Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez, PhD

The ebooks you thought you owned.

2012-02-02T20:49:00.000-08:00

One of the most troubling and less discussed characteristics of the new wave of digital content is the change in the relationship between you and the private property rights of your collection.

Traditionally, when you go to borders (ups!) and buy a book, this book is yours for you to keep, will form part of your collection and one day, when you die, will become part of your estate. I never got to meet my grandfather. He died when my mother was a child and the only contact I had with him was through the comments he did at the margins of the books he owned. Hundreds of them for me to explore and learn about him....

...well, I guess that is one tradition that I will not be passing to my grandchildren. Read the first paragraph of the licence agreement of your kindle books:

Use of Digital Content. Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Digital Content. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict. Some Digital Content, such as Periodicals, may not be available to you through Reading Applications.

...surprised to know that you don't actually own the books you bought? you only licence them, and they are non transferable. Once you die, all this patrimony you collected with years of passion to the written digital word will evaporate into thin air, and Amazon can make all those books and comments you accumulated in 70 years of digital reading vanish to never reappear.

Although the downfall of private online ownership might be a positive thing -after all, information wants to be free, and what is free cannot be owned- Amazon's scenario is the worst possible one. Yes, information is not owned by you, but by the corporation, and no it is not free; it is almost as expensive as a book you can buy.

Do not get me wrong. I am a strong advocate of e-books and the promise they represent for the future of a world where publishing has no bouncers anymore. But the idea that I actually will not be able to transfer the property of the most intimate thing I "own", my digital library, is a scary thought that will become more and more relevant once the early adopters of the e-book revolution start dying.

Today, you have few choices available to avoid this horrible outcome, but the legality of most of them is questionable.

a) You can give your password to your family and hope that when you die, Amazon will not found out and therefore they could keep accessing your material (it is like keep receiving your social security check after you die).

b) You can download and break the DRM of your ebooks that you thought you owned, so they can be distributed freely. Beware, though, that circumventing DRMs is a possible breach of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and might get you into trouble, even if you paid for the ebook.

c) You can download all your material in one kindle and once you die, that hardware should never go online again. In theory, this method is the only one with few to none legal implications.

Not only SOPA was a huge mistake and clumsy hollywood should not be deciding how we manage the Internet. We need copyright reform, but we need more than that. We need a complete new way to think about ownership of digital product. One thing is certain; copying is not stealing, the same way that buying a kindle book is not owning.

list of recent thesis I have advised or co advised.

2012-01-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

One of the privileges of working at CHDS/NPS is that I get to advice great thesis and learn during the process.

Here is just a short list of the most recent ones that I will try to keep updated. Each of those was a learning experience that increased my understanding of homeland security / national security issues, and each of them was the opportunity to work with highly committed brilliant students who are serious about bringing rigor and critical thinking to the field of security studies. Each thesis is an original contribution and takes us beyond the common places or the coffee shop opinions about security and defense.

[PDF] LESSONS ON POLICING TERRORISM: STUDYING POLICE EFFECTIVENESS IN ITALY AND GERMANY

PG Born… - 2011

13. ABSTRACT As terrorism threatens a democratic nation, there tends to be an aversion to
deploying military forces to combat the internal threat—rightfully so, as it speaks to
democratic principles of rule of law. Because of this tendency, democratic nations tend to ...

[PDF] THE BALLOON EFFECT AND MEXICAN HOMELAND SECURITY: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE AMERICAS'SECURITY CHAIN

JAR Cuevas… - 2011

... December 2011 Thesis Advisor: Rodrigo Nieto Gomez Second Reader: Leo Blanken Page 2. ...
from the NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL December 2011 Author: José A. Rodríguez Cuevas
Approved by: Rodrigo Nieto Gómez Thesis Advisor Leo Blanken Second Reader ...

[PDF] DENATIONALIZED CITIZENSHIP THEORY: WHAT IS THE ROLE OF CITIZENSHIP THEORY IN HOMELAND SECURITY?

CA Lombardi… - 2011

... by Cherie A. Lombardi December 2011 Thesis Advisor: Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez Second Reader:
Samuel Clovis Page 2. THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ... Author: Cherie A. Lombardi
Approved by: Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez Thesis Advisor Samuel Clovis Second Reader ...

[PDF] THE PERFECT STORM: THE RELIGIOUS APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION AND PERSONAL DISASTER PREPAREDNESS

AM Albertazzi… - 2011

... by Anne Marie Albertazzi December 2011 Thesis Advisor: Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez Second
Reader: Anders Strindberg Page 2. ... Author: Anne Marie Albertazzi Approved by: Rodrigo
Nieto-Gomez, PhD Thesis Advisor Anders Strindberg, PhD Second Reader ...

The Power of the few. Disruption and technology evolution for homeland security

2012-01-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

This is the full text of my new peer reviewed article "The power of the few". The original publication can be found at the Homeland Security Affairs Journal at: http://www.hsaj.org/?article=7.1.18

It is available in PDF, mobi and epub too.

The suggested citation is:

Nieto-Gómez, Rodrigo. “The Power of "the Few": A Key Strategic Challenge for the Permanently Disrupted High-Tech Homeland Security Environment.” Homeland Security Affairs 7, Article 18 (December 2011)
http://www.hsaj.org/?article=7.1.18

In a nutshell, in this article I elaborate on the consequences of the rapid pace of technology evolution and what it means to live times of accelerated returns for security. It is my most elaborate explanation yet about why I think homeland security is first and foremost a usability challenge for exponential times.

Full text:

------------------------

The Power of “the Few”:
A Key Strategic Challenge for the Permanently Disrupted High-Tech Homeland Security Environment

Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez

To a greater degree than at any point in history, individuals and small groups — from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on the one hand to criminal networks and terrorist organizations on the other — have the ability to engage the world with far-reaching effects, including those that are disruptive and destructive.
-First Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, 2009

INTRODUCTION

The task of defining a homeland security environment is tricky. Framing it seems like an invitation to oversimplify its nature as a series of elements that can be fitted into a tightly packaged description that might look elegant, but also provides us with a false sense of linear order and predictability for what it is in reality an interactive, complex, and evolving web of forces, constraints, incentives, and conditions.

This article will first describe how the current pace of technological progress perpetuates the chaotic nature of the homeland security environment and maintains it in a permanent state of disruption. This has given birth to a new phenomenon that I call “the power of the few,” where technology has lowered the barriers to entry for disruption, both positive and negative, thus creating the need for a new kind of security strategy to prevent innovation and freedom being turned against the legitimate users of social and physical infrastructure. I conclude with an exploration of the limits of the current homeland security institutional framework to adapt to this rapidly evolving and unpredictable environment, and propose a new strategic approach to homeland security, based on the different natures of incremental and disruptive threats, to counter more effectively the negative effect of the power of the few.

Whereas the normal approach to describing an environment for strategic purposes is to think of it as a static abstraction of reality, akin to the chessboard where players distribute their pieces and make their moves (think of a battle map, as shown in Figure 1), a social environment for public policy is not a snapshot frozen in time, but a mutating context in which people operate and interact with each other and with the natural and man-made structures that surround them, and each interaction morphs a little bit the state of the system. It is more an ecosystem than a photograph.

Figure 1. Cartographic representation of Operation Overlord strategic plan.¹

As such, the homeland security environment should be understood as a chaotic system where long term planning is very difficult and forecasting is in reality impossible. As Levy explains it, “chaos systems do not reach a stable equilibrium; indeed, they can never pass through the same exact state more than once.” Therefore, “we cannot learn too much about the future by studying the past: if history is the sum of complex and nonlinear interactions among people and nations, then history does not repeat itself.”² Trend analysis, the basis of most forecasting based planning, is not a useful tool to plan and prepare against future disruptive threats because that previously mentioned metaphorical chessboard will not have the same number of squares twice, and the pieces constantly change the way they move.³

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described the limitations of forecasting for defense, strategy, and war:

We can’t know with absolute certainty what the future of warfare will hold but we do know it will be exceedingly complex, unpredictable, and — as they say in the staff colleges — “-.” ... And I must tell you, when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.⁴

HERACLITUS AND ASIMOV WERE RIGHT

In Cratylus, Plato imagines a dialogue where Heraclitus expresses: “all things are in motion and nothing at rest...[it is] like the stream of a river ... that you cannot go into the same water twice.⁵ Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, updated the quote: “It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”⁶

That is why trying to describe the current state of the homeland security environment is a flawed approach to developing a strategy, mainly because the current state is just an instant in the evolution of this complex and randomized system. Instead, I will focus on demonstrating how scientific and technological progress (two of the main motivational forces for societal transformations) have accelerated the pace of this evolution, reducing in the process the “shelf life” of some of the security paradigms and doctrines that condition the reactions of our institutions in the homeland security environment. This accelerated pace implies a change of scale that empowers small groups.

Over the last century, radical technological changes have disrupted the human environment in profound and permanent ways. In this very short amount of time, a 100-year-old person alive in 2011 would have witnessed the arrival of the power grid, the telephone grid, the mass produced automobile and the interstate highway system, radio broadcasting, television, the cell phone network (first transmitting only voice and then voice and data), the computer and, of course, the Internet. None of these technologies that shape and sustain the human ecosystem today were generally available the day he was born.

In those same 100 years, new techniques and construction materials have reshaped our urban environment. Reinforced concrete and the steel frame allowed us to build higher, giving birth to the modern skyscraper and opening the door to a new level of urban concentration. Paradoxically, stronger and more flexible infrastructures (dams, pipelines, power plants, the grid, tunnels, bridges, highways, and airports) gave us the capacity to locate people and resources over much greater distances than before, enabling a technological urban sprawl.

This contemporary urban environment is dependent on technological infrastructure operating unceasingly. As Weisman’s provocative narrative describes, it would take less than a week without functioning infrastructure for places like New York City to start a process of rapid decay.⁷

Because of innovations in transportation and information technologies, the rapport of the individual with space also suffered multiple disruptions and our environment has “shrunk.” Low transportation costs made possible unrestricted and rapid travel to almost anywhere in the world for less than one thousand dollars using the global civilian aviation network, and provided the ability to ship any product anywhere for just a few hundred dollars. This modified our relation with time, as spatial processes that used to take months — like sending a shipment across the world, traveling, or sending a letter — can now be accomplished in days for what used to take months, and instantly for what it used to take days. The grace period that societies used to enjoy to prepare for a disruption coming from overseas no longer exists, or at least it has been greatly reduced. Disruptions not only can travel far and cheap, they can also travel fast.

Lastly, our relationship with the working and productive environment also endured important changes that affect the way we deal with technological innovation. In the last 100 years high tech societies have become postindustrial,⁸ and knowledge creation has replaced manufacturing as the main added value for economic growth, with consequences for every production sector.

The food industry operates today in an environment where, thanks to agrotechnology, produce is abundant and easily transported from its source to the consumer. In this high-tech environment, less than 4 percent of the population of any given developed country can grow enough food to feed all its inhabitants and still sell an “exportable surplus.”⁹ Furthermore, the primary sector is being disrupted by the recently gained knowledge of how genetics work and how genes can be converted into information and manipulated digitally,¹⁰ freeing genetic scientists from the physical limits of Mendelian inheritance.¹¹

Regarding the secondary sector, affordable energy, robotics, and outsourced cheap labor made possible by communication and transportation technologies have made dull and repetitive manufacturing tasks unprofitable and undesirable inside the labor environments of most high-income nations, forcing their citizens into more information driven endeavors. In fact, this labor environment has seen “a huge increase in the number of people paid to think or talk, rather than produce or transport objects.”¹² That is, people are being paid for their capacity to produce and manage information (granted, not all of it creative) and not for their muscles, thus multiplying as a result the amount of knowledge that can be recombined and therefore the potential for disruption (voluntary or involuntary) of the environment in cumulative way.

This takes us to the two main patterns that govern our innovation and security environment and are to blame for the emergence of the phenomenon of the “power of the few.”

The first one has to do with the cumulative, combinatorial, evolving and unpredictable behavior of the system: waves of new technologies lay the foundations for the next technologies with cross-pollination during the same wave. Some new technologies, like the printing press and the combustion engine, have ripple disruptive effects across many domains, and affect security in many ways. Others are just incremental upgrades from previous technologies and security strategies do not need to be altered. Nonetheless, all new technologies inherit some elements from previous generations of scientific discovery and technological advances. While this process can be traced back in time, in what Bryan Arthur denominated “Combinatorial evolution,” he also concluded:

[Modern technology is now] becoming an open language for the creation of structures and functions in the economy ... shifting from technologies that produced fixed physical outputs to technologies whose main character is that they can be combined and configured endlessly for fresh purposes. Technology, once a means of production, is becoming a chemistry.”¹³

So, the first pattern exhibited by the system is that technological environments evolve in a combinatorial way, and modern technology has made recombination, including convergence, simpler. For example, when material products are transformed into binary data, they can be manipulated with little to no associated manufacturing cost. As Chris Anderson points out, “once something becomes software, it inevitably becomes free — in cost, certainly, and often in price.”¹⁴ Products that used to be “things” are today binary code: music CDs or LPs, VHS tapes or DVDs, typewriters, solitaire decks, blueprints, calculators, libraries full of books, office files, medical test results, genetic strings, to cite just a few. While this convergence might seem today logical and understandable, just a few years ago (before the computer era) it would have been difficult to find something linking medical research and film distribution.

The second key pattern derivates from the first one. As part of this evolution and the iterative learning process that comes with it, technology gets cheaper and better with time incrementally. Any early adopter of technology has witnessed this phenomenon when, after a few generations, his or her first generation model has become an obsolete object that cost twice as much as the new model. This kind of innovation was baptized “sustaining” by Clayton Christensen. In his words, sustaining technologies "improve the performance of established products.” But he also recognized that sometimes “disruptive” technologies emerge. They bring to “a market [I would say to the security environment] a very different value proposition than had been available previously.”¹⁵

So, for the purposes of this article, the second important environmental pattern is that innovation brings change to the system either incrementally or disruptively. Incremental improvements of existing mainstream technologies makes them better and cheaper, but disruptive innovation can and often does change the environment in unexpected ways, disrupting (hence the name) the rules that governed what seemed, for a while, a stable ecosystem.

Disruptive technologies are the ones that normally modify the physical qualities of our environment and more importantly, the fabric of our technologically dependent civilization. For example, the combustion engine not only replaced the horse as the main human means of transportation, it also completely disrupted the way humans interact with their urban space, making modern cities and suburban sprawl possible; this created new conditions and constraints for spatial planning. It also created new social vulnerabilities and risks, as the thousands of road fatalities per year demonstrate, catapulting accidents — in less than a century — to the fifth leading cause of death in the United States and creating the need for a highway safety and security strategy.¹⁶

Technological innovation is a natural consequence of scientific progress. Every time a new phenomenon is understood or, to use Brian Arthur’s words, every time a phenomenon or effect is “harnessed” by science, it can be exploited by technology.¹⁷ Then, market forces and human behavior normally determine how and if these new technologies will be assimilated and become a permanent part of the environment.¹⁸

Each new technology that we adopt creates new structural vulnerabilities. As Ted Lewis points out “highly technological societies are vulnerable because they depend heavily on technology.”¹⁹ The more technology we use, the more potential vulnerabilities there are. Because technology now has such a high level of combinatorial complexity, it can safely be said that the environment has reached a state where the periods of stability between disruptions are short lived (certainly shorter than before), and we should assume that disruption is the permanent default state.

You cannot go to the same water twice, and when the water reaches the ocean, the shape of its breaking waves cannot be predicted. Change is indeed the main factor of society today. Therefore, the current mutating environment encourages disruptive participation of small groups of new actors that, until recently, had not enough resources to achieve disruption on a global scale. Because of the two previously described environmental patterns (the combinatorial evolution of the technological environment and the intrinsic characteristics of “sustaining” and “disruptive” technologies), the scale has been altered to favor the small groups I refer to as “the few,” and away from big organizations or governments that used to hold a monopoly on system based disruption.

THE POWER OF THE FEW:
A 2001 ‘CELL’ HAS THE SIZE OF A 1941 EMPIRE

On September 11, 2001, “a few” hijackers were able to bring to a halt the entire nation, cripple the economy, place continuity of government at risk and inflict more than 3000 casualties. The only other occasion when the United States suffered comparable loses from a single attack was during Pearl Harbor, when the combined fleet of six carrier battle groups (the Kido Butai) backed by the full power of the Japanese Empire was deployed to accomplish a similar result.

In 2001, a cell of nineteen hijackers did what only a powerful empire could do in 1941.

How is it possible that a twenty-first century cell has been empowered to provoke the same kind of damage as a twentieth century empire?

The more technologies we integrate incrementally into our society’s environment, the more options or choices for recombination are created, and the more unforeseeable vulnerabilities appear. New technologies have commoditized certain key resources needed to affect the environment on a global scale. In addition, the expensive physical infrastructure that was formerly required to do this has often been replaced by technologies that can be modified and recombined without heavy machinery and big factories.

The Quadrennial Defense Review of 2010 explicitly recognized this as one of the key sources for uncertainty in the current security ecosystem:

Globalization has transformed the process of technological innovation while lowering entry barriers for a wider range of actors to acquire advanced technologies. As technological innovation and global information flows accelerate, non-state actors [the few] will continue to gain influence and capabilities that, during the past century, remained largely the purview of states.²⁰

It is no longer true that technological innovation requires a heavy investment to manipulate nature and produce a result capable of having an impact in the real world, as when most technology represented a tangible single-purpose achievement, designed to obtain a specific desired effect. In the past, the pace of disruption was limited by the constraints of the physical world and as such, disruption moved more slowly and was more expensive than it is now. Today, technology is cheaper to create, easier to recombine, and more integrated in our social environment; because of this, the barriers to entry for achieving world wide disruption have been reduced.

The price of the transistor, backbone of the current computing paradigm and essential to recombining technology, has shrunk exponentially since the 1960s,²¹ and computing power has become accessible to everybody for many purposes. As a consequence, digital technology has invaded our environment, replacing in many instances the single purpose “moving parts” that existed before. The digital world serves as a common denominator for an enormous number of social and natural phenomena and directly affects the analog (i.e. the “real”) world: anything that can be transformed into binary data can be processed digitally and recombined with other seemingly unrelated phenomena, all for a marginal cost that quickly approaches zero.

We have assimilated into our innovation landscape some of the positive consequences of this new phenomenon. Nowadays, some independent blogs have a readership as large (or larger) than established newspapers with more editorial influence and without the need for expensive presses or distribution channels.²² Small groups of entrepreneurs were capable of creating “garage startups” that became big multibillion household names like Apple, Microsoft or Google, mainly selling a programmable idea without the initial requirement of large industrial capacity. The original capital needed to jumpstart these companies was in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions of dollars.

Grassroots movements of loosely interconnected individuals (at the left and right of the political spectrum) have been emerging around the world, using Web 2.0 tools to transform political landscapes without the need for cumbersome party bureaucracies, but also with new vulnerabilities hardwired into their structure because of their need to communicate online.²³

Aggregators like Wikipedia have started to take advantage of the fragmented knowledge and the free unstructured time of millions of individuals, who are willing to donate this time “just for fun,” capitalizing on what Clay Shirky calls an enormous and yet unexploited cognitive surplus.²⁴ This effort has created a source of information many times bigger than any physical library, accessible from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. This dematerialized knowledge distribution is leveling the information field, independently of how far people are from the cultural centers. It might be true that Wikipedia is the result of the work of many thousands of volunteers working together, but thanks to aggregation and crowd sourcing technology, this is done at the individual level (the scale of the few) replacing big centralized teams.

