research and development in response to the fear of insider threats is aimed at the creation of what is called a 'National Common Operating Picture for Critical Infrastructure' or 'COP' in order to 'sense rogue behaviour' not simply in pre-identified sources of threats to life but in order to be able to 'sense rogue behaviour in a trusted resource or anticipate that they may be a candidate threat'. As such it is deemed necessary 'that we presume any insider could conduct unauthorized or rogue activities.' Consequently, the movement of life, each and every possible human disposition and expression, is becoming the object of strategies construed paradoxically for the defence of the living. In this context any action or thought that borders on abnormality is to be targeted as a potential source of threat. As the Plan states, 'the same anticipation of overt damaging action by a purposeful threat can be used to anticipate an unfortunate excursion in thought or action by a well-meaning actor.'
The development of technologies and techniques for the analysis of 'what people do' and their 'deceptive behaviours' runs the risk not simply of endangering the aleatory condition of being human in the most general sense. It runs and indeed fulfils the risk of the violent destruction of forms of life, human populations and individuals, who for no fault of their own, are deemed to exhibit signs of anomalous and threatening behaviour. The deliberate murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, killed with five gunshots to the head fired at point blank range by British police on July 22, 2005 is a case in point. This human being described as 'unidentified male' with 'dark hair beard/stubble' was targeted on account of the fact that his 'description and demeanour' 'matched the identity of a bomber suspect'. The simple fact of his leaving an apartment block thought to have been used by terrorist suspects, the simple fact that on his subsequent journey, he exited and re-entered the bus on which he travelled, and in spite of the facts that he walked did not run, showed no sign of possessing weapons of destruction, gave no signal of intent of any sort, was deemed, nevertheless, to represent a divergence from a normal pattern of behaviour so serious that his life was targeted with the most deliberate violence, and killed. In spite of the scale and intensity with which the aim of a complete mapping of human dispositions and behaviours has been pursued, and in spite of the urgency with which today it is being implemented, the most banal and everyday expressions of life continue to fall, tragically, outside its grasp.
> Julian Reid