Securing Against Future Events (SaFE): Pre-emption, Protocols, and Publics

In the decade following the events of September 11 2001, security against potential terrorist attack has significantly changed in its form and emphasis. Put simply, in many of the post-event analyses following the attacks, as well as those in Bali, Madrid, London and Mumbai, the security problem is understood to be how to take action on the basis of uncertain, unforeseen and unanticipated events. For example, the 9/11 hijackers did not fit the known and established risk profiles for airport security screening - and so, in effect, the absence of a match to profile resulted in a failure to intervene or act. Today, the known and established characteristics of who or what may pose a terrorism risk is considered something of a risk in itself. That is to say, what is sought is an adaptive and responsive means of securing against future threat events, whatever their characteristics may prove to be. In short, the conventional security practice of preventing future attacks through verification against profiles, names and watchlists is beginning to be superceded by the pre-emption of future events through horizon-scanning, data gathering and projection, mobile profiles, and threat imagination. Uncertainty about the future is no longer posed as an impediment to action, but precisely as a spur to new forms of security calculation and decision that make uncertainty the very basis of action.

The SaFE fellowship will advance knowledge and understanding of these futures-oriented and pre-emptive security techniques, helping to achieve further focus within the terrorism core area of the Global Uncertainties Programme, and with significant implications for the cyber security and threats to infrastructures core areas. The fellowship will convene and deliver a programme of activities designed to identify and nurture productive relationships among GU researchers and practitioners. The programme is organised around three thematic streams that have resonance and significance across discplines and across the public and private sectors: inferred futures, or how future threats can be inferred in advance; enacting decision, or how action can be taken even where information is partial or fragmentary; and publics and proportionality, or how judgements can be reached on what is a proportionate pre-emptive security measure. The activities are convened on the principle of opening spaces for dialogue, collaboration and the advancement of ideas and knowledge - from the on-site seminar planned for St Pancras International station, to knowledge exchange residencies for early career researchers, to the 'Security's Futures' public report.

Within the fellowship, a programme of personal research will focus specifically on the deployment of digital data and analytics within border security programmes. For border security, the shift to pre-empting future threat events has meant 'stretching' the geography of the border itself, such that it reaches into the background, behaviour and associates of people. As one leading supplier of border control software has put it, "the future of border management lies in the convergence of the biometric key with the system of integrated risk data that it unlocks". Social science has yet to develop conceptual and empirical knowledge of how potential future border threats are imagined and acted upon within such systems. Within the European Union's directive on Passenger Name Record (PNR) data, for example, all EU countries are required to devise compliant risk data systems, and to establish passenger information units for the assessment of the data. The SaFE research will analyse the relationships between software systems and risk decisions within the PIUs in the UK and Netherlands. The findings will be compared and contrasted with two areas in which important new innovations in system and decision have taken place: identifying flood risk, and identifying anomalous financial transactions.

The ESRC's delivery plan (2011-15) identifies a key strategic priority to "create a better understanding of how and why people and organisations make decisions, and how these can be managed and influenced" (page 5). This priority intersects with the cross-council Global Uncertainties priority to "realise greater security for all in a changing world", precisely because current understandings of how and why people and organisations make security decisions lack attention to the technological intersection of commercial, governmental, political, and public decisions about risk and threat. For example, in data from my past projects, the commercial designers of algorithms for crowded place security have reported in interviews that they are unsure how their "model designed to detect insurance fraud" is different from "the mathematically similar model used for border controls" in the eyes of the public. From a different perspective, government agencies charged with securing the border report that they want commercial suppliers to "automate the kinds of decisions our experienced staff are making every day".
The SaFE fellowship responds directly to the need for better understanding of security decisions made under conditions of profound uncertainty about future threats, with specific emphasis on engaging commercial, governmental and 'third sector' beneficiaries.
Who will benefit from this research? - the beneficiaries of the SaFE fellowship include: commercial bodies with interest in the development and application of technologies that pre-empt future threat events (e.g. IBM; SITA; CapGemini; Thales; Augmentiq); governmental and policy making authorities with a remit to consider and to deploy new forms of 'future risk' oriented security (e.g. UKBA; Koninklijke Marechaussee; European Commission; European Parliamentary Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs); and 'third sector' and public bodies with a stake in deliberating the societal effects of new security measures (e.g. UK Information Commissioner; European Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx; UK and European legal advocates who confront a new 'vocabulary' of risk in national security cases; representatives of charitable sector, such as National Council for Voluntary Organisations, NCVO, and Islamic Relief).
How will they benefit from this research? - With regard to the commercial and industrial stakeholders across the GU programme, they will benefit from the programme of leadership activities because it will afford opportunities to share their applications and systems 'problem spaces' and to devise new approaches from other sectors (e.g. partnerships, future leaders residencies, knowledge exchange workshops). Within the border security domain that is the focus of the personal research, the commercial beneficiaries will gain greater understanding of what happens to their algorithmic models when the system is 'retuned' by governement priorities or adapted within the PIU. This matters because the commercial suppliers tell us they have little feedback knowledge on the experiential and onward life of their systems in situ, and that there may be ways to 'design in' adaptation.
With respect to the governmental authorities, the primary beneficiary will be the UKBA, whose 'in kind' partnership will ensure that the insights from pre-emptive techniques used in other threat domains can be used to the full. The Fellow is also involved in the ongoing negotiations between EU and US on PNR sharing - the research will be crucial to ensuring that attention is paid to the public and democratic effects between data gathering and risk analytics.
Finally, the SaFE fellowship will develop ongoing engagement with a wide range of bodies whose advocacy work is transformed by new security practices - for example, charities whose compliance with new border security practices demands new ways of working.