As all the previous examples demonstrate, global consequences for the actions of small groups of individuals have been commoditized to the extreme. There is one last example that is more dramatic than any other: Thanks to computer modeling, geo-engineering projects to alter weather patterns are now within reach of wealthy individuals like former Microsoft CEO William Gates.²⁵ In 2008 (well before Gates announced that he had any interest in funding this kind of projects) David Victor wrote “a lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of Gates bank account, could force a lot of geo-engineering on his own. Bond films of the future might struggle with the dilemma of unilateral planetary engineering.”²⁶

Current technologies make it possible for small groups of individuals (“the few” or “the one”) to alter Earth’s weather patterns. This is the degree of change in the scale for disruption: one person, financing a “few”, can change the planet, and not only in a metaphorical way. In less than fifty years, individual disruption potential has reached a global scale.

In the 1970s, Alvin Toffler coined the term “future shock” to describe the effects of rapid and accelerating changes in society.²⁷ In his words,

The rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change. No attempt to understand adaptivity can succeed until this fact is grasped. Any attempt to define the “content” of change must include the consequences of pace itself as part of that content.²⁸

In this rapidly changing environment, where consecutive waves of disruptive technologies are reshaping society faster than it can adapt to the last wave, the small and unstructured “few” are capable of adapting to the pace of change faster than vertical organizations or big governments. As this is a tool-based phenomenon, and tools have no morals or ethics, the “power of the few” can be moral or immoral, legal or illegal.

Without the proper countermeasures, small groups (i.e., terrorist cells, gangs or cartels) or even just lone individuals (e.g., skilled hackers), have a new capacity to inflict damage, fear, and death due to potential access to the same tools that also empower positive behavior and sustain our technologically dependent environment.

The implications of this are fundamental for homeland security’s strategic culture. New technologies, especially disruptive technologies, come with new recombining potential. Because “the few” have better adaptivity than “the many,” small groups can take advantage of unforeseen consequences of the new altered environment more rapidly than authorities can identify a new potential threat and react to it. Convergence of different technologies makes this a multi-layered vulnerability, beyond just information technology risks. For example: human beings outfitted with Life Critical Implantable Medical Devices, (e.g., pacemakers, defibrillators or neurostimulators) have potentially become “hackable” targets. Most of the new versions of these lifesaving devices are activated and deactivated via wireless protocols and “the lack of authentication and integrity mechanisms put patients at risk from attack by anyone with a transmitter.”²⁹ Without the proper countermeasure, “the few” might conceivably be empowered to literally stop a heart or a mind by just thinking about it (and programming the proper code).

The permanently disrupted environment cannot and should not be reversed, as its positive effects far outweigh its negative implications. In those places where, in the last 200 years, science and technology have become permanent fixtures of the social landscape, quality of life and security are greater than ever. As Indur Goklany explains in his thoroughly researched book, meaningful indicators like hunger, infant mortality, life expectancy, education, political rights and the UN “human development index” are all positively affected by the presence of “unparalleled technological change, which has transformed the world more in the past two centuries than all the other events put together since the beginning of agriculture 10 millennia ago.” He then points out: “Economic growth and technological change have redefined the role of women and children, restructured the workplace, undermined age-old arrangements of caste and class, expanded the middle class, and developed new institutions and organizations.”³⁰

A policy that would try to stop innovation and progress in the name of security would also be immoral, as it would do more harm than good by denying solutions to some of our most pressing problems. It would also would be Orwellian, as it would transform the creativity and imagination of innovators into “thoughtcrimes” punishable by law. The suppression of technology has rarely if ever been proved to be an effective strategy.³¹ Instead, we need a security strategy designed to protect the safety of “the many” from this recently acquired power of “the few,” while at the same time preserving the technological tools needed to unleash innovation and entrepreneurial creativity.

A high-tech environment is also a target-rich environment, where society’s infrastructure is not only vulnerable to sabotage — it can even be "illicitly appropriated,”³² by clandestine actors, and turned against its legitimate users. Even the consequences of natural disasters are worse today because of our social dependency on technological infrastructure in dense population centers.³³ As Mitchell and Townsend observe:

By bringing down the networks it depends upon, a city can be killed. Those networks can also be hijacked and turned against their creators delivering destruction by appropriating the very transfer and distribution capability that motivated their construction ... for an attacker it can be a better strategy to exploit, rather than destroy, an enemy’s networks. If access to large-scale network can be gained, it eliminates the need to expend a lot of effort and energy to get to them. It isn’t even necessary to possess comparable forces. Violence and destruction can be delivered with modest means but pinpoint accuracy, by infiltrating or hijacking those networks.³⁴

Furthermore, complex networked environments like the ones previously described tend to self-organize critically, injecting a degree of randomness into the security landscape in which, as Lewis points out, catastrophe is hard to avoid: “A small (random) perturbation in these systems can trip a major collapse, unexpectedly, dramatically, and resoundingly. Because the cause is not obvious (until after the fact), and it is often a very minor perturbation, the collapse comes as a shock.”³⁵

On 9/11, the illicit appropriation of the civilian aviation network was catastrophically recombined with the steel frame of the skyscrapers in a very disruptive way, to circumvent the security systems of the continental United States. Basically, on that day, the United States of America was hacked by a terrorist cell.

While homeland security has been redefining the role of the state in the fight against asymmetrical attacks, the current strategy has structural limitations in its capacity to deal with “out of the box” vulnerabilities created by our dependence on new technologies and the accelerated pace of technological change. A new strategy capable of taking advantage of this disrupted environment is urgently needed for our era, as the acceleration changes in new technologies — like bio or nanotechnology, robotics and geo-engineering — means the clandestine “few” can find new possibilities every day to appropriate more systems, recombining them in unforeseeable ways.

No traditional, slow reacting bureaucracy is agile enough to respond to this challenge, and the current homeland security institutional model is no exception. Therefore, I argue here that a new organizational change to America’s homeland security institutions is needed to prepare them to be proactive actors in this disrupted high-tech environment.

The Limits of Current Homeland Security’s Adaptability to Disruption

How can a traditional security bureaucracy react to this permanently disrupted environment of innovation and fast paced technological evolution? How can a big enterprise made of bureaucratic institutions composed in their turn of hundreds of thousands of individuals, respond to the new vulnerabilities and threats posed by disruptive multipurpose technologies that raise, recombine and fall in cycles measured in months and not years, empowering the adaptable few in unexpected ways?

The answer is that it simply cannot.

To understand why and what choices are available to defend society’s freedoms in this innovative but unstable landscape, it is essential to consider two key determinants regarding the current nature of the threat and how homeland security institutions are expected to confront this threat with a two-pronged approach.

The first essential determinant is that while terrorism should be a big part of any current asymmetrical threat assessment — if only because it is the tactic of choice not just of the weak, but also of the clandestine few (while they are more adaptable than the many, they are not always weaker) — the narrow framework of terrorist conduct does not suffice to describe the homeland security threat posed by the few. Most institutional definitions of terrorism concur that one of the main elements of any terrorist’s conduct is the motivation behind the calculated use of violence.³⁶ Whether this motivation is political, religious, or ideological, the terrorist act has to be oriented to modify the conduct or policy of a government. Yet, in a permanently disrupted environment, what defines the threat posed by the few has less to do with the motivation than with the employed means.

The new vulnerabilities of this high tech society make motivation irrelevant. Whether a critical infrastructure is sabotaged or illicitly appropriated to pursue a political or religious agenda, to look for personal gain, to just prove that it can be hacked,³⁷ or even by accident, the catastrophic consequences for “the many” are the same.

In that sense, homeland security’s response to the power of “the few” has to shift its focus beyond motivation to the means. To phrase it differently, not all homeland security threats will be terrorist attacks per se (i.e. politically, religiously or ideologically motivated acts designed to affect the government’s policies), nor will all homeland security adversaries will be traditional terrorists. Nevertheless, understanding how a technology can be sabotaged, penetrated, or illicitly appropriated to harm society’s interests can be achieved independently of the motivations of the adversarial actor,³⁸ and a “homeland security response” can be preemptively deployed to address this technological risk.

Without question, confronting the underlying causes which incite a particular group of “the few” to try to do harm to “the many” must be an important and permanent objective of the entire nation and not just of the homeland security enterprise. These causes can be diverse and are often beyond the reach of any security policy. Issues like international Islamist radicalization, domestic racism and xenophobia, organized crime, radical rejection of the federal authority, bullying and social rejection in American schools and colleges, to name just a few, are all social problems for which a solution has to be actively pursued. However, a security and defense policy that would try to address all underlying causes would be diluted in its diversity and faulty in its means, since these and other asymmetrical sources of conflict, almost with the only exception of international state sponsored terrorism, are not at the outset a security or defense problem, but a social one. Consequently, responding to these sources of conflict is a mission for a nation, not for a security strategy.

The second determinant is that we demand from homeland security institutions (composed of more than just the Department of Homeland Security) a two-pronged approach, shaped by two seemingly opposing missions. On the one hand, these agencies are supposed to manage an organizational system of systems using standardized procedures and best practices to prevent known kinds of vulnerabilities in our high tech environment. When a traveler removes his or her shoes to be x-rayed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) before boarding a plane, this bureaucracy is applying a continuous security layer designed to counteract a known security vulnerability. On the other hand, homeland security institutions are supposed to “connect” the proverbial dots to anticipate all the threats and vulnerability scenarios that have not yet happened, might never happen, but are morphing rapidly because of the complex nature of the of recombining technologies (old and new), and then patch the security holes, before clandestine actors can exploit them.

Both missions are critically important, but their relation to innovation and therefore to the power of the few is very different. The difference resides in the previously explained distinction between sustaining or incremental technologies and disruptive technologies. The first mission, that I will call here the “systemic mission,” deals with sustaining threats. In contrast, the second one, the “future shock mission,” is supposed to neutralize disruptive — almost random — threats posed by the rapid pace of technological evolution. These differences are key to understanding homeland security’s successes and “failures,” and to establishing an alternative strategy to adapt to this complex ecosystem.

Contrary to what one might think, the majority of potential threats against our high tech society are incremental and not disruptive in nature. A bomb used against a soft transportation target like a subway train or a bus (Madrid 2004 or London 2005), for example, is a well-rehearsed and well-proven method. It has happened many times before and it will probably be tried again with just small incremental innovations to adapt it to the precise conditions of the chosen scenario (i.e., size of the bomb depending on the target, method of concealment, etc.). The same thing can be said about the suicide bomber in a highly dense urban setting, the Columbine copycats, the car bombing of public buildings, and airplane bombings (such as the Pan-Am 103 bombing of 1988, the failed attempts of the so-called shoe bomber in 2001, and the Christmas bomber in 2009).

From the point of view of technology, these are all sustaining threats made possible by the sabotage or destruction of critical infrastructure, exploiting known security holes that are difficult to close in open and technologically dependent societies. It is for these kinds of hazards that a bureaucracy is needed to manage, maintain, and ameliorate a system designed to neutralize incremental, known threats. An organizational approach is essential for this systemic mission, as most of the known security deficiencies can be corrected through standardized measures and “best practices,” which create a more secure process for the technology user and ultimately for society. While in some cases budget constraints or civil liberties issues might limit the full spectrum of choices for the policymaker, forcing him or her to imagine disruptive alternatives to solve an otherwise incremental problem, in general the mission can be handled well by an efficient security bureaucracy.

As Henry Mintzberg and others point out: “the key to strategic management, therefore, is to sustain stability or at least adaptable strategic change most of the time, but periodically to recognize the need for transformation and be able to manage that disruptive process without destroying the organization.”³⁹

Bureaucracies are good organizations for managing iterative processes that are subject to continuous improvement loops and must be executed every time in the same way, independently of the specific individual who takes care of the task any given day. They are the best solution to the problem of maintaining the same level of quality in a repetitive process.

Figure 2. Iterative feedback loop of the homeland security Risk Management Framework. ⁴⁰

In fact, because of the iterative nature of the bureaucratic processes, this organizational model embraces sustaining change. James Wilson explains, “changes that are consistent with existing task definitions [i.e., incremental innovation] will be accepted [and] only those changes that require a redefinition of those tasks [i.e. disruptive innovation] will be resisted.”⁴¹ Mintzberg goes one step further when he suggests:

[Traditional planning] usually institutionalized a form of incrementalism [with relation to planned change] ... because incremental change — change at the margin, with limited scope — is consistent with the established orientation of the organization, and is planning itself. In contrast, quantum change — which means comprehensive reorientation ... disrupts all the established categories of the organization, on which planning depends. As a result, such change tends to be resisted, or more commonly, ignored, in the planning process.⁴²

For Mintzberg, an organization pays the price of having an enunciated strategy with their “ability to change when it must.”

The “systemic” homeland security mission appears to be executed in an acceptable way. Most of the time there are no casualties linked to acts of sabotage against or appropriation of the critical infrastructure of the United States; since the establishment of the homeland security policy, only one plane has been used to perpetrate an attack. In 2010, a single-engine plane was deliberately directed against a government building in Austin, Texas, killing one person besides the pilot and prompting a vivid debate about as to whether or not this incident qualified as an act of terrorism, given the sui generis motivations of the perpetrator (an IRS audit).

If I suggest that the systemic mission appears to be well executed, it is because measuring the success of the homeland security deterrence strategy takes us into the difficult realm of measuring the success of a negative. How do we “tally the score” of events that did not happen because they were deterred by a systemic approach? What statistical indicators are available to determine if the homeland security institutions are doing a better job today than yesterday and a worse one than tomorrow (the basis of continuous improvement)? And, what is more important, how do we know that we are safer and more secure today — because of all this organizational effort — than before 9/11, our baseline?

Answering these questions is essential for both, the “incremental” and the “future shock” missions, albeit even more complicated for the second, as I will later demonstrate.

There is, of course, a simple methodology to prove the effectiveness of most homeland security measures to protect our security environment. A controlled experiment could, for example, shut down all iterative security measures at the airports of one state, while maintaining them at all the other airports in the United States. Once all the protections and security protocols in that state were removed, we would just have to measure the difference between the amount of security incidents originating from those airports (even when flights crossed state lines), and compare them with the control group (the rest of the US) to see if there was a positive difference (i.e., the airports of that state were more secure) or a negative difference (i.e., the airports of that state where less secure). This is the underlying logic of the tests used by the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA to determine the safety of a drug, or by the computing industry to test the effectiveness of the security architecture of their networks.

A homemade version of this test can be tried by anyone: it would just be necessary to take a personal computer and install a version of Windows XP without Service Pack 1 and 2, no firewall and no antivirus program, and then start using the web with Explorer 6. Then, the experimenter will have to wait and see how long it takes for the computer to get hacked or infected by a virus. After this test, he or she will now know with certainty how effective the previous security measures were. (For my computer, it never took more than three minutes for the OS kernel to be corrupted).

The moral, legal, and political implications of such an experimental and controlled approach to measure the effectiveness of a deterrence strategy for homeland security are evident.

A seemingly less effective, but certainly more humane alternative to address the task of assessing effectiveness has been developed in the form of vulnerability analysis methodology for critical infrastructure protection, designed to study and determine the best way to “allocate limited funding in such a way as to minimize overall risk.”⁴³ While this methodology creates a more efficient resource allocation system for homeland security funding, the nature of the bureaucratic culture signifies that risk reduction will be perceived through the lens of the continuous improvement process and hence always as an incremental movement. As Christensen points out:

One of the dilemmas of management is that, by their very nature, processes are established so that employees perform recurrent tasks in a consistent way, time after time. To ensure consistency, they are meant not to change or if they must change, to change through tightly controlled procedures. This means that the very mechanisms through which organizations create value are intrinsically inimical to change.⁴⁴

Therefore, homeland security organizations will tend to evaluate critical infrastructure protection countermeasures, even the disruptive ones, within the current continuous improvement paradigm. This is fine for the systemic mission, but everything related to the second mission, the “future shock mission,” will most probably be discarded, because disruptive and unpredictable threats posed by the recombining nature of new technologies cannot be confronted by incremental methodologies. They are by definition outside of the feedback loop.

In other words, for the yet to be planned homeland security incident that will use a new combination of technologies never tried before, the current homeland security institutional framework cannot connect the dots, because there are no dots to be connected. What makes Christensen’s concept of disruptive technology so troubling for administrators all over the world is that he clearly demonstrated that good planning, and not the opposite, was in fact one of the main reasons why big companies failed and were crushed by new disruptive technologies. In the context of homeland security policy, this means that with the current organizational model, the bureaucracy might get as good as it can possibly be and still miss the next threat precisely because it has learned to be very efficient in its normal operation, thus resisting any change outside its sustaining processes. Hierarchical iterative bureaucracies are precisely the worst kind of organizations to confront “out-of-the-process” threats.

This is why I stated earlier that a traditional bureaucracy cannot be the one reacting to disruptive threats. Instead, to fight this bureaucratic hysteresis the current homeland security institutional design (indispensable for the “systemic mission”) has to be complemented with another very different approach to security to confront the recombining threats of the permanently disrupted environment. A new ad-hocratic organization, with no direct involvement in the fight against incremental threats or the day-to-day operation of homeland security institutions, should concentrate its efforts on producing positive homeland security disruption to counteract the negative effects of the power of “the few.”

PUSHING THE BORDERS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE:
DISRUPTING POSITIVELY THE HOMELAND SECURITY ENVIRONMENT

While the first homeland security “systemic mission” of neutralizing incremental threats seems to be fulfilled in an acceptable way by the current homeland security institutional model, the second “future shock mission” focusing on counteracting the threat posed by the recombining of disruptive technologies is almost nonexistent. In fact, the relative success of the first mission is one of the biggest obstacles to accomplishing effectively the second one. As the homeland security bureaucracy becomes more effective in limiting the success ratio of incremental threats, it creates a political environment where it is very difficult for the policymaker not to keep allocating more resources to the same programs that appear to be working, therefore sustaining the investment cycle. This makes it very challenging for the few to repeat the last attack, but it also focuses the limited organizational resources and attention span on the last incremental scenario and away from the next (unforeseeable) disruptive attack. Hence, the strategic truism, which states that successful armies and navies are always preparing to fight the last war, has, in this case, metaphorical and literal significance.

In this security ecosystem defined by the accelerated pace of disruptive technological recombination, “connecting the dots” is not an acceptable strategy to avoid the next threat. Intelligence gathering is not possible for attacks that have not yet been planned or even conceived, combining technologies that are or will be available, but were conceived for other purposes. Also, while focused intelligence plays a central role for avoiding specific threat scenarios, once these scenarios are identified and hopefully neutralized they become, by definition, part of the systemic mission and an incremental threat.

Instead, homeland security institutions addressing the “future shock mission” have to be able to be proactive and become disruptive agents themselves. In this way, the state would reclaim the initiative with innovation (instead of fighting against it), provoking positive environmental changes through a sustained research and development effort. Doing this requires an organization shielded from the “systemic mission,” designed to avoid the same things that make other bureaucracies so successful: iteration and incremental processes.

Administrative reforms have a bad name in homeland security, probably because there have been so many of them in a very short amount of time. Wood and Waterman established that political reorganizations might not be enough to break bureaucratic resistance to change when more than one organizational culture exists inside the bureaucratic bodies.⁴⁵ That is the case of the Department of Homeland Security, where the so-called department components (TSA, CBP, the Coast Guard, FEMA, Secret Service, etc.) have strong organizational cultures that precede the merger that created the department in 2002.

It is precisely for this reason that a new partial reorganization is necessary, addressing the limitations of the current structure to confront the “future shock mission.” The current competing organizational cultures of the homeland security bureaucracy are oriented to accomplish the old missions of the department’s individual components, fighting threats in an incremental way. Any new task given to this existing structure will be watered down by an older, more successful, more proven and more consolidated organizational ethos. Wilson explains it:

Tasks that are not part of the culture will not be attended to with the same energy and resources as are devoted to tasks that are part of it. Second, organizations in which two or more cultures struggle for supremacy will experience serious conflict as defenders of one seek to dominate representatives of the others. Third, organizations will resist taking on new tasks that seem incompatible with its dominant culture. The stronger and more uniform the culture — that is, the more the culture approximates a sense of mission — the more obvious these consequences.⁴⁶

In the current homeland security administration model, research and development efforts are embedded in the “systemic mission” and most if not all of its current results are incremental and not disruptive in nature. Therefore, there is no incentive to look for solutions to problems that are not considered part of the operational objectives of the current homeland security environment. That is why there is so much interest and debate regarding, for example, the development and implementation of the controversial full body scanners (an incremental innovation useful to the current operational mission of DHS),⁴⁷ and so little interest in countermeasures for security risks that have never been exploited.

