Neoconopticon - the EU Security-Industrial Complex

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Neoconopticon - the EU Security-Industrial Complex Copyright and publication details © Statewatch ISSN 1756-851X. Personal usage as private individuals/”fair dealing” is allowed. Usage by those work- ing for organisations is allowed only if the organisation holds an appropriate licence from the relevant reprographic rights organisation (eg: Copyright Licensing Agency in the UK) with such usage being subject to the terms and conditions of that licence and to local copyright law. Acknowledgments Th is report was produced by Ben Hayes for Statewatch and the Transnational Institute. Additional research was con- ducted by Max Rowlands and Fiona O’Malley of Statewatch, while Tony Bunyan and Trevor Hemmings (also Statewatch) provided a constant stream of invaluable comments, infor- mation and guidance (several sections also draw heavily on Tony Bunyan’s columns for the Guardian newspaper’s ‘Liber- ty Central’ website). Th e information and analysis provided by Frank Slijper (Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade and TNI), Matthias (from Gipfelsoli), and Kamil Majchrzak (ECCHR) was also invaluable, as was Th omas Mathiesen’s advice in respect to the variations on the ‘Panopticon’ dis- cussed in this report. Th e report was edited by Nick Buxton and Fiona Dove of the Transnational Institute (TNI) and benefi ted from help- ful comments and suggestions from Wilbert van der Zeijden and David Sogge at TNI and Eric Toepfer of CILIP, Ger- many. Th e author also gained much insight from discussions at a number of conferences and seminars. In particular, the International Workshop on Surveillance and Democracy organised by Minas Samatas at the University of Crete in June 2008, and the seminars on the EU organised at the ‘Militarism: Political Economy, Security, Th eory’ conference at the University of Sussex, organised by Iraklis Oikonomou and Anna Stavrianakis in May 2009. Th e comments of Kevin Haggerty (Department of Sociology, University of Alberta) on an earlier draft paper on the European Security Research Programme (ESRP), prepared for the ‘Surveillance and Democracy’ conference, were also very helpful in terms of shaping this report. N eoC onO pticon The EU Security-Industrial Complex Contents Part I Introduction 1 Summary of the report 4 2 Neo-what? Th e ideas behind the title 6 Part II Bringing in big business: the European Security Research Agenda 3 Setting out the stall: the ‘Group of Personalities’ 9 4Preparatory actions: EU security research 2004-2006 12 5 Setting the agenda: the European Security Research Advisory Board 15 6 Th e FP7 programme and beyond: security research 2007-2013 18 7 2030 vision: Th e European Security Research and Innovation Forum 22 8 A lobbyist’s dream 26 Part III From security research to security policy 9 Towards a political economy of the ESRP 28 10 Full spectrum dominance: the mission explained 29 Part IV Full spectrum dominance in the borderlands 11 Points of departure: from migration controls to social controls 33 12 EUROSUR: the European Border Surveillance System 36 13 R&D for global apartheid? 41 Part V Combating crime and terrorism: full spectrum surveillance 14 Th e EU’s PATRIOT Acts 43 15 ‘Situation awareness’ 45 16 Th e dawning of the biometric age 46 17 Suspect communities: profi ling and targeting systems 49 18 Th e EU’s space race: Galileo and Kopernikus 52 19 Eyes in the skies: unmanned aerial vehicles 55 Part VI A world of red zones and green zones 20 Critical infrastructure protection 58 21 Policing the red zone: crisis management policy 63 22 Th e policing of protest: a full spectrum dominance case study 67 Part VII Full Spectrum governance 23 ‘Interoperability’ 70 24 Expanding the concept of national security 72 25 Th e years ahead 75 Part VIII Taking stock 26 Conclusions and recommendations 78 NeoConOpticon - The EU Security-Industrial Complex PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 Summary of the report Governmental spending on products In 2006, Statewatch and the Transnational Institute pub- lished Arming Big Brother, a briefi ng paper examining the and services for homeland security development of the European Union’s Security Research should reach $141.6bn worldwide Programme (ESRP). Th e ESRP is a seven year, €1.4 billion programme predicated on the need to deliver new secu- in 2009... Th e high priority given rity enhancing technologies to the Union’s member states in to homeland security has made order to protect EU citizens from every conceivable threat that market one of the few to their security (understood here purely in terms of bodily safety). recession-resistant sectors of the defence industry, some Th e ESRP also has the explicit aim of fostering the growth of a lucrative and globally competitive ‘homeland security’ experts believe. industry in Europe. To this end, a number of prominent Eu- ropean corporations from the defence and IT sectors have 1 Visiongain Market Research, 2009 enjoyed unprecedented involvement in the development of the security ‘research’ agenda. Arming Big Brother set out a number of concerns about the pending ESRP, including the implicit threat posed to civil