U.S. homeland security and risk assessment

Highlights

• Risk assessment drives U.S. security policy.

• The practices of risk threaten safety and civil liberties, especially for other-ed populations.

• The practices of risk hide how inconclusive risk assessments are.

• The risk imaginary tries to control the unknown future.

• The risk imaginary creates panic.

Abstract

Risk is constitutive of homeland security policy in the United States, and the risk apparatus supports growing concentration of executive power, increased surveillance, and secrecy. For example, the Transportation Security Administration in the Department of Homeland Security employs risk assessment particularly against groups considered “other.” Using the work of mostly European scholars, especially the literatures about Foucault's governmentality and Beck's risk society, the paper combines theory with empirical work by governmental agencies on transparency, secrecy, and risk assessment methods used in the Department of Homeland Security, providing insight into the securitization of the American state. Risk is a means to futurize threats to the polity, to create the security imaginary, a fictionalization that creates a moral panic and a climate of fear in seeking to cope with uncertainty. With those limitations of risk in mind, we can question four important elements of risk in U.S. security practice: “connecting the dots”; the quantitative bases of risk assessment algorithms; how risk assessment tends to ignore the important if circular intentionality of terror; and the difficulties inherent in controlling populations by classification, especially other-ed populations. The paper concludes with suggestions about unmasking the uncertainty of risk assessment and enabling oversight of its practice by legislative, judicial, and public actors.

Introduction

At the annual meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology in Montréal in fall 2013, there was a panel discussion about information policy since 9/11/2001 that considered, among other things, the role of scholars in the study of public information policy and security. Among the themes discussed was the scholarly and ethical imperative for scholars of public policy to be members of “the loyal opposition,” exploring what Mannheim called “dangerous thoughts” (cited in Mythen & Walklate, 2006, p. 395). That is, policy scholars must view what policy makers do with a skeptical but sympathetic eye and must be independent from governmental power while recognizing the difficult task at hand in keeping the polity safe, open, and welcoming. The current paper is an exercise in that skepticism, critically examining the use of risk management in general, and risk analysis in particular, as a cornerstone of security policy in the United States.

Post-9/11 initiatives in the U.S. to increase government secrecy and government surveillance are part of a much older and larger narrative in politics of the accretion of executive power and the intractable tension between secrecy and openness. This last is a “mess” (Schön, 1983, p. 16, citing Russell Ackoff); a “muddle” (Lindblom, 1959, Lindblom, 1979); or a “wicked problem” (Rittel & Webber, 1973). These are terms used to describe enduring dilemmas in public policy. One way of reading American political history is as a story of the increasing concentration of power in the executive branch of government, no matter which political party or parties are in power or which may be in decline. This concentration comes, in part, at the expense of the power of the legislature and judiciary. In the context of security affairs, one theme in this expansion is the growth of the concept of homeland security from war and national security, a story well if briefly told by Relyea (2002) in the earlier pages of this journal. Another theme is the “rhetoric of crisis” that governments of all stripes have commonly used, including the executive branch of the government of the United States, which has been explored in depth by, for example, Kiewe (1994) and Kuypers (1997) on the U.S. presidency and crisis rhetoric. This long-standing use of crisis has, since 9/11, devolved into the rhetoric of permanent emergency (Doty, forthcoming). A third theme in this expansion is how it is that increased governmental secrecy and surveillance can undermine the public trust in government.

In order to make appropriate theoretical interventions and to inform both the polity and policy makers about political conflicts, scholars must often assume a contrarian position in the emotionally volatile context of the politics of security. It is important to ask genuine questions about important security matters, especially to question the need for increased surveillance, increased secrecy about governmental actions and decision-making, exceptions to the Constitutional protections of citizens and non-citizens, and the purported necessity to avoid judicial and legislative review and oversight of executive action. At the same time, however, research into information policy problems can remind us all of the moral landscape in which such problems reside without resorting to moralistic and antagonistic attitudes toward decision makers.