In fact, Michael Greenberger demonstrated that under the current organizational model, homeland security’s institutions are unresponsive even to technology solutions that are widely available. He found that because of organizational limits, the Department of Homeland Security was incapable of recognizing widely available technology solutions to security threats in at least two cases: efficient “see through” technology to screen cargo, and liquid explosive detection for airplane passengers. To combat this resistance, he proposed an institutional reform to create inside DHS a “Department of Homeland Security Technology Mobilization Board” based on the successful mobilizations boards used during World War II to “review and search out antiterrorism technology and quickly decide whether the new technology should be used and promoted in the homeland security effort.”⁴⁸ I would like to take this good proactive approach a step further, using as a model the most disruptive institution for military research and development in the history of mankind: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Created in 1958 after the so-called “Sputnik Crisis,” when the American government was taken by surprise by the successful launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, DARPA’s mission is “to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research.”⁴⁹ It is a highly disruptive organization “with no operational mission, no service requirements and designed to protect fragile ephemeral projects.”⁵⁰ It doesn’t avoid future shocks surprises in itself, but tries to create its own surprises faster than its adversaries, thus controlling the pace of military innovation.

An organization like DARPA succeeds in managing a disrupted environment because it does not negate its disrupted or disruptive-prone nature, but instead uses it to its advantage. This means that it fights surprise by creating surprise, consciously producing as many environmental disruptions as it can. When DARPA succeeds, it forces American adversaries into the uncomfortable position of being the ones reacting to American military disruption and trying to guess the next move, robbing those adversaries of the initiative that the few naturally tend to enjoy. By doing this, DARPA does not counter specific future shock surprises, but it creates a security environment where US Armed Forces have the upper hand.

As any investor knows, high return and high risk are directly correlated. Therefore, high payoff research and development need a higher institutional tolerance for risk and failure. Christensen points out that because “the ultimate uses or applications for disruptive technologies are unknowable in advance ... Failure is an intrinsic step toward success.”⁵¹ DARPA’s creative process aims to “find an area of technology that could go a long way toward serving the needs of the country if improved but that wasn't getting much attention in the private sector, put some well-considered research and development money into it to get it on its feet, and then cut it loose.”⁵² Because of this high-risk approach, some of its projects fail in a way that would put in danger the career of the project manager in any other organization, while others, like the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), succeed in forever transforming the human environment ⁵³.

For this approach to work in the context of homeland security, it is essential to create an agency isolated from the core requirements of the “systemic mission.” It would have to be a task oriented research and development organization designed to positively disrupt the security environment with technology solutions for problems not yet identified by “the few.”

Some, like Joshua Cooper, have used the metaphor of an institutional immune system to describe such an approach to defend society against the negative effect of the accelerating pace of change. For him, “this constant surprise, and the demand it makes for an ‘always-on’ defense, is one of the reasons we need a deep-security immune system instead of an old-style Grand Strategy.”⁵⁴ An evolving homeland security immune system requires a risk management approach to identify vulnerabilities with low investment-high rewards opportunities to close a technological security hole while at the same time the usability of the concerned technology is preserved and, if possible, enhanced.

DARPA’s success as the proactive component of the Department of Defense immune system is due to the fact that it is structured as an adhocracy, a term coined by Toffler to describe an organizational model where organic temporary relations are established (hence the ad hoc part of the name) to respond to a particular task (or threat) with very little or no formal hierarchy or standardized behavior. An adhocracy is a “fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals.”⁵⁵ Such a model for homeland security would create ephemeral teams of experts used to close high risk security holes that would then be disbanded to make place to another team formed to tackle another disruptive challenge.

In fact, as Christopher Ford identified, some of DARPA’s most recent projects have already some unambiguous homeland security implications.⁵⁶ The “DARPA network challenge,” for example, showed how social networking web tools and aggregators can be engaged to gather data, mobilize participants, foster collaboration, and build trust,⁵⁷ in the context of multiple homeland security missions.

For the homeland security “future shock” mission, the challenge is not only to pair a disruptive solution with a disruptive problem; even the problem definitions themselves should be disruptive in nature: How to neutralize a threat that no one has yet identified as a threat? Thus, the “future shock” prevention effort must identify proactively security threats to the human environment provoked by the recombining of technology and human social and cultural behavior.

Consequently, this new homeland security institution would have to invest an important part of its resources probing disruptive security scenarios, using a “red team” methodology to identify security shortcomings. These “white hat” hackers would try to hack the whole United States of America technology environment, establishing the mission requirements for the new agency. Only then, after a critical technology has failed this highly classified penetration test or a scenario that recombines multiple technologies in a novel way has been identified, research and development could begin to find a minimum sufficient response that permits the technology to operate as efficiently as before but closes preventively the security hole. While this proactive approach will not identify every recombining threat, it will add a new layer of disruption and innovation to the human ecosystem on top of the ones that are already in place, but this time under the direct control of the homeland security institutions.

Because there is no bigger threat to America’s interests than the loss of competitiveness caused by crippling its critical sectors in the name of pointless security measures — something akin to an autoimmune disease if we extend the metaphor a little bit more — the concept of a “Minimum Sufficient Response” is essential. In fact, for the effort to be successful and sustainable, most of the tasks should be dual-purpose, enhancing (rather than the opposite) the usability of the concerned technology. This would also have a protective effect on American civil liberties and human rights, by limiting the scope of the security procedures. If done properly, this new actor in the homeland security environment would identify unproductive and bloated security solutions where a risk management approach is absent (i.e. a layer of security that does nothing to enhance the resilience of a technology), and could propose the necessary changes to improve the usability of the system.

While incremental research and development is an essential part of the “systemic mission,” this new organization should be isolated from them. If an attack by the few does occur, the technological solution needed to avoid such an event in the future should not be the responsibility of this new institution. Once a real “red team” has made explicit the exploitable vulnerability, fixing it has become an incremental and not a disruptive challenge.

Proving the effectiveness of this new institutional approach will be difficult and will require “out of the box” managerial and political skills. To demonstrate this, I offer to the reader a thought experiment: Imagine that an organization like the one I am describing existed in 1997. In 1998, the organization’s red teams identified the cockpit doors of commercial airplanes as weak links in the security environment of the transportation sector for many scenarios, none of which looked like the 9/11 terrorist attacks.⁵⁸ Then, multidisciplinary research and development teams identified a Minimum Sufficient Response technology solution: by armoring the cockpit doors and making it impossible for the pilot to open them while airborne — even if he or she wants to (in case the criminal actors try to blackmail him or her by holding hostage a passenger or a flight attendant) — no asymmetrical actor would be able to gain control of the airliner, closing the security hole.

If such a process would have taken place, we would never know that something as costly as 9/11 was deterred, but we would have taken advantage of a low investment-high reward opportunity to “upgrade” the United States security ecosystem in a disruptive way, leaving mostly unaffected the usability of the technology. I use the 9/11 example because it is a disruptive threat that has already been identified and mostly neutralized by precisely this kind of solution (the most cost effective measure of all the preventive solutions identified by the 9/11 commission report).⁵⁹ It also shows how hard it would it be to measure the effectiveness of a procedure that might deter a catastrophic event if that event never takes place because of our actions.

Finally, because what I am proposing here is a DARPA inspired model for the problem of adapting the homeland security organizational framework to respond to the power of “the few,” it is necessary to explain why I do not consider the existing HSARPA a sufficient solution. First, HSARPA lacks the proper funding needed to have the same positive effect that DARPA has had for research and development.⁶⁰ Second, HSARPA is devoting most of those resources to research incremental solutions to incremental problems. The HSARPA mission specifically states that it was created to “enhance departmental operations.”⁶¹ Because of this, HSARPA is not capable of addressing the “future shock mission.” One employee of the science and technology directorate at DHS described HSARPA to me as an agency “suffocating” inside of the Department of Homeland Security bureaucratic structure. For an organization to be successful at confronting disruptive technologies, strong evidence suggests that an independent small organization is needed to escape the gravitational field of the incremental mission of the bigger institution and its organizational culture.⁶² Currently, most if not all of the HSARPA projects are sustaining research and development programs pivoting around the operational missions of the Department of Homeland Security.

CONCLUSION

The expressed objective of this article was to define the rapid pace of technology’s evolution and its recombining nature as two primal forces that shape the homeland security environment in a way that has lowered the barriers to entry for disruption by small groups of actors that I called here “the few.” Because of this recent phenomenon, high tech societies require a security strategy to react to the threats that arise from this amoral phenomenon, and to preserve innovation opportunities and freedom of usability for new technologies. In the United States, this mission stands on the shoulders of the homeland security institutional framework, which is a consequence of a catastrophic “power of the few” attack.

It was also my intention to demonstrate how the dual nature of innovation (incremental and disruptive) creates very different challenges to the security environment. While homeland security institutions seem to be dealing effectively with the incremental threats, the current model offers no real response to the disruptive ones. This has a clear and dangerous negative effect on the American strategic process, penalizing disruptive solutions to disruptive threats, and privileging an incremental approach to security planning. Because both are needed, a new institutional framework should be instituted to take advantage of the proven superiority of adhocratic adaptive organizations to deal with unpredictable, chaotic environments. By adding a new layer of positive disruption to the environment, positive and unpredictable innovation would provide the best possible antidote to negative innovation and the illicit appropriation of technology.

America has been built on the belief that the future will be better than the past and that the best way to harness progress is to allow people to experiment and think freely. Protecting the homeland must become a synonym for protecting those foundational values, by making sure that positive technological recombination is available for all, and people can embrace and not be afraid of this permanently disrupted human environment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez is an instructor at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His fields of research include the geopolitical effects of homeland security/defense and national security with a regional focus on North America, border security, discourse analysis, and the implications of new technologies for security and defense policies. Dr. Nieto-Gomez obtained his PhD in geopolitics at the Institut Francais de Geopolitique of the University of Paris. More information and contact information can be found at: www.rodrigonietogomez.com.

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Also, the pieces move all together and at the same time, instead of in alternating turns; their intentions and incentives are not always shared with the chess player and one piece, coming from outside the chessboard can disrupt the whole game! The more one explores the metaphor, the least chess seems like a good analogy for strategy.↵
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The term itself was coined by Daniel Bell in his now classical exercise of “social forecasting,” one of the first works of social science that tried to introduce social chaos to the domain of trend studies, albeit still emphasizing the notion of forecasting. See: Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Perseus Books Group, 1976).↵
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In economics, the primary sector is formed by all those activities that involve the process of growing food and obtaining raw materials. The secondary sector is composed of heavy industry and manufacturing. The tertiary sector is made up of the service industry. While there is no controversy surrounding the fact that the knowledge economy has transformed the tertiary sector, the environments for the primary and secondary sectors have also been reshaped by technological transformations.↵
Gregor Mendel is one of the founding fathers of modern genetics. Mendel inheritance laws explain how the process of hybridization can be used to reinforce desired traits in plants and animals.↵
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This phenomenon of the exponential growth of computing power is called “Moore’s Law,” and it is one example of trend forecasting that has proven to be accurate, in part because it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It assumed the form of the gold standard for the semiconductor industry’s long term planning and benchmarking, and it is based in the knowable physical characteristics of semiconductors. In a way, it is like forecasting what the population will look like in 20 years, when you already know the current birth rate. What will happen with Moore’s Law after we reach the physical limits of those materials is less clear. See: Gordon Moore "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits." Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 1965), https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf&pli=1. ↵
For example, the Huffington post, “the Internet newspaper” and technically a blog, was bought in 2011 by America Online for $315 million. At that moment, the blog/newspaper was attracting more than 25 million visitors every month and more importantly, had become a strong liberal voice in American politics. ↵
Evgeny Morozov has demonstrated that social movements based on web 2.0 technologies are in fact more vulnerable to repression because of their dependency on these technologies. See:
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Ray Kurtzweil upgraded the term in 2003 with his “law of accelerating returns,” forecasting a technological “singularity,” a scenario where biological evolution would be replaced by a technological one. The term has been gaining adherhents and antagonists inside and outside of academia since it was proposed. Nevertheless, Toffler’s acceleration of change hypothesis is discussed here independently of the singularity prediction, as this last one is irrelevant for the objectives and proposals of this paper. The arguments exposed here are valid if the forecasted singularity scenario is correct or not. For more information on the singularity concept see:http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0610.html ↵
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Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation [2009, Kindle edition]. Retrieved from Amazon.com.
For a good radiography of current black markets breaking the suppression of manufactured illegal products see: Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy [2006, Kindle edition]. Retrieved from www.amazon.com. ↵
Dr. Calvillo Gamez and I introduced this term to describe the process when a user appropriates a technology thwarting the designer’s intentions and breaking the law. 9/11 is a clear example of a successful illicit appropriation of the transportation sector. See Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez and Eduardo Calvillo Gómez, “The Case of ‘Illicit Appropriation’ in the Use of Technology,” in M. Vargas, and A. Edwards, eds., Technology for Facilitating Humanity and Combating Social Deviations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives(Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2010).↵
Charles Perrow, The Next Catastrophe. Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters [Kindle version, 2007]. Retrieved fromwww.amazon.com. ↵
William J. Mitchell and Anthony Townsend. "Cyborg Agonistes: Disaster and Reconstruction in the Digital Era," in Thomas Campanella and Lawrence Vale, The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster [Kindle version, 2005]. Retrieved from www.amazon.com.↵
Ted G. Lewis “Cause-and-Effect or Fooled by Randomness? Homeland Security Affairs VI, no. 1 (January 2010), http://www.hsaj.org/?article=6.1.6. ↵
For example, the dictionary of military terms of the DoD defines terrorism as: “The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.” Available at:http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/.↵
In a “classical” behavioral profile for hackers published by the Cyberpunk project in 2003, using supposedly (no methodological appendix is presented) a trial balloon approach with 100 USENET hackers, it was established that “Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional rewards such as social approval or money. They tend to be attracted by challenges and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the interest of work or other activities in terms of the challenges offered and the toys they get to play with”. Available at: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/portrait_of_j_random_hacker.html.↵
Or even with no adversarial actor at all.↵
Henry Mintzberg et al, Strategic Safari [1998, Kindle edition]. Retrieved from www.amazon.com. ↵
DHS, National Infrastructure Protection Plan (2009), http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/NIPP_Plan.pdf ↵
James Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It [1989, Kindle edition]. Retrieved from www.amazon.com. ↵
Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning [1994, Kindle edition] Retrieved from www.amazon.com. ↵
Ted G. Lewis. Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security. ↵
Clayton Christensen. The Innovator’s Dilemma.↵
B. Dan Wood and Richard W. Waterman “The Dynamics of Political Control of the Bureaucracy,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 3 (September 1991): 801-828↵
James Wilson, Bureaucracy.↵
See: http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/imaging_technology.shtm ↵
Michael Greenberger, “Teaching New Dogs Old Tricks: Reshaping the Department of Homeland Security’s Technology Development Infrastructure,” Jurimetrics 281 (2007).↵
Available at: http://www.darpa.mil/mission.html ↵
Mr. Ryan Paterson Deputy Director for the Adaptive Execution Office (AEO), DARPA Adaptive Execution Office Conference, Naval Postgraduate School, 23 March 2010.↵
Clayton Christensen. The Innovator’s Dilemma.↵
Michael Belfiore, The Department of Mad Scientists [2009, Kindle edition]. Retrieved from www.amazon.com. ↵
For a list of some of some of DARPA’s high profile hits and misses see: “Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, misses and ones to watch”http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13907-fifty-years-of-darpa-hits-misses-and-ones-to-watch.html ↵
Joshua Cooper, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It [2009, Kindle edition]. Retrieved fromwww.amazon.com. ↵
Alvin Toffler. Future Shock. ↵
Christopher Ford, “Twitter, Facebook and Ten Balloons: Social Network Problem Solving and Homeland Security,” Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) 2010 Essay Contest, https://www.hsdl.org/?view&doc=123615&coll=limited ↵
DARPA, “MIT Red Balloon Team Wins DARPA Network Challenge” (press release, 2009). Available at:https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/darpanetworkchallengewinner2009.pdf ↵
In fact, it is very probable that such a team would have identified something resembling the 9/11 scenario, finding it very plausible. In 1994, the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale of the French government stopped four members of the Algerian “Groupe Islamique Armé” from using a hijacked airplane against the Eiffel Tower.
Tom Clancy’s fictional novel Debt of Honor (1994) identified some of the same key technological vulnerabilities that made 9/11 possible, proving that they were publicly known. The author explained to the BBC how he came with the scenario: “Well first you identify the point of vulnerability and then you try to see how you can address that particular problem.” Interview retrieved from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_24_03_02.txt
Nevertheless, for the sake of the thought experiment, let assume that a 9/11-like scenario does go unnoticed.↵
The capabilities analysis done by the 9/11 commission expressed that: “Any serious policy examination of a suicide hijacking scenario, critiquing each of the layers of the security system, could have suggested changes to fix glaring vulnerabilities-expanding no-fly lists, searching passengers identified by the CAPPS screening system, deploying Federal Air Marshals domestically, hardening cockpit doors, alerting air crew to a different kind of hijacking than what they had been trained to expect, or adjusting the training of controllers and managers in the FAA and NORAD”.
Available at: http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch11.htm ↵
DARPA’s allocated budget might well be the most cost-efficient use of taxpayer’s money in the entire US government. Its annual $3 billion has given us the Internet and GPS navigation, just to name the two most visible and successful projects of the agency. GPS technology is today a multibillion market and the Internet created a whole new economy. ↵
Available at: http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/structure/editorial_0530.shtm ↵
Clayton Christensen. The Innovator’s Dilemma.↵

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Distributed Denial of Service Attack: an online strike-like behavior!

2011-12-29T10:51:00.000-08:00

A tweet I received right now from one mexican anon (@wase_anon) reads in spanish: "DDoS are only symbols. A symbol doesn't mean anything but if a lot of people participate, taking down a website can change the world."

But what exactly accomplishes a DDoS? Being the most rudimentary way of bringing down a website, a Distributed Denial of Service Attack depends on many users constantly requesting access to a particular site; as the requests become overwhelming, the website becomes inaccesible. IT then has two response choices: shut it down until the coordinated attack is over (easy), or increase capacity -at least temporarily- to get over the wave. In any case, a blacklist will be used to block requests coming from the known IP addresses of participants to try to regain normal access to the site.

As hacking techniques go, DDoS is more of a prank that requires no exploit, and depends on capacity. The equation is something like this:

More attackers than installed server capacity = successful DDoS.

Simple, right?

But there resides the whole beauty of DDoS as a "cyberattack". Because of its distributed nature against a centralized target, it is the ultimate metaphor of the little guy fighting the big corporation... that is, the little guy multiplied by the thousands (sometimes the millions) fighting the megacentralized structure and making a statement out of it. Normally, no long lasting damage occurs, no proprietary information is stolen. It is cyber civil resistance pure and simple.

In a sense, this behavior is not that different from the strike rights most unions have to force a corporation (their employer) to behave in a certain way. And strike rights have enormous consequences to non involved third parties (think about the stranded passagers during airlines or airport strikes or strikes in the subway system of Paris... the french national sport). DDoS can have important consequences too, especially when targeted against critical infrastructure (a highly rare event), although most of the time the impact is only lost revenue to the owner of the website and lost access to its clients.

