17 Apr 2008

Security & society: please answer me one simple question

Just back from an IBM “deep dive” into the deep and vexed question of security and society. IBM makes a considerable effort with these, inviting a couple of dozen external people to each of a series of eight events looking at trillion dollar questions with wide social and geographic impact. This is a demanding task, rigorously cross-disciplinary, and ideally needing government input. To work, it needs corporate participants to have gone through some sort of Cluetrain Manifesto metamorphosis (ie to speak in a natural voice not a corporate one) plus a dynamic and energising process and environment (as I write these very words our facilitator joins me in the Tegel Business lounge, we get into good conversation and I nearly miss my plane).

I think my reflections are of three sorts:

- how we approach the exam topic: security and society (see below)
- IBM culture and the culture of security (to follow here)
- the heart of Berlin, what it means and how it has changed (to follow on personal blog)

We met in the very plush Hotel Adlon in Berlin, the reconstructed bombed-out 1920s building on a site by the Brandenburg Gate that lay between East and West, next to the Holocaust memorial, and heavily fortified British and US Embassies.

Parts of the conversation I was frankly uncomfortable with; I’m sure I contributed a fair measure of discomfort. That’s probably no bad thing. I sensed, perhaps unfairly, that we had to fight a “shallow-dive” instinct to look for rich clients with branded security problems to which solutions could profitably be applied. There were hushed conversations about the eye-watering growth in markets for automated analysis of surveillance output and guileless suggestions about how we could derive extra revenues by extracting marketing data from security cameras in shopping malls.

Security people have to be matter-of-fact about unpleasant things. They take refuge in euphemisms, and label or brand their enemies so the threat is more clearly defined. But sometimes they seem hard-wired with dangerously wrong assumptions. We heard that only 2000 people had been “affected” by the World Trade Centre attack, and that we have yet to see the results when something “really significant” happens. In this Weltauffassung ”AQ” is the mainspring of our thinking; the driving business need against which we sell products and services. But...but...but...2000 people were killed in New York; literally millions have been directly “affected”. Meanwhile what has happened in the Congo, Iraq and elsewhere - Katrina, tsunami - is already “really significant”. Hey, there are food riots in six countries as we speak: is that not significant?

Let’s not have a world in which dangerous fringe religious fanatics set priorities for us. Let’s think harder, set our own priorities, and act to pre-empt less enlightened people.

There’s a sense of “our” security. But who are “they”? Who are we frightened of? Why are they scared of us? Aren’t we all in this together?

My alternate reading list for Berlin started with Oxford Research Group’s analysis of the greatest causes of global and regional instability and large-scale loss of life. The top four are:
- Climate change
- Competition over resources
- Marginalisation of the majority world
- Global militarisation

Terrorism - by AQ or anyone else - is terrible, and criminal. But ORG’s evidence does not place it among the top four threats. ORG goes on to argue that our responses to these threats fall broadly into two sorts (tho I note the argument of the radiantly expectant Prof Sadie Creese that these are interrelated):

1. control paradigm – an attempt to maintain the status quo through military means and control insecurity without addressing the root causes, or
2. sustainable security - cooperatively resolve the root causes of those threats using the most effective means available

Note: don’t call the second option “soft”. There’s nothing soft at all about hardcore pacificts. Pulling triggers is easy. Putting up walls or CCTV is easy. Love is hard.

So, my question, which I sought several times without success to have asked, is this:

What is the proportion of our resources (time, money, people, effort, thinking, innovation, technology) we currently put into the first sort of security vs the second? And if we were being entirely rational and evidence-based about the risks we face and the realistic possibilities of our actions having any effect on them, what proportion would we put into the first, and what into the second?

I wasn’t able to persuade the organisers to put this question to the group on the day. So I’ll try now, after the event, to do so alongside the group thank-you emails that are going round. Glad of your comments. Just click “comments” if you’re not already on the comments page, cut the bit below, paste it & complete the percentages (50:50, 80:20, 100:0 or whatever) below:

% of our time/money/resources/innovation effort…
----------------------------
...that we currently invest in
Control paradigm today ---%
Sustainable security today ---%

...that rationally we should invest (once we’e thought about it and considred the evidence) in
Control paradigm ---%
Sustainable security ---%

(Answers are impressionistic. “We” can mean you, your company, country, or the world - it doesnt matter which)

Posted by William Heath on 17/04/08 at 9:24am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust
Comments (24) Permalink

Page 1 of 1 pages

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

Comment

Anyone is free to comment. Or mail with an article if you want to be an author. I'll post it up and send you a password. This whole thing is supported by Kable.

Authors

Member List

Sign up for new articles

17 Apr 2008

Security & society: please answer me one simple question

Ideal Government

Categories

Comment

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics

17 Apr 2008

Security & society: please answer me one simple question

Ideal Government

Categories

Comment

Sponsor

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics