[Forward from RRE. I read the first version of this piece, which wasexcellent. I thoroughly recommend it to CSL members. John.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: Phil Agre [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 7:08 AM
To: Red Rock Eater News Service
Subject: [RRE]War in a World Without Boundaries

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE).
You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use
the "redirect" option.  For information about RRE, including instructions
for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=



  Some Notes on War in a World Without Boundaries

  Phil Agre
  http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/

  Version of 19 September 2001.
  9500 words.


//1 Worlds and wars

Is this World War III?  The very question may seem irresponsible:
careless talk about World War III might make a world war thinkable.
But George Bush is talking about a "war" that spans literally sixty
countries.  We have to consider what this means, and a natural place
to begin is with comparisons to earlier world wars.  One contrast
is clear enough: in World Wars I and II, the great powers chose up
sides, but this time a single world power, supported rhetorically
if not substantively by nearly every country in the world, is going
to war against an enemy that it has trouble naming.  In that sense,
extending the series from I and II to III does not describe the
situation.

But in another sense the analogy to earlier wars may be apt.  World
War I began with a local conflict that gradually drew in other powers
through networks of rivalry and alliance.  The United States' global
campaign, whatever its moral grounds, is already interacting with a
multitude of local conflicts.  In attempting to recruit Pakistan in
its campaign against Afghanistan, for example, the United States risks
undermining the fragile political situation in that country.  If the
moderate regime in Pakistan collapses, it will probably be replaced
by a radical Islamist regime.  India is already ruled by a radical
Hinduist regime that has been engaged in a low-level armed conflict
with Pakistan for decades.  And both sides have nuclear weapons.

An odd feature of the new war is the mixture of languages: George
Bush and his staff constantly switch between the military language
of war and the police language of crime.  It is, for example, a war
to bring evildoers to justice.  This development is relatively recent.
It was during the Clinton years, for example, that the FBI went
global.  Congress vastly increased its funding and it opened offices
worldwide.  This was reasonable enough, given the globalization of
crime along with the globalization of everything else.  The drug war,
likewise, brought complaints that military forces were being used for
police activities.  Before the 1990's, though, the distinction between
military and police activities was relatively clear.  The Korean
War was supposedly a "police action", but it was obviously a war;
the "police" language was universally understood as a legal fiction
to escape the Constitutional demand that US military activity be
authorized by a Congressional declaration of war.  Legal scholars
protested this development, but it has now been institutionalized.
Other wars have ended with criminal tribunals, but these tribunals
have been conducted under the law of war, not under peacetime criminal
law.

So something is taking form here -- a "war" whose sole stated aim
is catching individuals who have committed crimes -- and it raises
questions.  The difference between war-talk and police-talk is
not trivial.  When a war is over, the victorious party customarily
lets the rank-and-file soldiers go back to their lives; having
been subject to the laws of their nation-state, and they are regarded
as following orders.  With a crime, however, one does not let the
soldiers go.  To the contrary, one tries them as individuals for the
full extent of their activities and punishes them if they are found
guilty.  In the United States, this punishment can include death.
In a war, either party is empowered to use nearly any means to detain
or kill the soldiers of other.  Captured soldiers have certain rights,
but others do not.  Criminals, however, have rights, and police are
heavily constrained in ways that soldiers are not.  The distinction
between "war" and "crime" is particularly important for the attack
on the Pentagon, which would be an ordinary military action in a war,
but it is also matters for the ways in which the World Trade Center
attackers can be brought to justice.

Here, then, is the danger.  Does Osama bin Laden, assuming for the
moment that he is the "commander" of the terrorist forces in whatever
sense is relevant, have "soldiers" who are just following orders?
Or is the United States setting the precedent that the winning power
in a war tries all of the losing power's soldiers for capital crimes?
That would set back the rules of warfare by centuries.  Is the United
States setting the precedent that the police are only constrained by
the rules of war (don't mistreat civilians and prisoners) and not by
the rules of law (don't mistreat anyone)?  That would set the law back
even further.  My point is not that the low-ranking terrorists should
go free.  To the contrary, my point is that what Bush is proposing is
not a war in any sense that can be recognized from centuries of law or
practice.  It is a police action, and should be regulated accordingly.

Bush said, "this is a conflict without battlefields or beachheads".
So what kind of conflict is it then?  According to the very general
conception of warfare that defense intellectuals have articulated
in recent years, we are facing a conflict without boundaries, without
front lines -- total, permanent war.  Judging from the editorial
columns, the main fear around the world is that the Americans will
engage in large-scale indiscriminate violence.  This is, I am afraid,
a legitimate fear.  Think, for example, of the destruction of Iraqi
infrastructure after the Gulf War.  The United States deliberately
kept Saddam Hussein in power in the name of regional stability
but then crippled his country to prevent him from hurting anyone's
citizens but his own.  Broader application of that model would only
multiply the calamity that resulted.

But I don't think that indiscriminate violence is likely.  The Bush
administration understands that, even with the broadest destruction
and the most effective blockade, the terrorists would be the last to
starve.  The terrorists' goal, after all, is to escalate the mutual
violence and recrimination in a way that recruits new terrorists and
leads to a global intifada.  How, then, will the war proceed?  Perhaps
our assumptions are stuck in the past.  Maybe we associate "war" too
closely with violence.  I do certainly suppose that the United States
will engage in violence, and I can think of several types of violence
that would be morally justified.  If the terrorists have training
camps, then operations to destroy those camps (now presumably deserted)
could surely be authorized by appropriate procedures in the United
Nations.  But Bush has also sworn, much more broadly, to eliminate
evil from the world.  That is quite a goal.  What if, by "war", he
means a broader spectrum of actions -- not just bombing and shooting
but psychological warfare, political and economic warfare, a full
spectrum of everything that the US can do to people or countries,
much as in the Cold War, but even more diffusely and with even less
geographical constraint?  Of course, the history of the CIA suggests
that quasi- and sub-military operations are going on all the time.
But perhaps the point of the present "war" is to massively escalate
that steady background of intervention in other societies, and to
institutionalize it by requiring that every government choose between
openly supporting it and being an object of it.