So.... if DDoS are civil disobedience acts that look a lot like online strikes, with picket lines formed by millions of individuals that have to commit resources (energy, computing power, bandwidth, time) in order to "filibuster" the targeted site, should we then transcend the "criminal" mindset we have when dealing with them and start thinking about DDoS as a social manifestation of anger that should have a different response than Law Enforcement? Democracies already allow manifestation and strikes if they follow certain parameters.

Or, would that be a horrible paradox, an oxymoron even, to try to regulate a behavior that is interesting precisely because it is unregulated? Maybe then DDoS hacktivists would see this as just one more meddling of the state in what they like to see as an unregulated or self regulated space, and move then to another kind of cyber civil disobedience?

Time got it wrong with its person of the year.

2011-12-24T06:19:00.000-08:00

The arab spring in the middle east, the #occupy movement in America, the new politics of twitter in Mexico and politicians like @EPN learning the hard way about the intricacies of the cyberworld. 2011 has shown what happens when society gets empowered by the forces of connectivity. Suddenly, people behave like networks and with the use of hashtags messages appear without a messenger. In 2011, time magazine gave the "person of the year award" to "the protester". That was wrong; the "person of the year" was not a person at all, it was a network. In fact, a series of empowered networks that are now more than the sum of their parts.

.....but by becoming real networked organisms, societies are also augmenting their vulnerabilities to be hacked like networks, either by clandestine actors (Drug trafficking organizations killing twitter users), authoritarian governments (Iran studying Facebook to repress protests) or even by Captured States (#SOPA in the USA) serving corporations and not individuals.

The person of the year is more than the sum of its parts!
Merry Christmas!

The Homeland Security Challenges of Technological Evolution and Convergence in the Next Ten Years

2011-11-14T09:41:00.001-08:00

For the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Homeland Security Affairs published a special number with essays from all Secretaries of Homeland Security and scholars interested in Homeland Security related issues.

My essay, "Preventing the 9/10" explores the innovation process that drives the tech sector and changes the security environment.

The article can be found here, with its suggested citation:
http://www.hsaj.org/?article=7.2.7

...and here is the Full text of the essay:

Preventing the Next 9/10: The Homeland Security Challenges of Technological Evolution and Convergence in the Next Ten Years

Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez

The September 10, 2001 edition of Time magazine dedicated its cover story to Colin Powell and his “megastar wattage … curiously dimmed” inside of the Bush administration. Of course, no one knew that at that precise moment all the human and technological components for the worst attack ever committed on United States soil were already in place, and imminent danger existed. Discussing General Powell’s role inside the White House was a good cover story for September 10^th.

Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001 – 9/11.

The catastrophic event occurred without warning. The attacks seemed like a random and unpredictable occurrence; a black hole in our cognition.

But obviously, 9/11 was a complicated event that required the use of many previous steps, many technologies in concert, and many brains working together to achieve that particular end. What we saw that day was only one more step (not even the culmination) of a very long series of converging processes – a deviant result of the innovation process that also fuels progress inside our technologically dependent civilization.

On September 12, 2001 a still perplexed world asked how was it possible that the terrorists’ attacks were not stopped; all the clues were there, the dots were waiting to be connected and al Qaeda had already been active and recognized as a threat by the federal government since the 1990s.

On September 14,2001 Time had a new cover. It featured a collapsing World Trade Center – an avalanche of dust, steel and glass.

But if 9/11 was just the visible part of a longer process, were did it all start?

The historic account of the 9/11 Commission Report finds the roots of 9/11 in the rise of a national resistance against the communist government of Afghanistan in 1978, which would eventually lead to the formation of al Qaeda ¹.

I argue that the patterns that lead to 9/11 are much older, but at the same time they are considerably less linear. Therefore, that direct line that the 9/11 Commission Report traced is nothing more than an illusion produced by what Nassim Taleb calls the retrospective distortion, “or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized [linear] in history books than in empirical reality).”²

This retrospective distortion creates a security ecosystem where homeland security practitioners feel pressured to try to “connect the dots” every time, instead of adapting to an environment of emerging patterns and mutating dots that cannot be connected.

Moreover, certain technologies have been doubling in capacity every few months for many years now and, as a consequence, technology improvement cycles have also shrunk. We have grown used to having a new and improved version of a product that is twice as powerful in just a few months, and radical disruptive propositions every year or two. Because of technological convergence, it is very hard to predict what unintended consequences all those improvements and new technologies will have once they are recombined with others, and what catastrophic possibilities convergence might have that we will miss on the next 9/10. This is the chaotic security environment where homeland security operates today. For the next ten years, homeland security should embrace it.

9/11/1973: WHY NOT?

Romance languages, as well as German, have introduced the neologism of “uchronia” (from uchronie in French) in their vocabularies to define the subgenre in fiction where reality as we know it is profoundly altered by a change in the chain of events. They describe a time that does not exist, or a non-time. In an uchronic novel, reality it is indistinguishable to ours until an event – often called a “point of divergence” or a “Jonbar Hinge” – triggers a series of second and third level consequences that end up creating a reality that it is almost unrecognizable from ours, even though initial conditions were identical.

In Turtledove’s novel How Few Remain, the south won the American Civil War because of an accidental recovery of a document; in The Man in the High Castle, by Phillip K. Dick, a successful assassination plot against President Roosevelt creates an environment that ends up being favorable to the axis powers, who end up winning World War II.

Uchronias make interesting readings (or movies, although some people have trouble enjoying the convoluted plots of time paradox films) because they describe contextual patterns that we all recognize and are familiar with. Then, after a fictional “point of divergence”, second and third degree consequences create a believable new environment that is almost unrecognizable from reality as we know it, but that we can accept as a plausible “what if.” Uchronias confront us with the fragility of reality and the power of the randomized and chaotic forces that surround us. They contradict the linear nature of historic events; show us how precarious and fluid are “the dots” that have to be connected, and how organic is the nature of any threat. If the briefcase bomb would have been a little to the left (or to the right… who knows?), Hitler would have died; if one of many things described in the 9/11 Commission Report would have happened (or not happened) on 9/10, we would have continued the discussion about Collin Powell on 9/12.

The innovation cycle is “pushing” Jonbar Hinges on society faster than ever before. Each new or improved technology adds a new series of combinatorial possibilities that can shape society in unpredictable ways. Many technologies today are nothing other than backbones designed to support spontaneous innovation – touch screen blank slates for others to design their apps, in an emerging cycle that feeds on itself.

Millions of people potentially empowered by those backbone technologies mean millions of potential innovators all thinking and doing things that have not been thought or done before.

But those innovations do not happen in a vacuum. Instead, as Brian Arthur explains:

New technologies in time become possible components – building blocks – for the construction of further new technologies. Some of these in turn go on to become possible building blocks of yet newer technologies. In this way, slowly, over time, many technologies form from an initial few, and more complex ones form using simpler ones as components. The overall collection of technologies bootstraps itself upward from the few to the many and from the simple to the complex. We can say that technology creates itself out of itself. ³

Ideas – or memes, as evolutionists like to call them – evolve from the simple to the complex. They progress in the sense that whatever was there before will be constantly improved and recombined with new thoughts and ideas making something better that can then be used again to continue this incessant process.

Unfortunately, innovation has a dark side. The same accelerated combinatorial evolution that empowers entrepreneurs to rapidly improve our high tech environment can, and often is, used to harm the innocent.

In fact, I believe 9/11 was the product of thousands of years of innovation in a radical, deadly, and novel way.

The innovative recombination of technology that made those terrorist attacks possible took advantage not only of the knowledge and imagination of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden, but also of Minory Yamasaki (the WTC architect); the ingenuity of the Wright brothers and all the aviation heroes who made flying machines a reality; the hundreds of engineers from Boeing; and, in general, thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge (material engineering, tube frame design, Le Corbusier modernist philosophy, and thousands more innovations, all the way back to the wheel, language and the invention of tools!).

In Uchronia, 9/11/2001 could have occurred on 9/11/1973, just a few months after the ribbon cutting ceremony of the World Trade Center. By that time, jumbo jets were flying, the Pentagon had been built, and most of the technology that was materially used during 9/11 existed, ready to be recombined in order to achieve a catastrophic result.

But if the technology already existed in 1973, the “9/11 idea” did not. Creativity does not evolve following a linear path of dots and many things had to happen for this complex adaptive environment to evolve towards a state where 9/11 went from being a possibility that lurked in the dark since 1973, to a sad meme of human innovation ⁴.

That is the paradox. We can easily imagine “planes as weapons” as the 9/11 Commission Report asked. The meme requires the recombination of just a few previously known ideas: suicide militants, planes, volatile jet fuel, and skyscrapers. But the same thing can be said for Facebook (it is not hard today to imagine an interconnected personal database), Amazon (an online-only retail store), or Netflix (a mail-based rental model that combined the backbone of the postal service with the Internet). Yes, we can imagine all that, but someone imagined it first, recombined technologies and created huge companies out of it. We can all imagine an iPad, but Steve Jobs and the rest of the Apple designers imagined and successfully implemented it first.

Innovation is innovation not because it is impossible to think of something, but because no one else thought of it before.

WE DON’T REINVENT THE WHEEL – WE APPROPRIATE IT!

Ted Lewis identified the importance of “stigmergy” in the invention-innovation cycle: “invention [works] as the stimulus and innovation as the response. After each cycle, the stimulus-response pattern repeats.”⁵

I agree with him that “stigmergic” behavior is one of the patterns that govern the combinatorial evolution process of innovation and the technological environment. Lewis established the reciprocal need inventors and innovators have for each other in a stimulus-response cycle loop, but I believe that there is a third key actor in the invention-innovation cycle: the adopter of the technology. Inventors, innovators, and adopters stimulate each other. Although most adopters will be fairly passive actors, some will adapt the technology to be used as something that neither the inventor nor the innovator thought it could be used for, in a process that Dix refers to as appropriation.⁶

I am convinced that all innovators are also active appropriators – they appropriate existing technologies for their new designs, using them in unanticipated ways.

For example, the designers of the Chevy Volt did not have to reinvent the wheel or velour interiors. On the other hand, I am sure that the inventors of the wheel or the so-called “faux velvet” did not envision an electric car as one of the applications of their technological innovations (none of them knew what electricity or cars would be!). Progressive innovation requires the appropriation of previous technologies to be used differently from what the original designer anticipated.

When a clandestine actor uses infrastructure to do harm, he or she illicitly appropriates the technology to achieve a goal different from what the designers intended. In the online world, we give the name of hacking to that behavior. In the real world, terrorists hack our high tech society every time they are successful and the acceleration of technological development provides the illicit appropriator more building blocks and more possibilities to combine them every day. Combinatorial evolution creates unforeseen convergence that gives to the inventor-innovator-appropriator cycle more uchronic choices.

Terrorism is a technological artifact that results from the appropriation of systems through combinatorial evolution. Forecasting every possible innovation in this context is impossible.

Consequently, while it seems like an easy challenge to imagine planes as weapons (in fact Tom Clancy wrote an almost uchronic novel out of this exact idea), Taleb reminds us “had the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10, it should not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter planes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the attack would not have taken place, period.” He then continues: “something else might have taken place. What? I don’t know.”⁷

At this precise point, I am sure, many patterns are forming that will create appropriation opportunities in the future, and some of them will be harmful. Which ones will turn out to be relevant? I don’t know either.

In this complex adaptive environment of accelerated high tech innovation, the “connect-the-dots” game seems to be the worst possible metaphor. If one has to be found, I would like to offer an “Encrypted letter soup” as a replacement, where all the relevant information of a catastrophic event becomes relevant only after the pattern has been recognized. That is, after the fact.

In this primordial letter soup of catastrophes, the proverbial dots to be connected are encrypted in noise. Worse, because there is no preconceived pattern, the “dots” evolve and change in randomized ways, until one day they acquire meaning.

Connecting every dot is called paranoia. In the case of nation states, institutional paranoia is quite often the foundation of totalitarian regimes that thrive in the waters of the politics of fear.

We cannot anticipate all innovations, and imagination understood as anticipatory forecasting of new threats cannot be bureaucratized.

CONCLUSION: HOMELAND SECURITY: THE EARLY ADOPTER DISCIPLINE

Combinatorial evolution of technology does not have to favor the illicit appropriator. This randomized environment created by the accelerated pace of technology cycles will favor those who can produce more ideas, and ride the wave of uncertainty instead of opposing it.

While studying the origins of the so-called geniuses, Dean Simonton found that “The more ideas a mind can produce, the higher the odds that those ideas will be original and varied…. Flexibility and originality are both to a very large extent mere consequences of fluency.”

His research conclusively demonstrated that:

The creative process is to a certain extent blind. Even the greatest creators possess no direct and secure path to truth or beauty. They cannot guarantee that every published idea will survive further evaluation and testing at the hands of audiences or colleagues. The best the creative genius can do is to be as prolific as possible in generating products in the hope that at least some subset will survive the test of time ⁸

The homeland security effort for the next ten years must encourage public and private inventors, innovators, and appropriators of new disruptive security ideas to be prolific and then aggregate those efforts. This would allow us to surpass – by a few orders of magnitude – the number of disruptive ideas produced by the clandestine actors.

In the next ten years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should embrace and become the early adopter of almost all new technologies, appropriating them, generating knowledge about them, and proactively thinking how to recombine them with other building blocks in order to make civilization more resilient.

Ten years from now, DHS must be the gold standard of usability labs in order to understand, appropriate, and improve as many new technologies as possible.

We cannot control the complex adaptive environment of technological evolution nor should we try, as positive innovation requires – in Schumpeter’s words – creative destruction and chaos.⁹ Nevertheless, we can control the government’s own pace of innovation, and its rate of technological understanding and adoption.

For the next ten years, the homeland security community should become the most tech-enthusiastic community inside of government. No one – with the probable exception of DARPA – should be more innovative and more “tech savvy” regarding what makes technology usable, why people use a particular technology, and how security can be improved while also improving usability.

In 2021, homeland security should be perceived as a project that has helped maintain, or even accelerated, the pace of the innovation cycle and not the opposite. A project that has made the backbone of American innovation stronger, more open for positive appropriation, and more resilient for when the unavoidable illicit appropriation does take place.

Homeland security as a doctrine should embrace combinatorial evolution and plan for it. Government projects should be innovative, but also scalable, so they can be adapted to the unexpected, and they should prefer social to centralized deployment of technology. When possible, government should prefer software instead of hardware and off-the-shelf to proprietary. It should also design policy and infrastructure for openness instead of secrecy; there are more good people than bad people, so policies should take advantage of this superiority of numbers and aggregate their knowledge and effort.

Homeland Security technology and strategies (also a social technology) should be easily upgradable. If not, many of them will be will be legacy technology by the time they reach the public. Homeland security decision makers should avoid bloated solutions and examine constantly old security measures to avoid petrifaction. It might even be worthwhile to consider “sunset” security laws and regulations, in order to permanently question if old security layers are still needed in the ever-evolving security environment (we might be able to finally leave our cell phone on during take off…as many iOS users already do, without knowing it!¹⁰)

Finally, instead of official futures (we will get them wrong anyway), the homeland security planning process should plan for Uchronia and serendipity. Current scenario planning methodologies are a good starting point, although homeland security practitioners should create their own.

Technological evolution is part of our instinct to explore. It is who we are, and it is part of what makes us better than our previous selves. In 2021, the homeland security project should be the reason why the creative backbone of civilization is stronger and more resilient, so the explorers of tomorrow can perpetuate the very American tradition of thriving in the unknown, pushing the last frontier – the knowledge frontier – further, one innovation at a time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez is a research professor at the department of National Security Affairs and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His fields of research include border security, the implications of new technologies for security and defense and the geopolitical and strategic implications of homeland security and defense policies.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Report (July 22, 2004), 47. http://www.9-11commission.gov/.↵
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Kindle version, 2010).↵
Bryan Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Kindle version, 2009).↵
The history of aircraft hijacks is the history of a threat evolving from the first hijackings that were conducted by pilots trying to escape from authoritarian communist regimes, to hijacking as an extortion tool, to the first incidents of terrorist sabotage. See: http://fcafa.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/they-flew-to-exile-1950/.↵
Ted Lewis, Bak’s Sand Pile: Strategies for a Catastrophic World (Monterey, CA: Agile Press, 2011), 259.↵
Alan Dix, “Designing for Appropriation,” Proceedings of the BCS HCI 2007 Conference, People and Computers XXI (London, UK: BCS-eWik), 2,http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~dixa/publist-2007.html.↵
Taleb, The Black Swan.↵
Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Kindle version, 1999).↵
Joseph Schumpeter might be, from among all the classical economists, the one who best understood the nature of innovation and change. In Schumpeterian terms: “Industrial mutation – if I might use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. The process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” From: Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy(Google books version, 2003).↵
iOS is the operating system that powers most Apple mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Turning the device off is a two step process that requires that the user hold the off button for four seconds, and then move a virtual button from left to right in the touch screen. I have noticed many times that during take off or landing, when supposedly all electronic devices should be off for the security of the plane, what many iOS users do is to press the off button once. While this behavior darkens the screen, the Apple device is still fully powered. Nevertheless, no accidents have occurred after many years of unintentional violations of the “turn off all electronic equipment” security rule.↵

Hacking Mexico: My Tedx talk.

2011-11-12T16:23:00.001-08:00

In may of this year, I had the wonderful opportunity to give a Tedx talk in San Luis Potosi, Mexico (in spanish).

The subject "Hacking Mexico", is in fact a direct result from my current line of research, where I have been observing the consequences of high technology in the security environment, and coming to a conclusion: drug dealers, corrupt politicians or organized crime behave in similar ways than hackers in the online world, in the sense that they become experts vis-a-vis the system they want to penetrate, and then they take advantage of possible exploits to impose their will to the system.

While in this case my case study is Mexico and its so-called war on drugs, this framework of analysis is also valid about homeland security related issues in the USA, and the importance of protecting the system in a complex adaptive way.

why and how Steve Jobs changed the world. The non linear simplifier/disruptor (extract from the economist)

2011-10-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

The full text of the economist obituary for Steve Jobs can be found here:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/10/obituary

Some relevant quotes from the document:

"..Mr Jobs was one of a handful of pioneers who saw what was coming. Crucially, he also had an unusual knack for looking at computers from the outside, as a user, not just from the inside..."

"... A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences,” he once said. “So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions...."

"...but the Mac was not the mass-market success Mr Jobs had hoped for, and he was ousted from Apple by its board.

Yet this apparently disastrous turn of events turned out to be a blessing: “the best thing that could have ever happened to me”, Mr Jobs later called it."

"When his failing health forced him to step down as Apple’s boss in August, he was hailed as the greatest chief executive in history."

"“Technology alone is not enough,” said Mr Jobs at the end of his speech introducing the iPad 2, in March 2011. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.” It was an unusual statement for the head of a technology firm, but it was vintage Steve Jobs."

"His interdisciplinary approach was backed up by an obsessive attention to detail."

"Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified. He eschewed market researchers and focus groups, preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. “A lot of times,people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he said."

"But in the end he changed reality, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped music, telecoms and media. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe” did just that."

Las consecuencias geopoliticas para Mexico de la politica de “Homeland Security” estadounidense.

2011-02-12T10:35:00.000-08:00

En 2006, publiqué en la revista científica Herodote el siguiente artículo que, evidentemente, apareció en francés. Por alguna razón que se ha perdido en el tiempo y en mi mala memoria, aparentemente existe una versión en español del texto. Hoy, haciendo inventario de mis documentos me encontre con ella, y me pareció que merecía ser publicada, aunque sólo sea para las arañas de google y bing (no estoy diciendo que los que trabajan en google y bing son arañas).

Desconozco que tanto se apega el texto a la versión que finalmente fue publicada, pero es suficientemente fiel a la version francesa que no tengo problema en que se use la cita del texto francés, que se encuentra aquí:

http://www.herodote.org/spip.php?article257

Vaya pues hoy como pequeño token de mi propia amistad francomexicana, en días de ánimos encendidos y lenguas largas.

