Random ramblings

Thursday May 22, 2008

The Security-Industrial Complex

This piece in the Rolling Stone magazine on China's surveillance state is well-worth a read.

This piece finally gives me a sense that perhaps I can understand the economic (i.e. corporate) motivations behind the ever-increasing dominance of security in civil life, something that has puzzled me for a while. For example, the military-industrial complex clearly is a factor* in the USA's use** of military-intervention as a foreign policy tool. However, I could never understand the bias that many western-governments have shown against freedom, in favour of encumbering us with, sometimes absurd, security measures. In my naivety, I thought it had something to do with some kind of "psychology of fear"-as-political-tool - not thinking of the security industry itself as being a significant driver.

This piece though puts it into perspective. Just as there are large industrial interests driving military spending, via a revolving door between the military, the government and the industry, so that piece makes it clear there are similarly large industrial interests, and a similar revolving door (except perhaps substitute police for military+) around security. This security-industrial complex is helping to drive the security policies of our western governments, and so cause growing amounts of public (or governmentally-mandated) spending to be sent their way. Given this encompasses spending on data-retention (private spending, by EU directive), national identity databases (UK), and so on, the amounts are not quite insignificant.

It's important to realise that security-service++ spending is at best of indeterminable utility+++. At worst, it may largely be wasted, other than to a small number of people who manage to make a lot of money for little work. Further, even if there is some utility to this security spending, that money may have achieved more had it been spent elsewhere, e.g. education, research, health-care, etc. Given the dubious utility of such security spending, the opportunity costs may well be far more significant than the amount of that spending itself.

Sadly I've little confidence anything is going to change in the near future. I'm vaguely hopeful though that eventually some nations will gain a competitive, economic advantage from foregoing massive-spending on security-theatrics and so influence other states. At least now, I think, I have slightly less naive understanding of it..

* In the sense that there is clearly a strong feedback loop in the USA of high military-spending sustaining significant military-industrial interests in the USA, which lobby to have the USA sustain its high level of military spending. The end-result is a state heavily invested in military power.

** Not that I claim that other nations are more enlightened. Just that most don't have anywhere near the same military dominance***.

*** I.e. I'm uncomfortable with militarism, not nations.

+ There's also a revolving door between the military and the police forces. Many coppers seem to be ex-armed-forces in the UK at least, though I don't have hard data.

++ Note that I say "service". Money spent on research, e.g. face-recognition, low-energy, x-ray tomography of passengers, might find other applications. An X-ray scanner operator though is not contributing as much to society, in that capacity, as they might otherwise. Also, I'm thinking mostly of the kind of additional spending on indiscriminate surveillance, data-mining and check-points prevalent since 9/11, rather than spending on more traditional security, policing and civilian intelligence.

+++ Exactly how dubious, no-one knows. There is this, though it talks of the opportunity costs of terrorism rather than just of security spending - related, but not quite the same (i.e. implicit in my opinion above is that the current security theatrics are essentially useless in terms of preventing any future terrorism). I don't know of the studies into this, would be interested to hear of more.