The ambiguity between war-language and police-language also leads
to confusion about goals.  It seems as though the Bush administration
has announced two goals.  One is to arrest a man who knows how to
live in a mountainous country.  Another is to stop a global network of
terrorists from coordinating their actions.  That is a very different
goal, and perhaps it is easier, if one can follow the money.  If
the terrorists can't move money around then they can't do anything.
This suggests that, instead of persuading nations to cooperate in a
military conflict, the United States should persuade them to cooperate
in integrating their banks into a global regulatory system.  The war
on terrorism merges with the drug war.

Attempting to reform the global banking system would provoke an
altogether different sort of conflict.  Some have observed that it
would bring the administration into conflict with many of its campaign
contributors who maintain off-shore accounts, and we can hope that
America's mighty anger at the attacks can defeat the preference of the
rich and powerful for offshore bank accounts.  But I have seen less
comment on the philosophical rift that the concept of an integrated
global banking system opens up.  Cyber-anarchists have called for
a parallel global banking system, based on cryptography, that the
government cannot audit or tax.  And such a proposal sounds good
to many civil libertarians.  But constitutional democracy does not
require anything so strong.  Citizens have a right against unreasonable
surveillance of their finances, but reasonable surveillance is another
matter.  It is easy to design a banking system that is intrinsically
surveillance-proof, but designing a banking system that intrinsically
admits only reasonable surveillance is much harder.  The existence
of unregulated off-shore banks always provided a kind of imaginative
pressure-valve: no matter how invasive FinCEN might become, it
was always possible to move one's money to the Caribbean.  A global
banking system that had no such outside would compel us to face the
deep question of what money in a democratic society even is.

//2 Arguing responsibility

Here is a small irony: the militants in Afghanistan whom the Reagan
adminstration funded, trained -- created -- have now caused Reagan
National Airport to be shut down indefinitely.  It is not a random
coincidence.  Reagan represented sought to make the war against
communism into a defining feature of American society, and they
defined their ideal for American society as the polar opposite of
communism.  When Reagan died, the political tendency he represented
thought it fitting to honor his contribution by naming landmarks after
him in the political center of the country.  When we inquire into the
origins of the current war against terrorism, then, we are reopening
the central political issues of another time.

It is good to keep this in mind, because questions of right and wrong
in the aftermath of the east coast attacks can be very complicated.
Who is responsible?  One answer is that the people who organized and
executed the attacks are solely and completely responsible, and that
nobody else's actions, right or wrong, have any relevance.  Another
answer is that context is everything: the United States, it is argued,
created these extremists and contributed to the oppression and anger
that helped them grow.  The proponents of these two answers, it is
fair to say, hate one another.  In part they are simply politically
polarized: rightists reflexively supportive of America's pursuit of
its interests versus leftists reflexively opposed.  But on another
level their positions are two sides of a coin.  The coin arises from
a confusion about right and wrong.  We need to distinguish two kinds
of responsibility, moral and practical.  The bombers have absolute
moral responsibility for their actions: they committed mass murder.
But that fails to answer some important questions: what could we have
done to keep the disaster from happening, and how can we keep it from
happening again?  These latter questions have their moral components,
in that certain policies might be deemed culpably reckless, but they
do not assign moral responsibility for the bombing as such.  We are
responsible for our actions in helping to create the context, and they
are responsible for theirs in acting on it.

The conflation between moral and practical responsibility has major
consequences for policy, and it is partly responsible for the parallel
conflation between the languages of crime and war.  Criminal law
assigns moral responsibility for wrongdoing, and it punishes the
guilty.  Punishment itself has a moral component -- just retribution
-- and a practical component -- deterrence.  War should be conducted
in a moral fashion, but its goals should be practical: self-defense.
When George Bush announces a war against "evil", he mirrors the
rhetoric of his opponents; although he has retracted his use of
the term "crusade", he has not stopped using the language of holy
war.  The world does not need armies conducting holy wars against
one another.  A war driven by a need for moral retribution leads
to disaster.  Issues become fogged: levels of violence are chosen
in proportion to the magnitude of the wrong being avenged, not in
proportion to the real interests of the country.  Simply cranking
up our violence until their violence stops may not make practical
sense: to the contrary, Osama bin Laden is surely counting on the
Bush administration to drive the whole Muslim world into his arms.

Another approach is to separate the issues.  Far from escalating the
cycle of global violence, a practically-minded policy might proceed
along different lines: respectfully engaging with moderate Muslims,
making amends for the wrongs we've done, encouraging civil society,
and helping with institutional reform, along with lawful police
actions to detain the individuals who have committed crimes.  Once
the moral and practical issues are separated in this way, space
opens for a proper examination of practical responsibility -- "our
part in it".  At that point we can admit that unlimited support for
fundamentalists against the Soviet Union, supporting the jihadis in
every possible way simply because they were "on our side", contributed
to our current problems.  Recognizing this practical responsibility
does not diminish the moral responsibility that some of those jihadis
bear.  We can acknowledge a degree of practical responsibility for the
conditions in which those people acted, in other words, without taking
moral responsibility for their actions.

//3 Where blind spots come from

When something new happens in the world, we suddenly learn how the
world used to work.  The attacks on the east coast were new: American
military and intelligence authorities and anti-terrorism intellectuals
admit that the possibility of suicide bombings involving hijacked
commercial airliners had never occurred to them.  Let us consider
a few of the consequences of this remarkable failure of imagination.