Título: Las consecuencias geopoliticas para Mexico de la politica de “Homeland Security” estadounidense.

Autor: Rodrigo Nieto Gómez.

Tabla de Contenidos

Introducción……

La “mudanza” geopolítica de México………

El Once de septiembre y la “Fortaleza América”……

La frontera sur del Perímetro de Seguridad Norteamericano……

“la defensa del “Homeland” comienza en el Suchiate”…………

La seguridad energética del “homeland”…………

Conclusiones……………

Anotaciones………………

La nueva política de seguridad del territorio nacional (Homeland Security) de los Estados Unidos, elaborada como respuesta a los atentados terroristas del 11 de septiembre del 2001, puso en peligro la recién adquirida “pertenencia” de México a Norteamérica.

Con la destrucción del World Trade Center y de una de las cinco caras del Pentágono, también fue demolida una representación geopolítica estadounidense muy recurrente en el diseño de su dispositivo de seguridad: La protección “quasi insular” que dos grandes océanos y dos vecinos amistosos le garantizaban. “The National Strategy for Homeland Security” que la Casa Blanca presentó en 2002, hace referencia expresa a este cambio fundamental^ⁱ.

Así, esta insularidad dio paso una nueva representación contenida en el neologismo de la “Homeland Security”, concepto en el que el territorio de la unión americana es considerado como un hogar sitiado (la elección de la palabra “homeland” no es arbitraria), que debe ser defendido.

Esta forma de concebir el territorio resulta perjudicial para los intereses de sus dos vecinos, puesto que en su diseño más simple buscaría “fortificar” a los Estados Unidos, a fin de evitar otro ataque terrorista. Obviamente, esta “fortaleza América”, como se le ha conocido, se contrapone en muchos sentidos a las políticas de integración que la región norteamericana venía implementando desde la década de los noventa en el marco del TLCAN.

En el caso de México, esta “fortificación” de su principal mercado atenta directamente contra su modelo actual de desarrollo, orientado a la exportación.

En los días que siguieron al 11 de septiembre, fue posible presenciar un ejemplo de las consecuencias negativas que una política semejante tendría para los tres países socios del TLCAN. En ese lapso, las nuevas medidas de seguridad fronteriza dibujaron un escenario nada halagador para el futuro económico de la región, que afectaría igualmente la cooperación trilateral en muchos otros campos; especialmente en el muy importante de la seguridad.

Es por eso que desde el principio se buscó una alternativa a la representación de “fortaleza América”, que tuviera en cuenta la profunda (aunque asimétrica) interdependencia entre los tres países de la zona TLCAN. De no ser así, no sólo las economías de los tres países sufrirían como consecuencia de los nuevos estándares vigilancia en las fronteras, sino que los objetivos mismos de seguridad de los Estados Unidos podrían verse comprometidos. Como Peter Andreas señala, el mayor problema en la lucha contra la entrada de terroristas a Norteamérica radica en el hecho de que estos utilizan las mismas arterias viales y redes de comunicaciones de tres economías integradas y sumamente interdependientes entre si. Por lo tanto, a fin de combatir el terrorismo, sin que al mismo tiempo las medidas de seguridad estrangulen el tráfico legítimo de bienes y mercancías, la economía y la seguridad deben dejar de ser dos agendas distintas^ⁱⁱ.

De esta forma, desde el 2002, el concepto de “perímetro de seguridad norteamericano” fue presentado como alternativa a la “fortaleza América”, como un compromiso entre la nueva política de “Homeland Security” de los Estados Unidos y la necesidad de mantener fronteras abiertas al comercio y al tráfico legal de personas en la zona TLCAN.

Esta nueva etapa en la integración regional, busca crear una frontera exterior común entre Canadá, Estados Unidos y México, en donde Canadá y México adquieren el compromiso de participar en el aseguramiento del hemisferio, a fin de “trasladar” los controles de seguridad de la “Homeland Security” a una escala continental.

El gobierno de México no sólo suscribió, sino que incluso fomentó vehementemente esta construcción, al considerarla útil a su estrategia de consolidación de la posición mexicana en América del Norte. Jorge Castañeda, entonces canciller mexicano dejó claro que la posición de México era la de “avanzar lo más posible en la continentalización (de las cuestiones de seguridad)”^ⁱⁱⁱ. Desde la academia incluso se llegó a afirmar que: “El 11 de septiembre del 2001 se ha convertido, en los hechos, en la oportunidad histórica para intentar una revisión del antiamericanismo mexicano y hemisférico.”^{^iv}

Geopolíticamente, este diseño adjudicó un nuevo valor estratégico al sur mexicano, convertido en la única frontera terrestre del perímetro de seguridad norteamericano, puesto que las fronteras de Estados Unidos con México y con Canadá quedarán contenidas dentro del él.

Unica frontera terrestre del perímetro de Seguridad, esta región concentra igualmente la mayor parte del patrimonio energético de México. En ese sentido, constituye un territorio esencial en la política de seguridad energética norteamericana.

A fin de poder explicar las consecuencias de este cambio fundamental, es indispensable comprender primero cómo el 11 de septiembre puso en peligro la “mudanza geopolítica” emprendida por el gobierno mexicano y cómo gracias a el proceso de construcción del perímetro de seguridad, México espera trasladar la presión de su frontera norte hacia su frontera sur, bajo la doctrina de la “responsabilidad compartida”.

La “mudanza” geopolítica de México.

La pertenencia simultanea de México al los dos conjuntos territoriales américanos –América del Norte y América latina- es indiscutible.

Por un lado, para los mexicanos no hay lugar a dudas: México es el tercer país de Norteamérica, como es enseñado en las escuelas primarias, de acuerdo al plan de estudios oficial. Paradójicamente, el que la identidad nacional de México haya sido formada en parte, como consecuencia de las pérdidas territoriales sufridas al norte, incrementó el sentido de pertenencia de México a Norteamérica, con una mirada permanente sobre los territorios perdidos.

Por el otro, el país se identifica plenamente con el conjunto de países conocido como América Latina, por razones históricas y culturales evidentes, entre las que sobresalen la lengua, la “raza”, el proceso colonial, la población, identidad y cultura indígena y la religión católica. Es por eso que, deslizando el acento de una serie de representaciones a otra, México ha sido capaz (aunque no sin tensiones) de redefinir desde el discurso su pertenencia a uno o a otro de los dos conjuntos territoriales entre los que se encuentra ubicado.

De esta forma, durante los sexenios de Luís Echeverría Álvarez (1970-1976) y de José López Portillo (1976-1982), el gobierno mexicano construyó un discurso netamente latinoamericanista y, conforme a los cánones de la época, se definió como un país “del sur”, del “tercer mundo” y “no alineado”. Como prueba de ello, México mantuvo una política exterior muy activa en América Latina, sosteniendo el derecho de los pueblos a su libre autodeterminación^{^v}, solidarizándose, por ejemplo, con los gobiernos de Salvador Allende en Chile y de Fidel Castro en Cuba, en oposición clara a la política de Estados Unidos para la región. El presidente Castro lo diría en 1980 de esta forma:

“México ha sido uno de los abanderados más decididos en la lucha por un nuevo orden económico internacional; México ha sido y es abanderado decidido en la lucha por los intereses de los pueblos del llamado Tercer Mundo; […]

México, en el ámbito de América Latina y el Caribe, es un sincero amigo de todos nuestros pueblos, un celoso defensor de sus intereses, y ocupa una trinchera de miles de kilómetros en la frontera misma de Estados Unidos.

Por eso no solo con su política internacional, sino aun geográficamente, México ocupa una primera trinchera en la defensa de la soberanía y los intereses de nuestros pueblos.”^{^vi}

México orientaba entonces todos sus esfuerzos en política exterior a definirse como un país que tenía más que ver con sus vecinos del sur que con sus vecinos del norte. Su pertenencia al “tercer mundo” era motivo de orgullo y, en las representaciones geopolíticas de la época, su pertenencia geográfica a Norteamérica era prácticamente inexistente.

A finales de los ochentas, el arribo de una nueva elite política, formada principalmente en universidades estadounidenses, transformó profundamente la relación de México con el norte y con el sur del continente americano. Poco a poco, en un proceso que no ha dejado de profundizarse hasta hoy, el gobierno federal de México decidió dejar de lado las teorías del desarrollismo y de la dependencia y dejar de “resistir” al norte para pasar a formar parte de él.

En el caso de México, una singularidad del abandono de las políticas “Cepalistas” ocurrido en toda la región es que, junto con la aceptación del modelo económico liberal y orientado a la exportación, geopolíticamente, el país llevó a cabo “una mudanza” de Latinoamérica a Norteamérica, aprovechando su posición geográfica entre los dos conjuntos territoriales. Este movimiento fue un acto conciente, destinado a “ligar” el destino de México a una región económicamente más exitosa y con niveles de desarrollo mucho más importantes, de la cual de todas formas dependía ya de facto, si no de jure.

Para el ex-presidente Carlos Salinas de Gortari, principal artífice de la “mudanza” mexicana, existe un factor muy importante en la explicación de esta decisión que tiende a ser olvidado: El 9 de noviembre de 1989, el mundo entero presenció la caída del muro de Berlín y con ella, el principio del fin del sistema bipolar. Esto tuvo dos efectos fundamentales sobre la geopolítica de México, que lo llevarían a tocar la puerta de de Norteamérica:

* Por un lado, la emergencia de Estados Unidos como única superpotencia mundial significó que para México, como para muchas otras naciones, sería mucho más complicado establecer los equilibrios necesarios a fin de contrarrestar la enorme fuerza del “coloso del norte”. En todo caso, económicamente México ya en ese momento dependía ampliamente del mercado norteamericano, pero la ausencia de un marco institucional sujetaba año con año los acuerdos arancelarios a los vaivenes de la política interna estadounidense.

* Por el otro, la representación de la “guerra económica por bloques” se perfilaba como sustituto de la “guerra fría” y el ejemplo de la Unión Europea volvió interesante la negociación de un tratado de libre comercio para los tres países de América del Norte^{^vii}. No es un accidente que el tratado de Maastricht haya entrado en vigor el primero de noviembre de 1993 y el Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, tan solo dos meses después.

Pero si bien esta “mudanza” de México a Norteamérica tuvo como eje fundamental la integración económica con la región, esta no se contentó con el simple acuerdo comercial.

Estratégicamente, la integración llevó al ejército mexicano a modificar sus manuales de guerra que, hasta bien entrada la década de los ochenta, representaban a los Estados Unidos como el único “enemigo natural” de México^{^viii}. Militarmente, el norte dejó de ser considerado una amenaza, abriendo nuevos espacios para la cooperación en materia de defensa, que están siendo aprovechados hoy en el contexto de la creación del perímetro de seguridad.

Pero sin duda la herramienta más útil en esta “mudanza” continental, fue el cambio en la forma de representar a la migración mexicana en México. Excluidos hasta ese momento del discurso publico, el “tema migratorio” adquirió un peso fundamental en la configuración de las rivalidades de poder entre las dos naciones.

Así, el gobierno federal incluyó de forma más contundente a “los migrantes” en su discurso, utilizando el reconocimiento oficial de su existencia para consolidar su pertenencia geográfica en América del Norte. En menos de una década, los migrantes dejaron de ser considerados como traidores para ocupar el lugar de héroes nacionales; se comenzó incluso a hablar de la “diáspora mexicana”, a fin de borrar la línea divisoria entre los mexicanos y los mexico-americanos^{^ix}.

El 6 de abril de 1989 fue publicado el “Acuerdo por el que se instrumentan acciones de mejoramiento de los servicios públicos federales en las fronteras, puertos marítimos y aeropuertos internacionales del país”, fruto de la primera gran negociación entre el gobierno federal de México y el liderazgo de la comunidad de mexicanos y de mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos. Este acuerdo dio forma a lo que hoy se conoce como el “Programa Paisano”^{^x}, diseñado para eliminar gradualmente “los índices de maltrato, extorsión, robo, corrupción y prepotencia en que incurrían servidores públicos de diversas dependencias del gobierno federal, en contra de los connacionales en su ingreso al país”^{^xi}. El programa existe hasta la fecha y es uno de los canales de dialogo permanente del gobierno de México con su “diáspora”.

Esta nueva concepción quedó definitivamente institucionalizada en el plan nacional de Desarrollo 1994-2000 que estableció por primera vez que: “La nación mexicana rebasa el territorio que contienen sus fronteras”^{^xii}.

Y a fin de continuar borrando la línea que separa a los mexicanos en México de los mexico-americanos, en 1998 entró en vigor la reforma al artículo 30 de la constitución federal mexicana, que autorizó lo que la opinión pública conoció como la “doble nacionalidad”^{^xiii} y que permite a los mexicanos que adquieran la nacionalidad estadounidense, así como a la primera generación de mexicanos nacidos en territorio de los Estados Unidos, conservar su nacionalidad mexicana.

Este proceso de vinculación ha continuado hasta hoy, como la creación del Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior en 2003 o la reforma de 2005 para permitir el voto de los mexicanos en el extranjero lo demuestra.

En otro nivel de análisis, existen ejemplos aún más elocuentes en el ámbito local: En el caso del estado de Zacatecas, los migrantes cuentan desde el 2003 con una representación de dos “diputados migrantes” en el Congreso estatal, elegidos por la comunidad originaria de ese estado, residente en los Estados Unidos. Esto no debe sorprender a nadie, puesto que como Miguel Moctezuma señala: “En la actualidad, los clubes de migrantes zacatecanos se han constituido en la organización social y política más extensa e importante que los mexicanos hayan creado en el extranjero”^{^xiv}.

Esta nueva forma de tratar al fenómeno migratorio cuenta con el más amplio apoyo de la opinión pública mexicana y no requiere más justificación que la de la propia ética política y la responsabilidad que la nación tiene con sus ciudadanos, se encuentren donde se encuentren. Es por eso que para los gobiernos neoliberales de México ha resultado una vía privilegiada, puesto que internamente no provoca polémica, para asegurar “la mudanza” a Norteamérica.

Pero esta nueva “posición geográfica” se encuentra lejos de contar con el apoyo unánime de las fuerzas políticas del ápis. De hecho, ha provocado profundos debates entre una “izquierda latinoamericanista”, representada por el Partido de la Revolución Democrática (izquierda nacionalista, originada de una escisión del PRI en 1988) y una derecha “norteamericanista” contenida principalmente en el Partido Acción Nacional, partido político al que, por cierto, los “republicanos conservadores (perciben) como su auténtica contraparte mexicana, al menos a nivel ideológico”^{^xv}.

El caso del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (partido político originado en la revolución mexicana, que gobernó hegemónicamente a México de 1929 al 2000) merece una mención especial, en razón del interesante conflicto que vive en su seno. El otrora “partido aplanadora” se encuentra hoy fuertemente dividido en dos alas, que representan dos modelos opuestos del desarrollo y dos visiones contradictorias de la posición geográfica de México. El “ala tecnócrata”, a la que pertenecieron en su momento los presidentes Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) y Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994-2000) y hoy dirigida por los gobernadores del norte del país (Natividad González o Eduardo Bours), claramente “norteamericanista”, y el “ala nacionalista”, recelosa de toda “sesión de soberanía” de México frente a los Estados Unidos. Figuras como Manuel Bartlett Díaz o José Murat Casab la representan claramente.

Así, en el tema que nos ocupa, mientras que no hay duda de la voluntad del PAN de participar en la política de “Homeland Security”, ni de la oposición del PRD, la posición del PRI no es clara.

Esta división se ha manifestado regularmente en cada ocasión que el gobierno de México ha alineado su política exterior para América latina con la de los Estados Unidos. Citemos dos ejemplos:

La transformación que más enfrentamientos internos ha generado es, sin duda, el distanciamiento político entre México y Latinoamérica, su antiguo barrio, a fin de permitir una normalización en la política hemisférica del país con los Estados Unidos. Dos ejemplos:

1) Durante el sexenio del presidente Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León(1994-2000), primer presidente mexicano de la era TLCAN^{^xvi}, el gobierno de México terminó con la “histórica relación” que mantenía con Cuba, lo que propició un simbólico distanciamiento entre las dos naciones que llevaría a declarar al presidente Castro, en diciembre de 1998, que México había decidido “pasar a formar parte del club de los ricos” en detrimento de sus vínculos latinoamericanos y que “Los niños de México saben más de Mickey Mouse que de los héroes de su patria”, refiriéndose al “colonialismo cultural” que Estados Unidos ejercía sobre México desde la firma del TLCAN cuando, todavía según sus palabras, “México se mudó de un vecindario pobre a un vecindario rico”^{^xvii}. La izquierda mexicana apoyó, en esa ocasión, al presidente de Cuba.

2) De manera más reciente, durante la IV cumbre de las Américas en noviembre del 2005 en Mar del Plata, Argentina, el gobierno del presidente Fox participó en un complicado debate con el país anfitrión y con Venezuela, al asumir el papel protagónico en la defensa del “Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas” (ALCA), proyecto que cuenta con el apoyo decidido de la Casa Blanca y que buscaría crear una gran zona de libre comercio, calcada del TLCAN, para toda América.

Tanto en temas históricos como la relación con Cuba, como en sus intervenciones en los foros económicos mundiales, México ha formado un frente común con los Estados Unidos en los asuntos que competen al continente americano, aun en contra de sus propios intereses. El caso de la defensa del ALCA es emblemático: México defendió en Mar del Plata la construcción de un acuerdo contrario a sus propios intereses, destinado a admitir nuevos países a su zona de libre comercio, que competirían frontalmente con él en la búsqueda de la inversión extranjera directa estadounidense y tendrían acceso al mercado de ese país en las mismas condiciones preferenciales de las que hoy goza México, casi de forma exclusiva.

Este alineamiento a llevado a la izquierda a acusar de “entreguista” al gobierno actual, puesto que ha convertido al país en un súbdito de los Estados Unidos. Por su parte, la derecha ha respondido con un discurso en el que la izquierda es dibujada como retrograda, populista y opuesta a la modernización.

Esta diferencia fue manifiesta en la geopolítica electoral del país, en julio del 2006, donde el norte del país votó mayoritariamente por el Partido Acción Nacional, mientras que la victoria del PRD fue igual de clara al sur.

Justo es decir que este polémico “frente común” entre México y Estados Unidos que el gobierno federal mexicano ha concertado dista mucho de ser absoluto. México ha sostenido internacionalmente posiciones distintas a las de los Estados Unidos en temas tan importantes como la guerra en Irak y, más recientemente, al firmar el Estatuto de Roma de la Corte Penal Internacional, sin acordar ninguna excepción para los ciudadanos estadounidenses, como este país le solicitó, en un tema profundamente relacionado con las cuestiones de seguridad y defensa que tanto interesan a los Estados Unidos.

Pero independientemente de estas y algunas otras excepciones, que se explican más por razones de política interna en México y que tienen poco que ver con la política estadounidense para el hemisferio, todos los gobiernos federales que siguieron a la firma del TLCAN han buscado, uno por uno, distintos caminos que hagan de la “pertenencia norteamericana” de México un hecho consumado e indiscutible. El actual modelo económico mexicano depende de ello.

Sin embargo, los atentados terroristas del 11 de septiembre del 2001 y la política estadounidense de seguridad resultante hicieron exactamente lo contrario: Pusieron en duda la posición de México en Norteamérica. Y si las consecuencias para su frontera norte fueron evidentes de forma inmediata, el conjunto más importante de nuevas obligaciones que México adquirió con sus socios TLCAN tienen que ver más con el control de su región sureste, especialmente de su frontera.

El Once de septiembre y la “Fortaleza América”.

Como se vio en los días inmediatos a los trágicos eventos de septiembre del 2001, la seguridad puede convertirse en un nuevo tipo de barrera contra el tráfico legítimo de personas y mercancías que, en el caso de México y Estados Unidos, remplace las barreras arancelarias que el TLCAN se encargó de desaparecer. O al menos esa es actualmente la representación dominante.