liberties and fundamental rights by EU ‘research’ into sur- veillance and other security technologies. Th e report was also highly critical of the corporate infl uence on the EU security research programme and warned of various dan- gers in actively pursuing a ‘security-industrial complex’ in Europe. Arming Big Brother, pub- lished in 2006, was widely distributed and debated.2 The online version has been downloaded over 500,000 times. Th is follow-up report contains new research showing how the European Security Research Programme continues to be shaped by prominent transnational defence and security corporations and other vested interests. Th ough technically a Research and Development (R&D) programme, the ESRP is heavily focused on the application of security technologies (rather than objective research per se), and is increasingly aligned with EU policy in the fi elds of justice and home af- fairs (JHA, the ‘third pillar’), security and external defence (CFSP, the ‘second pillar’). 1 Global Homeland Security 2009-2019, ASD reports, see: http://www.asdreports.com/shopexd.asp?ID=1442. 2 Hayes, B. (2006) Arming Big Brother: The EU’s Security Research Programme. Amsterdam: TNI/Statewatch. Available at: http://www.statewatch.org/ analyses/bigbrother.pdf. 4 NeoConOpticon - The EU Security-Industrial Complex Aligned to the EU’s policy objectives, the corporate-led research under the ESRP favours the public procurement of new security technologies and EU security policies that mandate their implementation. Th is largely hidden infl uence is now exerting a tremendous infl uence on the EU policy agenda in an expanding cycle of largely unaccountable and highly technocratic decision-making. Th e report is comprised of two substantial sections. Th e fi rst revisits the development of the European Security Research Programme to date. It shows that the design of the ESRP has been outsourced to the very corporations that have the most to gain from its implementation. Th e second focuses on the implementation of the ESRP and the broader consolidation of the EU security-industrial com- green zones; external borders controlled by military force plex. It examines the role played by specifi c actors, and the and internally by a sprawling network of physical and virtual relationship between specifi c EU ‘research’ projects and EU security checkpoints; public spaces, micro-states and ‘mega policy measures. Th is report examined all 95 of the projects events’ policed by high-tech surveillance systems and rapid funded so far under the security research programme (to reaction forces; ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘crisis management’ the end of 2008) and looked at several thousand related EU- mis sions that make no operational distinction between the -funded R&D projects from other thematic programmes. suburbs of Basra or the Banlieue; and the increasing integra- What emerges from the bewildering array of contracts, tion of defence and national security functions at home and acronyms and EU policies is the rapid development of a abroad. powerful new ‘interoperable’ European surveillance system that will be used for civilian, commercial, police, security It is not just a case of “sleepwalking into” or “waking up to” and defence purposes alike. a “surveillance society”, as the UK’s Information Commis- sioner famously warned,3 it feels more like turning a blind Despite the oft en benign intent behind collaborative Eu- eye to the start of a new kind of arms race, one in which ropean ‘research’ into integrated land, air, maritime, space all the weapons are pointing inwards. Welcome to the and cyber-surveillance systems, the EU’s security and R&D NeoConOpticon. policy is coalescing around a high-tech blueprint for a new kind of security. It envisages a future world of red zones and Ben Hayes, June 2009 3 Waking up to a surveillance society, Information Commissioner’s Office Press Release, 2 November 2006, see: http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/ documents/pressreleases/2006/waking_up_to_a_surveillance_society.pdf. 5 NeoConOpticon - The EU Security-Industrial Complex In just a few years, the homeland 2 Neo-what? The ideas behind the title security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size which is now signifi cantly larger Th e ‘Panopticon’ and beyond than either Hollywood or the music Th e Panopticon was a model prison designed in 1785 by business. Yet what is most striking the English social theorist Jeremy Bentham. Also known as the ‘Inspection House’, the design allowed the prison guards is how little the security boom is to observe all the prisoners (from the Greek: pan-opticon) analysed and discussed as an economy, without the prisoners themselves being able to tell when they were being watched. As a prison design, the success of as an unprecedented convergence of the Panopticon was short-lived,5 but several centuries later, unchecked police powers and unchecked the term was adopted by the French philosopher Michel Foucault as a metaphor for techniques of surveillance and capitalism, a merger of the shopping social control in modern society.6 His central argument was mall and the secret prison.
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