Consider, first, the Pentagon's lack of defenses against air attacks.
The military's resources, vast though they are, will always be finite,
and so the military cannot prepare for every possible contingency.
Instead, they design their equipment and make their plans based on
specific scenarios.  A cycle gets going: something major happens,
planners generalize from the disruptive event to derive a conceptual
framework for their planning, the resulting scenarios are inscribed
into the practices of the organization, those practices settle
down into routines that are drilled into newcomers until few recall
where they came from, something entirely unimagined finally happens,
and the cycle begins again.  This cycle is not obviously limited to
the military; it can be found in nearly any organizational setting:
building codes that are upset by unforeseen types of earthquakes,
company strategies that are upset by unforeseen technologies, and
so on.  On the one hand, he cycle reflects a kind of organizational
memory that reproduces the huge quantities of practical knowledge
that any organization requires to operate.  On the other hand, it
reflects the iron imperative that no bureaucrat be seen to make the
same mistake twice.

In the military's case, the old patterns derived from the Cold War.
Fighter planes were standing ready, but they were ready to intercept
invaders from outside American borders.  There was no procedure
for military aircraft to respond to threats from domestic civilian
aircraft, much less to shoot them down.  The end of the Cold War did
not uproot the established patterns because no compelling alternative
scenarios had arisen around which the necessary mobilization for
institutional change could be organized.  The existence of alternative
scenarios is key.  Right-wing rhetors have attributed the Pentagon's
lack of machine gun installations to the liberal decadence of American
culture, but the infinitely militarized society that they seek is
impossible in principle.

The terrorists, then, found a blind spot in the imagination of the
government.  This was evident as the events were unfolding.  The
government was off-balance, and it was a remarkable sight, serving
to remind us of the tremendous lengths to which all governments
go to present the outward appearance of balance.  When George Bush
flew from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska in the course of Tuesday,
many people criticized him for his disappearing act.  But I for once
was sympathetic.  Critics said he should be on the scene, taking
charge and being seen to take charge.  But Dick Cheney and the
others recognized, quite rationally, that they didn't know what was
happening.  I liked the part about the Secret Service guys bursting
into Cheney's office and carrying him down to the bomb-proof basement
command post.  It was something out of the Cold War, but without
the Cold War's boundless dread.  Whatever happened, the world was not
going to end.  The administration then, over the next few days, made a
public show of establishing a new conceptual framework and translating
this conceptual framework into new routines of activity.  That kind of
transition always the danger of institutionalizing new blind spots and
the opportunity that clear thinking might actually become translated
into practice.  We shall see what happens in practice.

Another of the bad assumptions was that the jihadis are all ignorant
peasant kids.  The idea that jihadis could live in the suburbs and get
pilots' licenses was totally outside the realm of imagination.  Where
did the error come from?  It came partly from stereotyping, of course,
and because we like to believe that all modern people agree with us.
But I think it also derived from a deep error in our understanding
of a networked world.  There's a Wired-magazine sort of myth that the
networked world makes everyone modern -- that it exposes everyone to
a wide range of ideas so they can't be held in mental prisons any more.
What if that assumption is wrong?  The Internet creates little that
is new; for the most part, it amplifies things already going on.  And
one thing already going on is what Bennett Berger calls "ideological
work": people working on themselves to change their personality and
behavior in accordance with an ideology.  The term is meant neutrally,
not necessarily either to disparage or praise.  So a religious person
does ideological work.  So does a person living in a countercultural
commune.  If someone in the wired world is engaged in ideological work
on themselves, then they are likely to use the Internet as part of
the process -- reading ideological materials, participating in online
forums with the like-minded, and so on.  In this way, the Internet
extends the possibilities of ideological work beyond the usual limits
of mass media and face-to-face interaction.

The jihadis, likewise, were engaged in ideological work on themselves.
They must have been, since they weren't willing to kill themselves
when they were born.  The Wired ideology assumes that ideological
work requires people to be sealed off from communications, but
that assumption is wrong.  Ideological work operates at two levels:
the individual level, in a person's own cultivation of self, and
the collective level, in the institutions, publications, associations,
and communications channels that support individuals' ideological work
from day to day.  New technologies make these collective supports for
individual ideological work more powerful, flexible, and far-reaching.
People can stay connected to them at greater distances and work on
themselves more intensively.  The left of the 1970s and 1980s built
a set of parallel institutions, and now the right is doing the same
thing.  A central chore of those institutions is helping people rid
themselves of their careless or credulous belief in the claims made by
the dominant culture, for example through a steady stream of accusations
of "bias".  Of course, this "dominant culture" itself is an ideological
construction; it often involves systematic stereotyping and distortion
of the other's views and especially the other's motives.

The ideological work that jihadis do on themselves is no different.
Here we had these indoctrinated jihadis whose construction of self
did not dissolve when they were exposed to McDonald's and television
in suburban Florida.  Apparently the jihadis were devoted users of the
Internet, and I look forward to learning what ongoing communications
they had back home while they were here.  In the 1970s, followers of
the Ayatollah Khomeini supported the ideological work of their fellow
Islamists in Iran by smuggling cassette tapes into marketplaces; now
perhaps the Internet plays the same role.  Another possibility is that
the jihadis, having conducted extensive ideological work on themselves
in the informationally isolated settings of the jihad schools in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, had internalized the ideology well enough
that they could maintain it in Florida by simply studying the Koran.
If they were drinking alcohol in bars, as we are told they were, then
obviously some aspect of their ideological work was slipping while
they were here.  But even if that is so, they wouldn't be the first
killers who were really trying to kill an aspect of their own selves.