En medio del caos y la descoordinación natural que siguieron a los atentados terroristas, el gobierno de los Estados Unidos prácticamente paralizó la operación de sus fronteras a causa del aumento en el nivel de seguridad en los puntos de cruce. Si bien la frontera nunca fue cerrada oficialmente, el tiempo de cruce estimado promedio para una persona se disparó de 5 minutos a más de 5 horas^{^xviii}, volviéndola en la práctica infranqueable y, en el caso del transporte de carga, el tiempo de espera aumentó a más de 24 horas.

Las comunidades fronterizas sintieron antes que nadie los efectos económicos negativos de la frontera bloqueada; la ciudad de San Diego, California, por ejemplo, se declaró en “estado de emergencia económica” ante la severa caída en los ingresos de su sector comercial, puesto que la mitad de sus clientes no podían cruzar la frontera para hacer sus compras. Del lado mexicano, los efectos fueron igual de graves, con una caída importante en el volumen de transacciones realizadas en los comercios de todas las ciudades fronterizas^{^xix}.

También la industria se vio severamente afectada. El TLCAN es, en muchos sentidos, pionero del sistema de producción “just-in-time” (justo a tiempo), en el cual, entre otras cosas, se disminuye el tamaño de los inventarios a fin de reducir los costos y la entrega puntual de mercancías es esencial para el proceso de producción^{^xx}. Esta resultó imposible en los días siguientes al 11 de septiembre y por esta causa, tan solo la empresa Ford anunció el cierre de 5 de sus plantas, a fin de compensar las perdidas provocadas por la paralización de las fronteras estadounidenses^{^xxi}.

La interdependencia económica de los estados fronterizos de Estados Unidos (al norte con Canadá y al sur con México) forzó al gobierno federal estadounidense a revisar la rigidez de los controles aduanales y a volver a niveles cercanos a los que se tenían antes de los atentados. Sin embargo, este corto periodo fue suficiente para dar cabida a una nueva representación geopolítica, según la cual, el nuevo miedo estadounidense al extremismo islámico puede estrangular a la zona TLCAN, arrojando a México, una vez más, “fuera de Norteamérica”.

Así, el peligro para México no es tanto el peligro del terrorismo per se, sino el peligro que implica la reacción de Estados Unidos frente al terrorismo, cristalizada en la nueva política de “Homeland Security”. En consecuencia, la decisión la administración Fox fue clara: Si Norteamérica debía “fortificarse”, mejor estar dentro que fuera de esta fortaleza.

Más aún. Para la administración Fox, después del 11 de septiembre, el acuerdo en materia de seguridad era la única vía restante para negociar su proyecto de política exterior más ambicioso: un acuerdo migratorio con los Estados Unidos fundado en dos ejes:

1) La obtención de la residencia legal para los mexicanos que radican ya en los Estados Unidos de forma irregular y;

2) Un programa de trabajadores temporales, similar al extinto programa bracero, que siente las bases de un mercado de trabajo común para Norteamérica.

Por estas razones, la administración mexicana se convirtió en una impulsora decidida de la construcción de una estructura de seguridad a nivel continental.

Para Estados Unidos, integrar a México a la política de “Homeland Security” tiene sentido igualmente por varios motivos. Como Stephen E. Flynn señala, las medidas unilaterales destinadas a “sellar” la frontera en uno de sus extremos crean toda una serie de impedimentos a la cooperación necesaria en la aplicación de la ley y, como resultado, la región fronteriza se vuelve más caótica, no menos, lo que provoca una situación aprovechable por cualquier tipo de criminal, incluidos los terroristas.

En cambio, un “perímetro de seguridad norteamericano” negociado trilateralmente tiene dos virtudes que el mismo autor indica:

1) Crea una “profundidad estratégica” a fin de responder a la amenaza terrorista antes de que se acerque a la frontera y;

2) Permite “segmentar” los riesgos desde el país de origen, a fin de facilitar los cruces fronterizos de las personas y mercancías consideradas como de “bajo riesgo”, enfocando en cambio las inspecciones a la categoría de “alto riesgo”^{^xxii}.

La “profundidad estratégica” de la que Flynn habla ya fue negociada en el acuerdo trilateral bautizado “Alianza por la Seguridad y la Prosperidad de América del Norte” (ASPAN) que, junto con el “plan Centinela” del ejercito mexicano, transforman en “territorio amortiguador” al territorio mexicano, a fin de contrarrestar cualquier amenaza contra Estados Unidos antes de que ésta llegue a sus fronteras (es decir, en territorio de México), y cuyo efecto más importante hasta ahora ha sido la participación activa de México en el combate a los flujos migratorios que lo atraviesan con destino a los Estados Unidos, considerados desde ahora una fuente de inseguridad según la política de “Homeland Security” estadounidense.

El segundo elemento que Flynn menciona, la “segmentación de riesgos”, está presente en la negociación de los Acuerdos de las fronteras inteligentes entre México y Estados Unidos que, como Raúl Benítez-Manaut señala: “sellan la cooperación contra el terrorismo, y hacen que la participación de todo el sistema de seguridad nacional de México sea muy intensa en apoyo a la seguridad nacional de Estados Unidos”^{^xxiii}.

Estas dos ventajas para los Estados Unidos fueron las cartas de cambio que la administración Fox decidió jugar ante el nuevo contexto a fin de proteger el país de un posible bloqueo en su frontera norte. Con el tema de la seguridad, el gobierno mexicano pudo mantener al gobierno estadounidense en la mesa de negociaciones.

La frontera sur del “perímetro de seguridad norteamericano”.

A principios del 2002, el recién creado Department of Homeland Security de los Estados Unidos inició conversaciones con los representantes de Canadá y de México a fin de dar forma a lo que ha recibido el nombre no oficial de “perímetro de seguridad norteamericano”. Puesto que el término no tiene una definición legal oficial, aquí ofrecemos la nuestra: “La puesta en marcha de una política común que involucra a los tres países miembros del TLCAN y que tiene por objeto la creación de una frontera exterior común para el continente norteamericano que sea más estricta con respecto al tráfico de bienes y personas que provengan de terceros países. Esta debe garantizar la seguridad de la región contra las amenazas externas, al mismo tiempo que facilite el tráfico legal, simple e ininterrumpido de los bienes y personas en su interior.”^{^xxiv}

Un muy importante informe patrocinado por el Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales, el Council on Foreign Relations y el Consejo Canadiense de Presidentes de Empresa, que ha sido utilizado como referencia por las elites políticas de los tres países de Norteamérica en diversas ocasiones, lo expresa de la siguiente manera:

“…los tres gobiernos deben avanzar hacia una situación en la cual un terrorista que intente penetrar nuestras fronteras se vea en iguales dificultades para hacerlo sin importar cual país elija para entrar primero. Creemos que estas medidas deben extenderse para incluir un compromiso de adoptar enfoques comunes en las negociaciones internacionales relativas al movimiento global de personas, carga y naves. Como el libre comercio lo fue hace una década, un perímetro común de seguridad para América del Norte es un objetivo ambicioso pero asequible, que requerirá cambios en políticas, estatutos y procedimientos en las tres naciones.”^{^xxv}

El informe señala que este objetivo deberá ser cumplido, a más tardar, para el 2010. La estrategia de negociación empleada por los tres países no pretende concretizar un gran tratado de seguridad, ratificado por sus Congresos. En cambio, se ha privilegiado la vía de los acuerdos entre los ejecutivos, que ponen en marcha una serie de compromisos para “armonizar” y coordinar sus políticas internas, con un marcado énfasis en la coordinación^{^xxvi}.

Por eso, la construcción del perímetro es descrita más como un “mecanismo permanente” que podrá sufrir avances y retrocesos, que como un tratado.

En territorio mexicano, el dispositivo del perímetro está siendo puesto en marcha en dos partes, disociadas entre sí en el discurso público:

1) Una parte militar, implementada a través del “plan Centinela” de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional, en coordinación con el NORTHCOM estadounidense y que opera en la esfera de acción de la nueva doctrina estadounidense de la “Homeland Defense”. Su objetivo es, en boca del entonces Secretario de Gobernación: “salvaguardar al país, a sus intereses, de cualquier ataque terrorista o de que nuestro territorio sirva de paso hacia otros países, principalmente a los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica.”^{^xxvii} Y;

2) Una parte civil, coordinada directamente por la Presidencia de la República a través de la Oficina de Políticas Públicas, y que se encarga de supervisar el cumplimiento de los compromisos adquiridos en la Alianza para la Seguridad y la Prosperidad de América del Norte (ASPAN), la institución trilateral del perímetro de seguridad, así como de la construcción de las fronteras inteligentes, de conformidad con el Acuerdo de 22 puntos del Plan de Acción de la Asociación Fronteriza firmado entre los Estados Unidos y México.

Una singularidad del perímetro de seguridad norteamericano es que, al menos en el mediano plazo, la creación de una frontera externa común no significa la desaparición de las fronteras internas; al contrario: en paralelo a la reforma migratoria, por ejemplo, la iniciativa de ley en materia migratoria aprobada por el Senado estadounidense que ya mencionamos, aunque contiene una buena parte de la reforma migratoria que la administración Fox persigue (una regularización de buena parte de los mexicanos internados de forma irregular y las bases de un programa de trabajadores temporales), endurece, por otro lado, los controles en la frontera con México, con la construcción de un nuevo muro entre los dos países^{^xxviii} y la asignación presupuestaria para la contratación de 6,000^{^xxix} nuevos policías de la patrulla fronteriza, que se sumarian a los 12,000 ya existentes.

Así, en lugar de las “fronteras abiertas”, una nueva representación geopolítica fue creada para describir a las fronteras interiores del perímetro de seguridad: “la frontera inteligente”, en teoría ventajosa tanto a los intereses de seguridad estadounidenses como a las necesidades del tráfico binacional legitimo, debe reemplazar a la frontera linear tradicional para establecer una “frontera en capas”^{^xxx} de vigilancia que, gracias a sistemas de alta tecnología, penetren en los territorios vecinos y controlen el tráfico de bienes y de personas desde su punto de origen, hasta su punto de destino^{^xxxi}.

De esta forma, los dispositivos fronterizos de cada uno de los tres países, pero principalmente del país que se encuentra en el “núcleo” de este perímetro de seguridad, penetrarán más allá de las fronteras físicas para internarse en los territorios vecinos. La “frontera inteligente” busca sustituir la revisión de las personas y mercancías que se realiza en la demarcación fronteriza, por una vigilancia permanente con cámaras, gps, contenedores especiales, transponders y, de ser posible, incluso agentes aduánales al interior del territorio colindante, que garanticen la seguridad desde el punto de partida y antes de su arribo al territorio del país de destino.

Esta “penetración territorial” del dispositivo fronterizo estadounidense en México choca directamente con la concepción tradicional del nacionalismo mexicano. Es por eso que el plan de fronteras inteligentes firmado entre México y Estados Unidos contiene sólo 22 puntos, 8 menos que el plan firmado con Canadá. La principal diferencia es la ausencia del “clearence” terrestre en el plan mexicano (punto 15 en el plan canadiense) que significa la revisión por parte de los agentes fronterizos (Customs) de Estados Unidos en territorio canadiense y viceversa. Aún así, los acuerdos actuales dejan la puerta abierta a una integración futura de México en el “clearence terrestre” (necesaria en el diseño final de la frontera inteligente) y, recientemente, la adjudicación de “títulos de autorización” en México a empresas privadas para operar el sistema de aduanas permite suponer que existe la intención de emplear al sector privado como sustituto de los agentes aduanales estadounidenses, siempre y cuando los empleados de estas empresas reciban la certificación del “Department of Homeland Security”.

Pero si las negociaciones del perímetro de seguridad no desaparecen a las fronteras internas, si crean en cambio una nueva frontera perimetral común que se agrega a las “fronteras inteligentes” y que tendrá como único punto de cruce terrestre la frontera de México con Belice y Guatemala. Las fronteras de México con Estados Unidos y de Estados Unidos con Canadá quedan contenidas en este perímetro y, salvo la frontera sur de México, el resto de la frontera perimetral no colinda con ningún otro país.

En consecuencia, el sur de México adquiere oficialmente el carácter de frontera sur (y única frontera terrestre) de Norteamérica, o como Francisco Alba y Paula Leite la llaman: “puerta de entrada al espacio TLCAN”^{^xxxii}, adquiriendo así un valor estratégico esencial, puesto que es desde ahí que inicia la defensa de los Estados Unidos: el “homeland” y núcleo de Norteamérica.

Tanto el ASPAN como el “plan Centinela” concentran una parte importante de sus esfuerzos en la región sureste del país y, dentro de este marco, México ha emprendido esfuerzos importantes destinados a reforzar su frontera sur, aumentar su capacidad de lucha contra el terrorismo y proteger la infraestructura petrolera del Golfo de México^{^xxxiii}, todo como efecto de la nueva política de “Homeland Security” estadounidense.

La defensa del “Homeland” comienza en el Suchiate.

La representación geopolítica de la “Homeland Security” sustituyó a la antigua representación insular que los Estados Unidos tenían de si mismos. Al “descubrir” que la defensa de Estados Unidos ya no podía ser asegurada en el siglo XXI por la protección oceánica y dos vecinos que no representan militarmente ningún peligro, la nación estadounidense redimensionó el papel de sus fronteras, otorgándoles un lugar central en su política de seguridad.

Este factor puso a la migración al centro mismo de las preocupaciones estadounidenses, ya no solo como un problema de política interna y de control migratorio per se, sino como una “amenaza grave” para la seguridad del “homeland”. Esto ha sido aprovechado por la extrema derecha estadounidense que ya desde antes del 11 de septiembre consideraba que la política migratoria estadounidense era muy laxa. La nueva política del miedo^{^xxxiv} en Estados Unidos ofreció un nuevo y poderoso argumento contra la migración, vinculando este problema directamente a la amenaza terrorista.

En el debate migratorio que tuvo lugar en Estados Unidos entre los meses de marzo y mayo del 2006, las “fronteras porosas” fueron constantemente representadas como un verdadero peligro para la seguridad nacional de ese país, puesto que grupos terroristas podrían aprovecharse de esta “porosidad” para infiltrarse en Estados Unidos y cometer atentados. “El terrorismo indudablemente incrementó la conciencia y los miedos -en particular entre el público estadounidense- sobre la porosidad de las fronteras”^{^xxxv} y desde el 2002 existe un vínculo directo entre un mayor control de las fronteras y la guerra contra el terror, reduciendo así significativamente la tolerancia del pueblo estadounidense al error o la laxitud. Esta “cero tolerancia” puede ser explicada fácilmente con un ejemplo: En el caso de la lucha contra las drogas (el gran problema de seguridad en la frontera, antes del 11 de septiembre) un hipotético aseguramiento del 90% de los cargamentos de droga sería considerado, sin duda, como un éxito rotundo. En cambio, en la misma hipótesis, 10% de terroristas que lograran entrar a los Estados Unidos representaría un fracaso total de la política de “Homeland Security”.

Este discurso estadounidense del miedo al terrorismo puso en peligro a los intereses de México y de los mexicanos residentes legal o ilegalmente en Estados Unidos, puesto que dio a los grupos “antiinmigrantes” un nuevo argumento para exigir un reforzamiento unilateral de la frontera estadounidense con México, que a oídos de la opinión pública moderada de ese país suena menos xenofóbica y con más justificación que cualquier otro argumento esgrimido con anterioridad. Ahí radica el enorme riesgo para México de ese discurso: trasciende las tradicionales propuestas extremistas y muchas veces racistas en contra de la migración de mexicanos y, ligando este fenómeno al miedo profundo que muchos estadounidenses sienten desde el 11 de septiembre, toca una parte de la opinión pública que, hasta este momento, no tenía un interés particular por el problema migratorio.

Esta nueva forma de representar a la migración no documentada como un peligro de seguridad, se agregó a los peligros reales para el tráfico documentado de bienes y personas en razón de las inspecciones, de los que ya hablamos.

La administración Fox propuso entonces asumir parte de la responsabilidad en el control y aseguramiento de los flujos migratorios provenientes del sur, a cambio de su integración al perímetro de seguridad norteamericano, avanzando “el principio de responsabilidad compartida”^{^xxxvi} según el cual, el tema migratorio debe ser considerado de forma trilateral y no como una cuestión de política interna de cada uno de los tres países de Norteamérica. De esta forma, el gobierno de México buscó representar al país como parte de la solución, en lugar de parte del problema.

Cabe mencionar que, en los estudios trinacionales más recientes a favor de la integración, el concepto de “responsabilidad compartida” no sólo ha sido ya aceptado para la cuestión migratoria, sino que ha sido trasladado directamente al tema de la seguridad: “Amenazas como el terrorismo, el crimen organizado y la seguridad pública constituyen amenazas comunes y responsabilidades compartidas que requieren soluciones bilaterales creativas.”^{^xxxvii} Esto crea un vínculo geopolítico directo entre la política migratoria mexicana y la seguridad continental, que se materializa geográficamente en la región sureste del país.

Por eso, México también está intentando combatir su propia “frontera porosa”. A partir del 2002, la frontera sur ha sido objeto del mayor programa de modernización de su historia, orientado a controlar los flujos migratorios que tienen como destinación final a los Estados Unidos. Actualmente, el gobierno mexicano avanza en el diseño e implementación del Sistema Integral de Operación Migratoria (SIOM), “un eficiente y moderno sistema computarizado de control de ingresos y flujos; repatriaciones, residencias, nacionalizaciones y trámites migratorios”^{^xxxviii}, versión mexicana del polémico programa estadounidense US-VISIT, destinado a ser aplicado a todos los cruces fronterizos legales, incluidos los todos los cruces terrestres en la frontera sur.

El llamado “plan Centinela” ha reforzado la presencia del ejército y de los agentes migratorios en una zona que va de la frontera sur, al istmo de Tehuantepec.

En realidad, el actual dispositivo de seguridad, justificado en la cooperación de México contra el terrorismo, tiene un antecedente directo y previo al 11 de septiembre. Ya desde el 17 de junio del 2001 y en el contexto de las negociaciones del “acuerdo migratorio”, la administración Fox ofreció a los Estados Unidos una mayor cooperación en la lucha contra la migración centroamericana.

El elemento más novedoso del “plan Sur”, como se le conoció entonces, era la utilización de la zona del istmo de Tehuantepec y principalmente de la carretera transistmica (uno de los programas faro del “plan Puebla Panamá”), como un punto de intercepción y control migratorio. El comisionado del INM, Felipe de Jesús Preciado, lo explicaba de esta forma:

“aprovechando lo que es el Istmo de Tehuantepec llevemos las instituciones, nuestros mejores operativos, nuestros mejores elementos, porque ustedes saben lo que es la frontera sur, ustedes saben los cientos de kilómetros que tenemos ahí de selvas espesísimas, hay ríos también en donde es difícil un marcaje metro a metro.

Y una realidad es que hay muchos que por ahí entran sin ninguna clase de documentación y, entonces, la estrategia plan sur es reforzar los operativos en el Istmo, aprovechar ese cuello de botella.”^{^xxxix}

Este esquema buscó crear una suerte de “aduana interior” en este “cuello de botella”, a fin de controlar el tráfico de centroamericanos indocumentados hacia el norte del país. El arribo de la representación de la “Homeland Security” volvió más atractiva la propuesta mexicana, pero la administración Fox ya había mostrado la voluntad de negociar un mayor control en la región del istmo, a cambio de un acuerdo migratorio.

El dispositivo del actual “plan Centinela” está diseñado con la misma filosofía en mente, aunque su alcance es mucho mayor: Mientras que el “plan Sur” era un plan netamente migratorio, coordinado en la Secretaría de Gobernación, el “plan Centinela” es un dispositivo de seguridad que tiene el acento puesto en la defensa estratégica de México contra el terrorismo (no solo del sur), coordinado directamente por la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional y ahora inscrito en el contexto de la construcción del perímetro de seguridad.