Major events also reconfigure politics.  Numerous agendas lie beneath
the surface of any society, and when the promoters of these agendas
see an opportunity they come out.  In a sense that's unavoidable; it's
how politics is institutionalized.  Someone grabs hold of an issue,
they build a constituency around it, and forever afterward they make
their living pushing it however they can.  Every event then defines a
playing field as issue-advocacy groups take their positions, proposals
take form, alliances are negotiated, and legislatures search for
the equilibrium that produces a majority vote.  Alliances can shift
unpredictably from one moment to the next, and the professionals know
not to burn any bridges because things can sort out quite differently
tomorrow.

One measure of the health of a democracy is the integrity of this
process.  Sometimes an issue advocate will use an event dishonestly,
for example when their issue has no genuine relation to it.  The
Bush administration has given off serious danger signs in this regard.
Before the attacks on the east coast, they had a very clear pattern,
which Bush also exhibited during his time as governor of Texas, of
pushing a small, fixed repertoire of proposals no matter what happened
in the real world.  This policy required Bush and his supporters to
make an endless series of contorted and sometimes self-contradictory
arguments, for example that a large, long-term tax cut is required
because the economy is so healthy and then that a large, long-term tax
cut is required because the economy is so poor.

War, being a dramatic departure from the stream of events that went
before it, is an especially fertile occasion for the pursuit of
private agendas.  World War I, for example, institutionalized the
public relations industry.  Most of the founding figures of public
relations first came to prominence by participating in the propaganda
campaign that persuaded Americans, against great odds, to join the
war on the side of France despite isolationist sentiments and the
large number of German immigrants in the country.  As they built the
government's propaganda machinery, they also built the professional
networks and personal reputations that guaranteed their success, and
the success of public relations as a concept, in the post-war world.
It was no accident that the government was able to recruit the leading
figures in the nascent PR field, and many generations of ambitious
individuals have joined political campaigns with the intention of
being appointed to public jobs and building professional networks that
would then serve them in private life.  The managed economy of World
War II was largely run by industrialists who then became integral
to the networks that shaped economic policy after the war.  MIT
came to prominence after World War II as well, its professors having
largely staffed the war research effort.

What new social structures will be institutionalized in the course of
the war that is now getting under way?  The answer, I think, can be
found in plain sight, in the military doctrine that the Bush people
have been articulating.  They are not talking about a traditional war
of carpet-bombing, but about an information-intensive war focused on
special forces.  This, too, is a product of the defense intellectuals'
work over the last five years, and it will be familiar to anyone who
has seen Tony Scott's 1998 film "Enemy of the State".  By directing a
wide variety of surveillance technologies at the enemy, analyzing the
captured information in real time, and relaying the analyzed results
to highly mobile soldiers, the emerging doctrine hopes to gain an
advantage over an opponent who may have a greater familiarity with
the terrain.  This model can be applied to remote locales through the
use of remote sensing technologies such as satellites, but it applies
much more extensively to industrial urban environments -- thus the
chase scenes in "Enemy of the State".  One of the great dangers of
the coming war is that it will institutionalize this kind of warfare,
applying it not simply to dangerous individuals in foreign countries
but to the civilian populace of the United States.  This would come
about not simply through the installation of certain devices, such
as face-recognition cameras in train stations, but more importantly
through the creation of professional networks, legal and policy
frameworks, organizational skills for integrating and applying
information from many sources, habits of public acceptance instilled
in wartime conditions, secondary applications of the technology that
assemble other political interests around its perpetuation, and so on.

//4 Civil liberties and security

It is easy to feel dispirited now about civil liberties.  Congress
is passing radical legislation that it doesn't even understand, and
civil liberties are a hard sell as fire fighters dig five thousand
rotting corpses out of a six-story pile of rubble and small children
have nightmares about burning people jumping off tall buildings.
Why bother?  You should bother because whatever force you exert,
things will be that much better than they would have been otherwise.
What to do?  Talk sense about the issues.  Take control of the agenda.
Don't get into the position of simply pushing back against freight
trains.  Offer constructive solutions to real problems.  Here I will
suggest a couple of ways to do that.

First, it is crucial to break the automatic association, so often
heard in the media and political statements, between protecting
security and restricting civil liberties.  This association is
simplistic and largely fallacious.  Numerous measures -- martial
arts training for flight attendants, for example -- could increase
security without affecting civil liberties at all.  There have really
been two arguments.  Because the President is envisioning a long-term
battle against a somewhat nebulous enemy, there is a real danger
that "temporary" measures that restrict civil liberties will become
institutionalized and permanent.  Are we talking about a temporary
state of war or a permanent change in our way of life?  Donald
Rumsfeld said in a September 20th news conference that the conflict
would last at least five years, and news reports claim that it will
last ten.  Restrictions on civil liberties that may be justifiable
in a temporary state of war cannot be justified on a permanent basis
if they erode the liberties that make democracy possible.  Wartime
secrecy, for example, corrodes the public sphere; so long as the
war continues, just as in the Cold War, everything that blows up
anywhere in the world will give rise to "reports" that the United
States did it.  Conspiracy theories, speculation, and disinformation
will flourish.  And will the restrictions on civil liberties end when
the war does?  Certainly not if the war, by its nature, never ends --
if we are institutionalizing a state of war.

The assumption security is necessarily associated with a loss of
freedom now runs deep.  Citizens have been told repeatedly that
increased security means giving up their civil liberties, and that
normal Americans are finding the trade-off worthwhile.  Some civil
liberties activists have even received messages instructing them that
they are traitors whose names have been reported to the authorities.
In this environment, it is too easy for the symbols of security to
substitute for real security.  This is already the case in airports,
whose security procedures are ineffective and serve mainly to convey
a symbolic sense of security without overly delaying anyone.  And
if new limitations on civil liberties come to be seen as symbols
of security, then we may find ourselves limiting civil liberties
purely for the symbolic statement that a loss of liberty will make.