Puesto que en este caso los esfuerzos que México realiza en materia de control de flujos se enfocan a los no mexicanos, los márgenes de cooperación que el gobierno tiene en materia migratoria son más amplios que en el caso del control de sus propios nacionales, a quienes no puede impedirles (ni lo desea) la salida del territorio nacional. Sin embargo, esta política opone directamente a México contra sus vecinos del sur, puesto que efectivamente “extiende” el control fronterizo estadounidense al territorio mexicano, convirtiéndolo en una “zona amortiguadora” de la política migratoria norteamericana^{^xl}. El resultado de facto es un desplazamiento de los controles migratorios estadounidenses del Río Bravo al Río Suchiate, con todo el territorio mexicano entre los dos ríos actuando como frontera estadounidense “engrosada” y la zona del istmo como poderoso filtro. Para esto, se han establecido una serie de retenes alrededor de la parte más estrecha del istmo, con la colaboración del ejército, las policías estatales y federales y el Instituto Nacional de Migración.

Como resultado, México duplicó en cuatro años la cantidad de repatriaciones de extranjeros indocumentados en su territorio, pasando de 110,00 en 2002 a 235,00 en 2005. Porcentualmente, esta cifra es más importante que los resultados obtenidos por la patrulla fronteriza estadounidense en el mismo periodo.

Este dispositivo puso en marcha cuatro tipos de acciones:

1) La construcción de nuevas estaciones migratorias y modernización de las ya existentes.

2) El aumento de personal dedicado efectivamente a la lucha contra la inmigración ilegal (directamente, a través de la contratación de más agentes para el Instituto Nacional de Migración e, indirectamente, con la utilización de las policías de los tres niveles de gobierno y del ejército en las tareas de control migratorio, sobre todo en el contexto del “plan Centinela”).

3) La modernización tecnológica y administrativa de la frontera sur de México, con apoyo del gobierno de los Estados Unidos en materia de transferencia tecnológica y de capacitación de los miembros del INM, y;

4) El reforzamiento de la zona del istmo de Tehuantepec.

Este dispositivo ha sido fuertemente cuestionado por diversos observadores en México, de una forma que reproduce, desde la academia, las diferencias entre “latinoamericanistas” y “norteamericanistas” que existen igualmente entre la elite política y la opinión pública. Así, para José Luís Sandoval, “nuestra frontera sur, colindante con el istmo centroamericano ha devenido en la frontera sur geopolítica de América del Norte, volviéndose así ésta la nueva frontera-frente de los Estados Unidos en su expansión hacia el resto del continente”^{^xli}. Para el autor, este diseño expansionista buscaría consolidar la presencia hegemónica de Estados Unidos en América Latina, a través de la frontera sur de México^{^xlii}.

Esta opinión contrasta con lo expresado por Raúl Benítez-Manaut que, al contrario, señala que en razón “la importante cooperación bilateral entre, por ejemplo, México y los Estados Unidos, se considera innecesario extender estos compromisos al nivel hemisférico”^{^xliii}, viendo así al diseño de seguridad norteamericano como un esquema más bien aislacionista.

Raúl Delgado Wise, denuncia a la administración Fox por su participación en el perímetro de seguridad “a cambio de ciertas prebendas en relación con la migración laboral mexicana –que hasta ahora han sido promesas-“^{^xliv}.Mientras tanto, Mónica Verea señala que, a partir del 11 de septiembre "Quizá será indispensable controlar mejor y destinar más recursos a la frontera sur, con el fin de vigilar y posiblemente detener a los inmigrantes "indeseables", si se pretende estar comprometido como socio y recibir una "relación especial" con sus vecinos del norte".”^{^xlv}

Aún y cuando estas profundas diferencias de percepción no se han convertido todavía en un gran debate entre la opinión pública mexicana, claramente muestran la enorme división que existe vis-à-vis de la pertenencia geográfica de México y el papel que deberá jugar el país en la construcción de la seguridad norteamericana.

En todo caso, un plan más aún más ambicioso para el control de la frontera sur de México se encuentra ya plasmado en la “Propuesta de Política Migratoria Integral en la Frontera sur de México” ^{^xlvi}. Este documento, resultado de una serie de foros organizados por el Centro de Estudios Migratorios del Instituto Nacional de Migración busca, por primera vez en la historia de México, modernizar la frontera sur de México a fin de dotarla de los elementos necesarios para que en ella funcione un sistema de aduanas con la capacidad de, por un lado, controlar los flujos legales de personas y mercancías y, por el otro, luchar contra la migración ilegal de centro y sudamericanos en México, al mismo tiempo que se defienden sus derechos humanos. Y es que, hasta el 2003, sobre los 1,100 kilómetros de la selvática frontera, se tenían 36 puntos de cruce detectados, de los cuales solamente 8 eran cruces formales, “es decir, contaban con la autorización de ambos gobiernos, estaban dotados de cierta infraestructura y tenían presencia de por lo menos una autoridad (migratoria, aduanal, policial, militar o agropecuaria)”^{^xlvii}.

Por ese motivo, dicha propuesta de política migratoria en la frontera sur propone en 4 líneas estratégicas los pasos a seguir para crear “una política migratoria de Estado”. Sobresale la tercera: “Contribución a la seguridad en la frontera sur de México”, con una serie de puntos orientados a controlar el flujo migratorio ilegal en México antes de que alcance los estados del norte del país y que reproduce, punto por punto, las acciones emprendidas por Estados Unidos para controlar la migración ilegal en su frontera con México. Y es precisamente así que el gobierno federal mexicano espera poder desplazar parte de la presión existente sobre su frontera norte, a su frontera sur.

México transformó una vez más el balance vertical de su geopolítica: Hoy, el país se representa menos como puente entre las Américas y más como filtro, puesto que por su “derecho” a pertenecer al norte, el país ofreció cumplir con la “obligación compartida” de controlar el sur.

Por último, resalta la poca difusión que la negociación del perímetro de seguridad norteamericano ha recibido. Si se compara a la firma del TLCAN, la firma del ASPAN en 2005 pasó prácticamente desapercibida, aún y cuando la negociación de esta Alianza es, sin duda, el intento de institucionalización de América del Norte más importante desde 1994, y significa para México una nueva concepción de su territorio que institucionaliza en el istmo de Tehuantepec la división norte-sur del país.

Source: ENJEUX GEOPOLITIQUES DE LA CONSTRUCTION DU PERIMETRE DE SECURITE NORD-AMERICAIN POUR LE MEXIQUE.

La seguridad energética del “homeland”.

Además del control de flujos migratorios, el sur de México reviste una importancia estratégica fundamental en la política de “Homeland Security” estadounidense, en razón de la prioridad otorgada a la defensa del yacimiento petrolífero de Cantarell, pieza fundamental en la política energética hemisférica estadounidense. Declarada “zona prohibida a la navegación” en razón de los atentados terroristas de 2001^{^xlviii}, toda la zona de la zonda de Campeche ha sido asegurada por la flota del golfo de la Marina mexicana que, por primera vez en su historia, tiene entre sus manos la salvaguarda del territorio nacional en contra del terrorismo, una amenaza que no proviene del interior del país^{^xlix}. Este solo hecho ha transformado toda la visión estratégica de las fuerzas armadas de México y, en el caso de la marina, incentivado su modernización, así como una cooperación mucho más estrecha con su contraparte estadounidense.

Toda fortaleza debe ser capaz de resistir un sitio prolongado con sólo los recursos con los que cuenta en su interior. La “fortaleza Norteamérica” no es la excepción. De ahí la enorme importancia de los yacimientos petrolíferos del sureste mexicano en la estrategia de seguridad del “homeland” estadounidense, que considera a la consolidación de los mercados energéticos de México, Estados Unidos y Canadá en un solo gran mercado norteamericano^{^l} como una necesidad para su seguridad nacional, a fin de garantizar un flujo seguro e ininterrumpido de hidrocarburos, en el contexto de su política de “independencia energética” de medio oriente. México es, desde el 2005 y junto con Canadá, el principal proveedor de petróleo de los Estados Unidos (1.6 millones bbl/d cada uno), seguidos de Arabia Saudita (1.5 millones bbl/d), Venezuela (1.3 millones bbl/d) y Nigeria (1.0 millones bbl/d)^{^li}.

Según Rosío Vargas, hay tres cosas que Estados Unidos requiere de México en el contexto de la construcción de una política de seguridad energética norteamericana:

“1.- Apertura al comercio y a la inversión. Que México libere las actividades de las cadenas energéticas lo más amplia y brevemente posible.

2.- Garantía de abasto, de ser posible, de la misma manera en que Canadá ha comprometido su producción petrolera, dando trato nacional a Estados Unidos en tiempos de escasez energética.

3.- Alineación, en el sentido de colaborar con la diplomacia petrolera de Estados Unidos frente a los productores de la OPEP”^{^lii}.

A esta lista de tres puntos, elaborada en 2002, nosotros agregaríamos un cuarto:

4.- Aumentar la protección y defensa de la infraestructura petrolera de México, y considerarla "infraestructura crítica norteamericana".

Y es que, durante la negociación de la Alianza para la Seguridad y la Prosperidad de América del Norte, los tres países miembros se comprometieron a identificar a la llamada “infraestructura crítica norteamericana”, a fin de elaborar los planes comunes de protección y de respuesta en caso de ataque^{^liii}. Las plataformas off-shore y la industria petroquímica mexicana al sur del país son los primeros grandes blancos calificados como “infraestructura crítica” en territorio mexicano, tanto por su peso económico como por el impacto que un ataque terrorista tendría en los ecosistemas del Golfo.

El tema del petróleo es, para los mexicanos, no sólo una cuestión de economía y política de hidrocarburos, sino también una profunda fuente de identidad nacional. La expropiación petrolera de 1938 es representada como un ejemplo de independencia soberana de México frente a las grandes potencias, sobre todo frente a los Estados Unidos y este solo hecho hace de la cooperación y coordinación continental en materia energética, un tema tabú.

Este orgullo fue llevado desde entonces a rango constitucional, consolidando un régimen petrolero sumamente restrictivo que reduce sensiblemente los márgenes de maniobra del gobierno mexicano.

Ya desde el inicio de las negociaciones del TLCAN, el equipo negociador de México dejó en claro que “el Petróleo de México pertenece a México. El Estado mexicano es el único ente para prospección, extracción, refinación, almacenamiento, distribución y exportación del petróleo y derivados” y, “El petróleo de México no es venta obligatoria a los miembros del TLC.”^{^liv}

Es por eso que, de la anterior lista de cuatro puntos necesarios para la política de seguridad energética norteamericana, sólo ha habido avances considerables en el cuarto, según el cual, México ha fortalecido las medidas de defensa y vigilancia de su territorio y de su “infraestructura crítica”, en plena aceptación de la visión de la seguridad de los Estados Unidos.

Este hecho marca, sin duda, una nueva etapa en el diseño de la filosofía de seguridad nacional mexicana, con una influencia clara de la “Homeland Defense” estadounidense. Sin embargo, en lo que respecta a los otros tres puntos de la lista, la enorme rivalidad existente entre la izquierda y la derecha mexicana en el tema petrolero, así como lo apasionado del debate, dificultan el tipo de coordinación que el gobierno estadounidense espera de México, a fin de lograr un acuerdo formal que asegure un acceso preferencial a los hidrocarburos mexicanos en caso de urgencia, aun y cuando en la práctica este acceso preferencial no esté en duda.

Igualmente, resulta casi imposible, al menos en el contexto actual, una reforma constitucional que abra el mercado petrolero mexicano a la inversión privada a fin de modernizarlo y mucho menos que permita su privatización.

Paradójicamente, este mismo marco restrictivo está impulsando el proceso más importante de integración de México con sus vecinos del sur, con el consenso de los Estados Unidos: El Programa de Integración Energética Mesoamericana (PIEM) busca crear un mercado regional de petrolíferos, gas natural y electricidad entre México, las naciones de América Central y Colombia^{^lv}, y cuenta entre sus proyectos más importantes la construcción de una refinería en Guatemala o Panamá (el sitio no ha sido definido aún) que tendrá la capacidad de refinar hasta 400,000 barriles diarios de petróleo mexicano tipo “maya”^{^lvi}.

La refinería será construida exclusivamente con inversión privada, a través de un proceso de licitación internacional dirigido por la Secretaría de Energía del gobierno federal mexicano que, posteriormente, llevará a cabo un contrato de maquila con la empresa ganadora de la licitación, a fin de que ésta procese petróleo mexicano^{^lvii}. De esta forma, México ampliará su capacidad refinadora, lo que le permitirá, en primer término, compensar las importaciones de gasolina que ya hoy realiza para su mercado interno y, en segundo lugar, colocar en el mercado internacional una cantidad importante de productos refinados a precio de mercado. México ampliará igualmente su participación en el mercado petrolero de las naciones que participan en el PIEM, vendiéndoles derivados a precios preferenciales. Entre las empresas privadas que se han mostrado ya interesadas en el proyecto se encuentran: Occidental Petroleum, Glencore, Itochu Corp, Mitsubishi, Marubeni, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, Chevron, Valero Energy y Petrobras^{^lviii}.

De esta forma, el gobierno de México busca en el exterior la participación del sector privado que la constitución le prohíbe en su propio territorio nacional. Este diseño no se contrapone al proyecto energético norteamericano, puesto que uno de sus efectos será aumentar la capacidad de refinación del petróleo mexicano, que podrá ser colocado posteriormente en el mercado estadounidense.

Más aun, incluso hay quienes han visto en el PIEM un esquema de contrapeso a PetroCaribe, la opción de integración energética propuesta por Venezuela^{^lix}, hecho que interesa a los Estados Unidos que ven con recelo el aumento de la influencia del gobierno de Hugo Chavez en la región.

Conclusiones.

La representación de la “Homeland Security” estadounidense ha tenido un impacto importante en la vida interna de México y ha forzado un profundo replanteamiento en la concepción de la seguridad de su territorio. El sur de México está siendo utilizado como “zona amortiguador” en el diseño del nuevo perímetro de seguridad norteamericano, destinado a hacer del río Suchiate la frontera de Norteamérica. Esta frontera “se extiende” hasta el istmo de Tehuantepec, donde la cooperación en la lucha contra el terrorismo justifica igualmente un endurecimiento de la posición mexicana frente a la inmigración centro y sudamericana, aun y cuando este esquema había sido ya negociado, previamente a los atentados del 11 de septiembre del 2001, como carta de cambio de la administración Fox en la búsqueda de un acuerdo migratorio.

Igualmente, la protección de la “infraestructura crítica” ha motivado una redefinición de las vulnerabilidades del país, asumiendo como propios los miedos estadounidenses al terrorismo. Esta redefinición puso en marcha un nuevo dispositivo de defensa en el sureste mexicano, que busca hacer de México un actor indispensable en la construcción de la “fortaleza Norteamérica”, la primera línea de defensa de la “guerra contra el terrorismo”.

Partes del sur de México, dentro del continente y en sus aguas territoriales, han sido aseguradas por el ejército y la marina a fin de proteger la producción petrolera del país en lo que puede ser considerado un nuevo papel estratégico de las fuerzas armadas de México, enfrentadas por primera vez a una amenaza externa. Esta nueva misión ha fomentado una cooperación sin precedentes con las fuerzas armadas estadounidenses, aunque México sigue siendo, sin duda alguna, “el eslabón más débil en la estructura de la alianza trilateral, a causa de sus problemas de pobreza y subdesarrollo^{^lx}”.

Si bien México ha asumido como propios y en su integralidad los postulados de la “Homeland Defense”, llevando a escala continental la defensa de sus instalaciones petroleras, el nivel de cooperación de México dista mucho de ser el que los Estados Unidos desean en materia energética. México no ha garantizado formalmente un abasto prioritario a Estados Unidos en caso de emergencia energética (aun y cuando así ha sucedido en la práctica en cada crisis) y la cooperación debe circunscribirse hoy por hoy al restrictivo régimen energético que la Constitución Política Mexicana dictamina. Es de suponer que en el futuro próximo, la geopolítica del petróleo continuará jugando un papel fundamental entre las dos naciones, concentrando buena parte de las presiones estadounidenses sobre México al Congreso de la Unión.

Las recientes elecciones en México han mostrado de una forma más clara que nunca la enorme división que existe entre la región norte y la región sur del país y la diferencia en las representaciones de la derecha y de la izquierda, con respecto a la pertenencia de México a Norteamérica.

Aunque el tema de la integración norteamericana nunca fue tocado explícitamente en las campañas, la clara segmentación territorial sí muestra dos visiones distintas del desarrollo.

Para el norte del país, el nuevo contexto de la “Homeland Security” presenta el enorme reto de garantizar que se mantengan las condiciones necesarias para el buen funcionamiento de la zona TLCAN, a la cual su economía se encuentra íntimamente ligada, al mismo tiempo que se garantice la seguridad de los Estados Unidos y de la “infraestructura crítica” mexicana, encuéntrese donde se encuentre.

Para el sur de México el desafío es, antes que nada, llevar todas las ventajas económicas de Norteamérica más allá del istmo de Tehuantepec, traduciendo el actual modelo de desarrollo en resultados tangibles con respecto al abatimiento de los índices de marginación y pobreza. Este hecho es necesario en el largo plazo, a fin de que la opinión pública mexicana pueda aceptar los grandes costos que los acuerdos en materia de seguridad impusieron a la región sureste de México y que han sido íntimamente ligados a la “prosperidad” de América del Norte. De no ser así, la división norte-sur del país se profundizará todavía más, ahora en el tema de la seguridad continental, un escenario negativo para la seguridad de América del Norte y del “homeland” que se encuentra al centro del perímetro norteamericano.