It is widely recognized that our infrastructures are all screwed up.
In fact, in many cases civil libertarians have also been prominent
voices calling for increased infrastructural security.  Until very
recently the paradigm case was information infrastructure, and as
I write these words immense damage is being inflicted to computers
worldwide by a worm that exploits a wide range of well-publicized
vulnerabilities in Microsoft's software products.  Now the paradigm
case of infrastructural vulnerability has shifted to airports.
But any infrastructure will illustrate the point equally well --
the electrical grid, for example, or the water system.  Ports are
vulnerable to large-scale military attacks, public health systems
are far too weak to respond to biological attack, the nuclear power
industry cannot account for its fissile materials, and so on.

It is useful to distinguish two approaches we can take to these
problems of systemic infrastructural vulnerability.  We can protect
the infrastructures: taking them as given and surrounding them with
armor, police protection, surveillance, legal penalties, and other
essentially reactive measures.  Or we can redesign them: throwing
them out and reworking them from scratch, designing together in
one concurrent process both their technical architectures and their
institutional arrangements.  Technical design principles might include
adequate redundancy, modularity that allows failures in one component
to be sealed off from other components, cryptographic protections
that keep sensitive information out of the wrong hands, and coherent
design philosophies for the interfaces between "self" and "other", as
for example when downloading foreign code on the Web.  Institutional
design principles might include economic incentives that recognize the
benefits of security and not just its costs, assignment of potentially
conflicting missions to separate entities, and regular audit and
review procedures with the ability to force redesign as necessary.

If the necessary security reforms to our infrastructures were minor,
then an infrastructure protection approach might suffice.  But they
are not.  With the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we
may have a political opening right now to redesign our infrastructures
in a comprehensive way.  The history of airport security demonstrates
that only an epochal event is capable of mobilizing enough political
force to redesign a fundamentally broken system, and we can hope that
the recent attacks will be epochal enough.  It is not obvious, though.
In fact, beyond the widely mocked and obviously temporary incremental
reforms that the US Department of Transportation has introduced, the
signs are poor.  For example, very little comment in the media has
generalized from airport security to sensitive infrastructures in
general, even as the latest worm tears the Internet apart.  And the
government's response to the attacks thus far has been framed quite
squarely in military terms.  Granted, the adminisration is talking
about spending more on "homeland defense".  That phrase was originally
a euphemism for missile defense, but now it is something broader.
But the very phrase, "defense", suggests the same kind of reactive
militarization as the protection approach.  Where will the political
force for a fundamental redesign of our infrastructures come from,
much less the intellectual direction and the money?

The protection approach, hardening things from the outside, does
have the advantage of keeping civilian and military concerns somewhat
separate.  Civilian industry builds systems and the military clamps
"security" around them.  But this approach is completely unworkable.
The already-given infrastructures are so profoundly insecure that they
will need impossible cumbersome, expensive, and intrusive "defending".

Security, then, must be designed in.  The redesign approach also
has the virtue of relaxing the supposed tension between security and
civil liberties.  The protection approach does generally harm civil
liberties: if an infrastructure is insecure, the only way to protect
it is to track and surveill everyone who uses it.  An infrastructure
that is designed to be secure, by contrast, can generally also be
designed to protect civil liberties.  If this seems counterintuitive,
consider the case of cryptography.  In the government's imagination,
cryptography is a threat to security because it allows terrorists
to conduct their communications without the authorities listening in.
This is not really true, in practice, since communications systems
usually have much weaker links than their encoding systems.  But
in any case, the main threat to authorities' wiretapping capability
is not cryptography; it is the sheer magnitude of communications
that flows through modern communications systems.  Individuals can
communicate through numerous communications channels, and disposable
cell phones multiply those potential communications channels beyond
counting.  This is not to say that the authorities are losing all
capabilities for surveillance; obviously those capabilities are
multiplying themselves.  The ongoing changes are complex, and old
models of investigation are giving way to new models.

Cryptography is part of the solution.  Cryptography, to the extent
that it frustrates listening, obviously enhances security by making
it harder for third parties to listen in for criminal purposes.  But
more importantly, cryptography is part of many other privacy-enhancing
technologies that infrastructural redesign can use to protect both
security and civil liberties.  Design problems are best discussed
in concrete particulars.  Once the design process engages with the
full complexity of real infrastructural security and civil liberties
issues, the new generation of privacy-enhancing technologies provides
a huge design space of options.  Likewise for the redesign of airport
security and other physical infrastructures that involve the passage
of people: if these redesign tasks can be given to real industrial
designers, then the full range of issues and potential solutions can
be explored in a conscious way.

The worst alternative, practically speaking, is the one way have now:
a historical accumulation of incremental inventions stuck together in
a way that has no coherent design.  Airport security again provides an
example, and many airports are old enough that security arrangements
have been artificially imposed rather than embedded thoughtfully in
the architecture of the building.  Systems for identifying personnel
(badges, background checks, and the like) are especially ill-designed,
and several investigations have shown that current identification
systems are essentially useless at keeping a determined invader from
a supposedly secure airport facility.

//5 The new city

Much was made of the rap group whose record had to be pulled because
its cover showed them blowing up the World Trade Center.  But it
was no great coincidence.  The terrorists blew up the World Trade
Center because it was our worst nightmare, and worst nightmares are
big business.  The World Trade Center was not great architecture by
any means, but it was a symbol.  It is worth asking why such enormous
buildings existed in the first place, and what they meant.

One story about modern telecommunications says that, by loosing the
bonds of physical proximity, telecommunications allows the world's
people and commerce to be spread about the earth.  In such a world,
surely tall buildings are obsolete.  The reality is more complicated.
The World Trade Center, which is basically at one end of Wall Street,
was pretty much the world center of finance.  Telecommunications
has participated in enormous changes in the financial industry, but
they are not not the changes that the simple theory predicts.  Two of
these changes relate directly to geography.  First, the simple theory
does apply to back-office activities: the factories of information
processing that are now scattered to South Dakota, Ireland, and India.
That change alone dramatically altered the sociology of New York in
the 1980s, long before Internet use became widespread.

The second geographic change in finance worked in the opposite
direction.  The new information and communications technologies
allowed financiers to make much more complex deals with one another,
and complex deals need to be made face-to-face.  Financiers want
to be geographically close to one another, and transportation and
telecommunications technologies let them move further from their
investments and closer to one another.  So even as it was exporting
its back offices to the hinterlands, New York was consolidating
its position as the world center of finance.  The financiers moved
to New York, and they took shuttles to London when they had to.
Personal networks of trust are perhaps a financier's greatest source
of capital, and those networks are built in the boardrooms and bars
of Manhattan.  Of course, not everybody who worked in the World Trade
Center was a captain of industry.  But if their work could have been
done remotely in a place where office space rents for 10% of what it
does in Manhattan, it would have moved a long time ago.  The people
in the World Trade Center were heavily networked with the rest of the
financial world, both in New York and elsewhere, and that networking
is what the World Trade Center was for.

It is hard to say whether the extreme geographic concentration (what
economists call "agglomeration") of the financial industry is a good
thing.  What is good, though, is the idea of dense urban development
with strong infrastructure and public transportation.  New York is
distinctive in several ways, but the great appeal of Manhattan derives
largely from its density.  Dense development supports specialized
services that require face-to-face interaction, including restaurants,
associations, and cultural activities, and it would be a shame if the
destruction of the World Trade Center brought an overreaction against
tall buildings.  The destruction of the towers and the resulting loss
of life are of course a horror that no sane person would wish for, and
yet we now have a chance to rethink density in its architecture and
urban-design aspects.

Some want to turn the World Trade Center site into a park in an area
that needs open space, but sentiment and economics will probably weigh
in favor of rebuilding.  The new buildings can be designed for greater
security, obviously, but also for less of the howling noises that the
World Trade Center towers produced.  The sheer height of the towers
defeated the rote modernism of their architect, and we need a new
conception of tall buildings besides the tedious repetition of a
single form.  The south end of Manhattan is too dead at night, a
security risk in itself, and a move toward mixed-use development of
that area would set a good precedent as well.  We also have a chance
to rethink the relationship between dense development and the larger
infrastructure that feeds it.  Is sheer density bought by wasting
the space required to get people and stuff in and out?  Let serious
thought on these topics be a memorial to the dead, and to a people
that refuses to be blown up.

//6 The discourse of terrorism

Two things are changing at once: war and concepts of war.  The two
are partially independent of one another.  Institutions are capable of
being deluded about the nature of the activities they engage in, and
they are even more capable of telling whatever stories will secure the
consent of the public.  Concepts can change without reality changing
and vice versa.  In practice concepts and reality are linked in
complicated ways.  They are also linked to other things.  Ideas about
war are linked to ideas about politics, the reality of war is linked
to the reality of economics, and so on.

The same is true of terrorism.  To speak of "terrorism" as a discourse,
to put it in double quotes like that, is not to deny that real human
beings are maimed and killed.  It is useful to distinguish two claims
that one might be making in referring to the "discourse" of terrorism.
The weak version is what we normally have in mind in talking about
ideology, bias, or spin.  It includes all manner of assertions about
the nature, history, workings, effects, and defenses against terrorists
and terrorist activity.  A discourse, in this sense, is an ensemble
of metaphors, slogans, received wisdom and celebrated innovations,
agendas for debate, and so on.  The discourse-community of terrorism
has its experts, its founders, its upstarts, its outsiders, its rules
written and unwritten, its conferences, its gossip, and everything
that any other discourse-community might have.

The discourse of terrorism hits the road most forcefully in the
simple question of selection.  The "contras" in 1980s' Nicaragua,
for example, were terrorists by any objective measure.  They operated
in small groups, attacked civilian targets, tried to undermine morale
and provoke an authoritarian response, and generally did everything
that other terrorists do.  The difference, of course, is that they
were supported by the United States, whose policy was to apply the
term "terrorist" only to organizations that opposed American interests.
Much the same can be said of the private militias in countries such
as Colombia and East Timor that interlocked with governments that the
United States was supporting.  American support for these militias,
however indirect, is a stain on our history.  In other cases, the term
"terrorist" is applied arbitrarily to one party in what is effectively
a civil war.  The PKK in Kurdistan, for example, is assuredly a
terrorist organization, but its violence hardly compares to that
of the Turkish military.  During the Cold War, it seemed as though
anybody in the world could get their opponents killed by calling
them communists; will the same now be true of anyone who is called a
terrorist?

Defenders of American policy argue that the United States was, in some
very large sense, in the right, and the geopolitical strategies whose
Realpolitik led to the support of authoritarian terror were justified
by the greater evil of the opponent.  We need not evaluate this claim
about real, physical violence in order to regret the semantic violence
that these policies have institutionalized.  If George Bush is going
to war against the sorts of people who could blow up the World Trade
Center, American prestige can only be damaged if he ignores parties
whose willingness to commit much greater attacks on civilians has long
been proven.

In criticizing the discourse of terrorism, I am not suggesting that
anyone ignore it.  This discourse is a force in the world, and it is
being written ever more deeply into American policy.  To the contrary,
I encourage everyone to read the many documents about terrorism that
have been placed on the Web by governments and think tanks.  Some
of these documents contain useful information, and all of them contain
evidence about the current thinking of political and military leaders.
Because they do reflect a discourse that edits the world in certain
ways, however, reading those documents calls for a critical attitude.
To that end, it helps to distinguished two modes of reading: either
identifying with the text or treating it as an object of investigation.
We are all familiar with both modes.  When we agree with a text,
we tend to identify with it, saving its arguments for future use.
And when we disagree with a text, we tend to treat it an object of
investigation, trying to figure out what is wrong with it.  The key
to critical reading is to adopt both of these attitudes at the same
time, neither uncritically accepting the text nor completely rejecting
it.  In a sense this dual approach is just a grown-up way of relating
to anything: neither merging yourself with it or cutting yourself off
from it, but maintaining your boundaries and engaging in a dialogue.

But the critical approach to a text is not just an attitude or a
personality.  It is not just being mature or smart.  To the contrary,
it is something to learn, and that everybody should be taught in
school.  Literary criticism consists of methods for establishing
this kind of constructive middle distance from a text: identifying
narrative structures, metaphors, logic or illogic, ambiguities,
complex modes such as irony and allegory, and so forth.  Some methods
of criticism emphasize the hidden tensions within a text.  Indeed
I've already done this above in identifying the two different claims
that are being made in public discourse about the need to restrict
civil liberties.

To explore the real complexity of discourses in the social world, let
us consider an example.  Why does Osama bin Laden get such prominent
billing in government statements and the media, when in fact the
terrorists operate in a sprawling network that includes other leaders
of various magnitudes?  After all, even bin Laden's worst enemies
describe him more as a spiritual leader, if you can use that word,
than as a general giving orders.  His finances are important, but
they are hardly the only source of funds for terrorists' operations.
Osama bin Laden's undue prominence makes the purpose of Bush's war
harder to explain, and no doubt if the United States goes to war in
Egypt or Algeria then someone else will become famous at that time.
Until then, however, here are some theories to explain the exclusive
focus on bin Laden:

(1) Cultures and organizations have instilled a preconceived idea
that there has to be one guy who runs it all.  Having gotten used to
talking that way, we keep doing so even when we consciously realize
that the situation is more complex.

(2) The media believe that they have to boil every story down to
its essence.  (Al Gore is boring, keeps remaking himself, and tells
lies; George Bush is dumb, is struggling in the shadow of his father,
and is well-liked.)  Once a single story emerges from the murk, that
one story then gets ferociously amplified in the media echo chamber.
Having become familiar, any other story would explode the rule of
one simple narrative.  So the standard story gets repeated, thus
reinforcing its dominance.

(3) The Western media, for many reasons, have a strict rule of not
giving their audience a sense that other discourse-worlds exist -- the
Arabic-language press, for example -- each with its own disagreements
and world of references and meanings.  Their main selling point is
their authority, which they reinforce by every symbolic means they can
devise, and admitting the existence of other discourses, other voices,
other intellectual worlds, would explode their authority as they have
constructed it.

(4) Osama bin Laden, through his riches and long-time organizing,
was responsible for some early spectacular successes.  This made him
famous first, and he was the easiest figure for media figures to reach
for, and so fame bred more fame.  His fame in the West may even be
responsible for his followers' allegiance; being jihadis, they want to
be on the team the the West most opposes.

My purpose here is not to evaluate these theories or choose among
them.  I simply want to give some idea of the ways in which discourses
are material things that arise and evolve through the roles they play
in the real world.

That, then, is the weak version of terrorism as a "discourse".  The
strong version is more ambitious and more debatable.  Where the weak
version maintains a distinction between discourse and reality, so
that we can notice a discrepancy between the two, the strong version
views discourse and reality as essentially identical.  This is not to
say that the material world is made of nothing but language; rather,
it is to observe that language is part of the material world.  Not
only that, but institutionalized practices are themselves organized
and defined by language.  To open a bank account, for example, is
literally impossible without the discourse of banking that gives
words like "opening" and "closing" their sense.  To be a patient
in a medical office, likewise, is not just a random interaction, but
is densely organized by rituals and expectations that the discourse
of medicine creates and reinforces.  Discourses are inscribed in
the design of buildings, in paperwork, in social conventions, in
the physical appearance of things, and much else.  Even people's
identities -- their conceptions of themselves and their plans for
their lives -- are organized by the discourses of the institutions
they participate in.  Doctors, for example, cultivate a tremendous
variety of embodied habits, all of which are organized by the
discourse of medicine.

What is the strong sense, then, in which terrorism is a discourse?
It is not immediately obvious, given that the jihadis who blew up the
World Trade Center made no special effort to conform to the West's
ideological ideas of terrorism.  Quite the contrary, they tried to
depart from the familiar and expected models of terrorist behavior,
adopting personae and tactics that fell completely outside of the
terrorism experts' textbooks.  The discourse of terrorism, however,
has numerous interlocking facets.  The jihadis did not invent their
methods from nothing.  All human beings are part of society and
history, and the jihadis surely took up a conscious relation to
various familiar models of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, older Muslim
practices of jihad, and so on, all of them familiar to the terrorism
scholars of the West.  The relationship between the jihadis' attacks
and the discourse of terrorism may have been complex, but it was by
no means random.

The discourse of terrorism also shaped how the attacks and attackers
were represented, for example on television and in the commentaries
of the remarkably unembarrassed experts.  Representation is not just
language floating in the wind; it is embedded in the whole complex
of identities and practices that join the producers and consumers of
representations into their respective places in settled institutions,
for example the institution of broadcast news.

Finally, those terrorists who were actually caught will definitely
be fitted into the discourse of terrorism in the judicial process,
as they are submitted to various bureaucratic operations.  They
will become defendants, convicts, immigration violators, members of
banned organizations, and all of the other elements of the terrorism
discourse.

Now, I am not deeply committed to this strong interpretation of the
notion of a discourse.  It is useful, though, in comparison to the
weak version, because it draws attention to important issues: the ways
that institutions shape everything from identities to architecture to
narrative conventions.  Discourses are being renegotiated wholesale
right now, and if we want to have any chance of building a society
based on inclusion and justice, and avoiding a society based on the
perpetual manufacture of terrorists, we need to see how the process
works.

//7 Crisis and inclusion

This is not a good time for Muslim Americans.  Many have been abused,
and many others are staying out of sight.  The vast majority of Muslim
Americans, of course, are decent people who oppose the Taliban and
terrorism.  Many of them moved here to escape extremism.  The question
is how to ensure that Muslim Americans are fully included in society.
Right now, the most obvious analogy for the current situation is
World War II, when many Japanese Americans, suspected of being spies,
were rounded up and interned.  Surely we can congratulate ourselves
that nobody has even suggested doing such a thing to Muslim Americans.
That's a little progress anyway.

The analogy to Japanese Americans not very helpful, though, in that
the Japanese Americans got their justice only decades later.  I want
to suggest another analogy, namely the gay community and AIDS.  AIDS
was a disaster for the gay community on a far greater scale than the
current wave of discrimination is for Muslim Americans.  The analogy
lies in the response.  Gays, like Muslim Americans, had faced a long
history of discrimination, including all manner of ugly language and
physical abuse.  Faced with the crisis of AIDS, however, they decided
that their only chance of survival lay with a cultural movement that
made their community visible and legitimized the cause of curing the
disease.  Although nobody would ever have chosen it, the AIDS disaster
and the AIDS movement led paradoxically to a huge step forward in
public acceptance.  Of course, public acceptance of gays is hardly
universal.  I myself have been threatened with death several times by
people who thought I was gay.  But when the egregious Jerry Falwell
says something terrible about gays, he is often made to apologize for
it.  This is progress, relatively speaking.

And we have lately seen tremendous progress in public acceptance of
Muslim Americans.  When the Taliban destroyed Buddhist monuments, the
press was clear that Taliban did not represent Islam; the Washington
Post, for example, ran a lengthy article surveying mainstream
Islamic opinion against the Taliban's actions.  In the 2000 election,
Muslims had the commendable sense to be the swing vote in Michigan.
They also provided George Bush with a way to pitch his "faith-based"
initiative as something other than an establishment of Christianity
as a state religion.  Bush's war speech made a point of respecting
Islam, and we would have been surprised if it didn't.  You take your
progress where you can find it.

So even though some Muslims may not be totally comfortable with the
idea, let us use gay liberation as a model for Muslim liberation in
the US.  It might be a bit much to appropriate "raghead", which is
quite a vile epithet, as a positive label the way that gays did with
"queer".  But let us make a big, public point of embracing Muslims
as part of America.  Immigrants make American interesting and strong,
and Muslims are no different in that regard than Norwegians.  Everyone
who comes here acculturates to some degree while adding new elements
to the culture.  Think, for example, of the way that yoga, sushi,
and feng shui have taken over the country -- what elements of Muslim
culture should go mainstream in the same way?

We need Muslim visibility.  Muslims, to start with, need better
publicists.  Their religious leaders have generally not been effective
at communicating in the mass media.  They should start a Muslim think
tank that takes lessons from the established ones.  There are lots
of cool Muslims out there -- let's get them on TV.  We'll be making
progress when Muslim characters appear often enough in sitcoms that it
isn't even news.  We also need public education about Islam.  We need
to translate the ideas of the Koran into American vernacular language
-- simple, clear statements that don't like platitudes.  We need
the work of contemporary Muslim artists hanging in art museums, and
we need Muslim folk tales read in kindergarten classrooms.  None of
this needs to be didactic.  Muslim jokes need to become as familiar
as Jewish jokes, as soon as everyone is in the mood for jokes again,
and Arabic slang needs to become as familiar as Yiddish slang.  Lots
of good Americans want to channel their feelings into good works at
this time, and the practical work of making Muslim culture a visible
part of American culture would seem like a good place to start.

//8 More battle hymns

The United States also needs more and better patriotic songs.  The
top-selling record on Amazon is "American Patriot", a collection of
patriotic standards by the otherwise very unremarkable Lee Greenwood.
Looking at the Amazon page for this record, it's amazing how few
patriotic songs we actually have.  It's odd, for example, to see this
bad country singer include both the communist "This Land Is Your Land"
and the white-supremacist "Dixie", *and* turn the Pledge of Allegiance
(written by a socialist) into a song, in order to round out an even
ten.  (He also threw in a couple of his own, which I don't have high
hopes for.)

I like the national anthem.  It's a very weird song -- a notoriously
unsingable 18th century English drinking song refitted with amateurish
and obnoxious lyrics -- yet somehow it works.  Then there's "America
the Beautiful", a good song that nonetheless becomes enervating after
you've heard it ten million times.  It needs several decades of rest.
The "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is an excellent song whose excellence
is only understood allegorically and in its historical context.  It's
the "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave" song refitted
with lyrics in honor of the Union army in the civil war.  As a symbol
of our spiritual war against slavery and other forms of injustice, it
is an excellent symbol of the country.  I wonder how often it is sung
in the South.  We need more songs like that: stirring, well-written
songs about how despite all our historical baggage we've fought to
bring dignity and equality to ever wider groups of people.  Garth
Brooks' "We Shall Be Free" is sort of like that, but unfortunately
it illustrates the pitfalls.  It is abstract and didactic, and it
is framed in a negative way -- that we're not yet free -- rather
than defining us by our commitment to freedom and acknowledging the
progress we've made.

If we're going to have a war, let's have a patriotic song that defines
the war in positive terms: we can't win by just going out and killing
terrorists, but everyone can win if we name what we care about and
live by it.

end

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************