ANOTACIONES.

i United States. Office of Homeland Security., National strategy for homeland security. 2002, [Washington, D.C.]: Office of Homeland Security. xiv, 72, 4 p.

ii Andreas, P., A tale of two Borders, in The rebordering of North America : integration and exclusion in a new security context, P. Andreas and T.J. Biersteker, Editores. 2003, Routledge: New York. p. 179

iii Lisa Schmit, Mexico would support shift to security perimeter with U.S. and Canada, Canadian Press, 22 février 2002.

iv Valdés Ugalde, J.L., Estados Unidos y el sistema internacional después del 11 de septiembre. Algunas reflexiones desde México, en Globalidad y Conflicto: Estados Unidos y la crísis de septiembre, J.L. Valdés Ugalde and D. Valadés, Editores. 2002, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte UNAM: DF. p. 57-64.

v En lo que se conoce como la doctrina Estrada, México renuncia a reconocer o no a gobiernos extranjeros y únicamente manifiesta su derecho a retirar a sus embajadores. En la práctica, México ha utilizado selectivamente este derecho, manteniendo, por ejemplo, a su embajador en Cuba después del triunfo de la revolución de Fidel Castro y retirándolo, en cambio, después del golpe de estado de Augusto Pinochet en Chile.

vi Castro Ruz, F., Discurso pronunciado por Fidel Castro, en el acto de amistad cubano-mexicana. 2/8/1980. 1980.

vii Salinas de Gortari, C., México : un paso difícil a la modernidad. 1. ed. 2000, Barcelona: Plaza & Janés Editores. xxiii, 1393 p.

viii Schulz, D.E., Between a rock and a hard place : the United States, Mexico, and the agony of national security. 1997, [Carlisle Barracks, Pa.]: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College. vi, 44 p.

ix Fox, J.A., Reframing Mexican Migration as a Multi-Ethnic Process, in Reprint Series. 2006, Center for Global, International and Regional Studies.

x Resulta interesante cómo en México la palabra “paisano” ha sido elegida para representar a los mexicanos en Estados Unidos, de forma que estos mantengan, al menos en el discurso, un nexo con su tierra.

xiAntecedentes del programa paisano. [sitio internet] 2006 [revisado en 2006]; Disponible en: http://www.paisano.gob.mx/acerca.php?

xii Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 1995-2000. Presidencia de la República.1995.

xiii Jurídicamente el término correcto es “la no perdida de la nacionalidad”, puesto que a lo que esta modificación constitucional hace referencia es al hecho de que un nacional mexicano que adquiera otra nacionalidad, no perderá por este hecho su nacionalidad mexicana.

xiv Moctezuma, M. Inversión social y productividad de los migrantes mexicanos en los Estados Unidos. 2004 [consultado en 2005; Disponible en: www.migracionydesarrollo.org.

xv Laveaga, R.R. Mitos y realidades del Congreso Estadounidense: una perspectiva mexicana. Revista mexicana de política exterior 2004. p.144 [consultado en 2006; Disponible en: http://www.sre.gob.mx/imred/publicac/rempe73/rlaveaga.pdf.

xvi El presidente Carlos Salinas de Gortari gobernó aún del 1 de enero de 1994, fecha de entrada en vigencia del TLCAN, al 31 de noviembre de ese mismo año. Sin embargo, es el presidente Zedillo, el primero en hacerlo durante todo su sexenio.

xvii Castro Ruz, F., Alocución durante la reunión del SELA en la Habana, Cuba. 2 de Diciembre 1998.

xviii Andreas P., Op Cit.

xix Con una excepción: La Asociación Farmacéutica de Tijuana reportó en octubre 2001 un aumento de 100% en las ventas del antibiótico conocido con el nombre comercial de Cipro, utilizado en el tratamiento del ántrax, a causa de las compras de pánico de los estadounidenses.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/18/se.05.html

xx Monden Y., Toyota Production System: An Integrated Approach to Just-In-Time, Engineering Management Press, 1997.

xxi Flynn, S.E., The False Conundrum, in The rebordering of North America : integration and exclusion in a new security context, P. Andreas and T.J. Biersteker, Editores. 2003, Routledge: New York. p. 110-127.

xxii ibidem.

xxiii Benítez-Manaut, R., México-Estados Unidos: los consensos y las tensiones de una difícil e inevitable relación de seguridad. Mitos y realidades después del 11 de septiembre. 2004, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales FLACSO-Chile: Santiago de Chile. p. 10.

xxiv Rodrigo Nieto Gómez, Enjeux géopolitiques de la construction du Perimetre de Sécurité Nord-americain pour le Mexique, memoire DEA no publicada, Institut Français de Géopolitique (Paris 8). 2005.

xxv Construcción de una Comunidad de América del Norte, Informe de un Grupo Independiente de Trabajo. 2005, Council on Foreign Relations, Consejo Canadiense de Presidentes de Empresa, Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales. p. 64.

xxvi Rudolph, C. Homeland Security and International Migration: Toward a North American Security Perimeter? in IRPP Conference on North American Integration,. 2004. Ottawa, Canada,.

xxvii Rueda de Prensa del Secretario de Gobernación, Santiago Creel y el Secretario del "Department of Homeland Security", Tom Ridge en el Salón Juarez de la Secretaría de Gobernación. 2004 [citado 2006]; Disponible en: http://www.gobernacion.gob.mx/templetas/conferencia.php?id=3394.

xxviii Sección 2454 de la versión aprobada del “Securing America's Borders Act”.

xxix Sección 101 de la versión aprobada del “Securing America’s Borders Act”.

xxx “…a continuum framed by land, sea, and air dimensions, where a layered management system enables greater visibility of vehicles, people, and goods coming to and departing from our country.”

The National Strategy for Homeland Security, 2002. P.22

xxxi Plan de Acción de la Asociación Fronteriza entre Estados Unidos y México.

xxxiiAlba, F. and P. Leite, Políticas migratorias después del 11 de septiembre: Los casos del TLCAN y la UE. Migración y Desarrollo, 2004. abril: p. 4-20.

xxxiii Country Reports on Terrorism 2005, Oficina del Coordinador de la lucha contra el terrorismo. Departamento de Estado. 2005. P. 167

xxxiv Robin, C., La peur, Histoire d’une idée politique. 2006, Paris: Armand Colin. 365.

xxxv Alba, F. and P. Leite, op. Cit.

xxxvi Comunicado de Prensa No.218. 2005, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores.

xxxvii Los Estados Unidos y México: Construyendo Una Asociación Estratégica. Un reporte del Grupo de Estudio de la Relación México- Estados Unidos, A. Rozental and P.H. Smith, Editores. 2005, ITAM, COMEXI, Woodrow Wilson International Center fos Scholars. p. 24.

xxxviii Artola, J. Op. Cit.

xxxix Entrevista al comisionado del Instituto Nacional de Migración Felipe de Jesús Preciado. 20 de junio 2001. Disponible en:

http://www.segob.gob.mx/templetas/entrevista.php?id=658

xl Peter Andreas, op.cit, p.13

xli Sandoval Palacios, J.M. Migración y seguridad Nacional en las fronteras sur y norte de México. in 1er encuentro internacional sobre desarrollo e integración regional en el sur de México y Centroamérica. 2003. San Cristobal de las Casas, México.

xlii Ver: Sandoval Palacios, J.M., El Area de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA) y la nueva seguridad regional hemisférica. 2003: Seminario Permanente de Estudios Chicanos y de Fronteras (DEAS-INAH). y;

Sandoval Palacios, J.M. El Plan Puebla-Panamá Como Regulador de la Migración Laboral Centroamericana y del Sur-Sureste de México. in Foro Internacional de Información, Análisis y Propuestas sobre Libre Comercio y Asuntos Transfronterizos. 2001. Tapachula: Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio (RMALC).

xliii Benítez-Manaut, R., Mexico and the new challenges of hemispheric security. 2004, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Latin American Program. 65.

xliv Delgado Wise, R. and O. Mañán García. Migración México-Estados Unidos: eslabón crítico de la integración. 2004 [consultado en 2005; Disponible en: www.migracionydesarrollo.org.

xlv Verea C., M., El terror del terrorismo: Cambios sustanciales en el debate migratorio estadounidense. Consecuencias para México, en Globalidad y Conflicto: Estados Unidos y la crísis de septiembre, J.L. Valdés Ugalde and D. Valadés, Editores. 2002, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte UNAM: DF. p. 93-108.

xlvi http://www.inm.gob.mx/paginas/foros/tercerforo/Prop_Pol_MIg_Int_Front_Sur_Final.pdf

xlvii Campuzano López, J.J. México y Guatemala: de la vecindad a la asociación. Revista mexicana de politica exterior 2004 [revisado 2006; Disponible en: http://www.sre.gob.mx/imred/publicac/rempe72/oropeza.pdf.

xlviii ACUERDO mediante el cual las secretarías de Marina, de Comunicaciones y Transportes, y de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca y Alimentación, establecen medidas de seguridad en la Sonda de Campeche. Diario Oficial de la Federación, 11 septiembre 2003.

xlix Anteriormente, tanto las amenazas, real o supuesta, de las guerrillas en los años setenta y posteriormente del narcotráfico, han sido amenazas a la seguridad nacional de México que provienen de su interior y tienen un carácter principalmente continental.

l Whitehouse, National Energy Policy. P: 8-9

li United States Country Analysis Brief.

Disponible en : http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html

lii Vargas, R., Algunos efectos de los actos terroristas del 11 de septiembre sobre el mercado petrolero internacional y la geopolítica de los hidocarburos, en Globalidad y Conflicto: Estados Unidos y la crísis de septiembre, J.L. Valdés Ugalde and D. Valadés, Editores. 2002, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte UNAM: DF. p. 295-307.

liii Declaración conjunta del Presidente Vicente Fox Quesada, el Presidente George W. Bush y el Primer Ministro Paul Martin de la Alianza para la Seguridad y la Prosperidad en América del Norte. 23 de marzo 2005.

liv Giudice, V. ALCA- SUR. 2003 [citado en 2006; Disponible en: www.redem.buap.mx/word/2003victor.doc.

lv Lo integran: Belice, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Nicaragua, Panamá, República Dominicana.

lvi Barnés de Castro, F. Integración Energética en Latinoamérica y el Caribe El caso de México. [Powerpoint] 2006 [citado en 2006 2/8/2006]; Disponible en: http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/global/downloads/lac/lacbiregional0606fb.pdf.

lvii Aguilera Flores, M. Integración energética, para el sexenio que viene. 2006 [citado en 2006; Disponible en: http://www.pan.org.mx/?P=182&ArtOrder=ReadArt&Article=205282.

lviii México y Centroamérica licitarían refinería a fines de agosto. 2006 [citado en 2006 3/8/2006]; Disponible en: http://www.invertia.com/noticias/noticia.asp?idNoticia=1581477

lix Caroit, J.-M., Pétrole : le Mexique cherche à contrer le Venezuela, en Le Monde. 2006: Paris.

lx Benítez-Manaut, R., Op. Cit, 2004.

Testing mobile publishing

2011-01-22T17:27:00.001-08:00

Test number 1

coke distribution

2011-01-11T10:55:00.000-08:00

I have a hard time believing that this highly complicated network has no critical nodes beyond rio grande. Not even the "other coke" has been able to build such a complicated net with no vulnerabilities, right? somewhere there this network has already self organized critically, I am sure, and hitting those nodes would provoke a cascade effect like in any other network.

About the “unified command” for the police departments in Mexico (in spanish)

2010-10-12T06:26:00.001-07:00

I am trying to avoid posts in spanish in this blog, but this one was too go ignore!

Intentando revivir el género epistolar “a la XXI siecle” ósea en el feis, aquí está un intercambio –injusto porque la última y larga respuesta es mía- entre Guillermo Luevano, un excelente amigo, y su servidor, con respecto al “mano único” propuesto por el presidente de México. Sus razones y las mías:

Primer texto:

Guillermo Luévano Bustamante

Entre los especialistas de ciencias penales, suele hacerse un énfasis en la distinción que existe entre la Política Criminal y la política criminal. La primera es el campo disciplinar que comprende los estudios que se enfocan a las decisiones públicas, jurídicas y administrativas que toman los gobiernos para entender, resolver, prevenir y sancionar los problemas derivados de la incidencia delictiva. La segunda acepción hace alusión a una forma de gobernar que resulta violenta, deslegitimando así las decisiones y acciones del poder político, en contra de los mismos gobernados.
En el caso de la Política Criminal de Calderón, bien valdría decir que es a la vez una política criminal. Felipe Calderón –presidente por decisión del Tribunal electoral- entregó la mañana del 6 de octubre de 2010 ante el Congreso de la Unión una iniciativa de Reforma Constitucional que entre otras cosas pretende crear un mando único para todas las policías del país.
Aseguran los funcionarios del gobierno federal que la solución a los problemas asociados con la delincuencia es concentrar el control de las corporaciones policiacas en una gran dirección nacional. Los argumentos a favor de esa iniciativa se basan en estadísticas, que por sí solas no dan cuenta de muchos puntos centrales que abonen a la intención centralizadora del que se dice presidente de la República; que el 90 de los delitos que se cometen en México son del fuero común, y que la proporción es la misma en cuanto a los elementos policíacos del país, mientras que 400 000 son municipales y estatales, solo 30 000 son federales.
Calderón sostiene que los cuerpos de seguridad municipales son más vulnerables y frágiles, que por ello se hace necesario que los federales se hagan cargo y que de hecho eso ha justificado la irrupción de miembros del ejército desempeñando funciones de policía, inconstitucionalmente, pero sobre todo, de manera desastrosa en cuanto al tema del respeto a los Derechos Humanos.
El mando único de policía implica un retroceso enorme en el ámbito de la procuración de justicia. La intención centralista del titular del ejecutivo –a la fuerza- va a contracorriente de los supuestos avances democráticos en otras aéreas de la vida pública. Si lo que pretende es garantizar la seguridad de los ciudadanos, es indebido que se anteponga como pretexto para soslayar otros principios democráticos.
Es complicado implementar el modelo, aunque esa no es razón suficiente para desecharlo, si lo es el hecho de que se opone al esquema básico de los Estados Democráticos de Derecho y contra la definición misma de nuestro país, pues no es Republicana, no promueve el Federalismo, ni se constriñe a los lineamientos de la Democracia contemporánea:

6.1. En primer lugar, atenta contra el principio republicano de la división de poderes: plantea un mando de policía que depende del poder ejecutivo, pero que realiza funciones de auxilio para el poder judicial. Esto implica que el ejecutivo tenga injerencia indebida sobre las libertades individuales, lo que hasta ahora es exclusivo del poder judicial mediante procesos jurisdiccionales de por sí cuestionables y dudosos, en muchas ocasiones.

6.2. En segundo término, atenta contra el principio federal de organización política. El titular del ejecutivo y el secretario de seguridad pública del gobierno federal tendrían atribuciones enormes dentro de los estados y con más peso dentro de los municipios. Con ello se vulnera flagrantemente su de por sí endeble autonomía política, so pretexto de su precariedad económica, lo cual se vuelve de hecho un argumento de poder financiero: los municipios más ricos tendrán más peso frente a la intromisión del gobierno central, los más pobres quedarán a merced de las decisiones del mando único.

6.3. En tercer lugar violenta la noción moderna de democracia. Entre más delegado y dividido está el poder, es más democrático, entre más concentrado es tendencialmente absoluto y por lo tanto autoritario.

Calderón se empeña en combatir la delincuencia, o al menos en decir que la combate, a través de militares y policías. Sostengo que el origen se encuentra en una política económica que favorecer el incremento del poder de entidades privadas, en detrimento del soberanía y por lo tanto del poder punitivo del Estado.
Muchos otros factores han originado la crisis de inseguridad que hoy padece el país, la mayoría están asociados a desaciertos del gobierno federal, de esta y de las anteriores administraciones. Pero el mando único no se vislumbra como una solución pronta y eficaz, ni siquiera sensata, pero sobre todo es un síntoma clarísimo de la cortedad del gobierno calderonista y de su desprecio por la República Federal y Democrática, que al menos en el nombre pretendíamos ser.

Mi primer comentario:

Rodrigo Nieto Gómez

Se vale no estar de acuerdo? Sistemas de mando único existen en todo el mundo, en democracias centrales como la francesa o federales como la alemana sin atentar ni contra el federalismo ahí donde el sistema es federal ni contra la democracia en los países democráticos. Las policías municipales son el eslabón más débil del sistema de seguridad en México; no tienen ni entrenamiento ni recursos y son el primer contacto con la altamente organizada delincuencia

Por ultimo, la definición eninsteniana de locura era esperar un resultado distinto ante las mismas causas, ósea esperar que las cosas cambien haciendo lo mismo. La estrategia de "depuración" de lasnpolicias se viene repitiendo desde los 70s. Al menos en esta ocasión se está tratando algo distinto. Y nada impide combatir las otras causas sin al mismo tiempo construir una policía eficaz. Esa es una alternativa falaz... Que los programas de lucha contra la pobreza no sirvan es otrra discusión. Pero el rubro sigue estando en el presupuesto.

Su respuesta:

Guillermo:

Rodrigo, pues claro que se vale estar en desacuerdo, eso ni se pregunta. Pero es que yo si creo que van encadeanadas las políticas de seguridad nacional y la política económica. Se ha disminuido el poder político del Estado y se ha favorecido el empoderamiento de organismos privados. Eso debilita la capacidad punitiva de las entidades públicas. Y no voy sólo, esto lo dice Zaffaroni y Ferrajoli, sobre todo el tema de la violación de esferas, y el tema de la democracia. Saludes y un abrazo.

La mía:

Rodrigo:

Aha. Y en eso estoy de acuerdo al 100% contigo. No sólo la económica, en lo que se refiere al combate a la pobreza, la fiscal y financiera también pues en la debilidad del sistema financiero mexicano se encuentra el verdadero pilar que soporta al crimen organizado. Mi punto es que nada de esto está peleado con la construcción de una policía más eficaz en el ejercicio de sus funciones, y creo que la actual pulverización de mando en nada ayuda a este objetivo. El mando único es una condición esencial, que no suficiente para romper lo -eeehh- campechano y rustico de nuestras policias. Ningún campo de la administración requiere de más ciencia -social y dura- que la seguridad (con excepción de la medicina). Creo que en México ninguno recibe menos.

La suya:

Guillermo:

Si pues es que comparto tu opinión, salvo en eso, me parece que la policía mexicana, igual la municipal que la federal, es proclive a la violacion de Derechos Humanos, y pienso en los municipales con mando central reproduciendo el esquema de los federales. Luego ¿por qué no es invasivo que una dependencia federal tenga tanta injerencia en los ayuntamientos. Y del otro planteamiento, una entidad con facultad sobre las libertades individuales, pero que depende del ejecutivo, no es peligros. Habría que ver los mecanismos que propone el Calderas, si es que los hay, pero sospecho que es una propuesta que él mismo calculó que no pasaría, pero al menos le dará argumento para decir que lo intentó.

Por último –por ahora- todas mis cartas sobre la mesa:

Rodrigo:

Dos contraargumentos y una aclaración. La aclaración primero. Un sistema como el que actualmente tenemos en México, con una cantidad exorbitante de corporaciones no tiene obligatoriamente que ser ineficiente. Estados Unidos es el caso ejemplar. Casi el único.

Pero sí es sin duda un sistema con un “grado de dificultad” mayor que un sistema de mando único. Por cierto, el propuesto en México ya no es mando único “puro”, en el sentido que se le deja la responsabilidad central a un mando estatal, como en Alemania. Otro país federal. Baviera o Sajonia (los estados) coordinan la actividad de la policía federal, pero los estándares de entrenamiento y manejo son centralizados. Es decir, un ciudadano de un municipio pobre rural de Alemania del este tiene el privilegio de contar con un agente de la policía con el mismo entrenamiento y formación que alguien de un barrio rico de Munich. En México definitivamente no es el caso.

El problema de los derechos humanos, me parece, es un problema distinto aunque concomitante del problema de la falta de eficacia en el ejercicio de la función policiaca. La policía viola los derechos humanos principalmente por una de tres razones:

a) está mal entrenada y lo hace sin saber o a sabiendas pero sin asumir cognitivamente los costos y consecuencias de sus acciones.

b) Está mal entrenada y lo hace por no saber controlar su frustración (brutalidad policiaca) –su mal entrenamiento no le dio las armas y el proceso de selección careció del profesionalismo necesario para filtrar ese perfil- o está mal entrenada y lo hace porque es la única manera que encuentra para ser medianamente eficiente (la tortura para la obtención de confesiones o para inventar un chivo expiatorio).

c) Es corrupta –y mal entrenada- y lo hace conscientemente, al servicio de la delincuencia organizada y fuera del ejercicio de su función policiaca. Una mala construcción institucional y la falta de un sistema de “asuntos internos” le permite continuar actuando de esta manera.

La solución a estos tres problemas pasa sin duda por una mejor construcción institucional y un mejor entrenamiento policiaco. Me parece que el mando único nos avanza en las dos direcciones, creando un mismo proceso administrativo para la formación de todos los policías del país (hoy los polis del DF tienen mejor entrenamiento que los de Aquismón, SLP) y centralizando recursos científicos, como laboratorios forenses y academias, potencializando así los de por sí escasos recursos. Visto que 80% de los delitos que cimbran a la población son cometidos por menos del 20% de los delincuentes, aun en el delito “común” como la violencia de pandillas en barrios marginados o el robo de autos, el mando único permite tener equipos móviles especializados que se ocupen de ese 80%, y puedan ser desplegados por todo el país. Calidad reemplaza cantidad.

Sin embargo, la mayoría de la policía seguirá siendo policía presencial, próxima y disuasiva (el poli que vez en la calle, pues). Estos tendrán un entrenamiento con los mismos estándares en todos lados y podrán ser transferidos a otros territorios según se necesiten o conservados en la misma colonia por años, si se necesita una policía de proximidad. Nada impide en el mando único tener unidades con distintas características y distintas relaciones con el ciudadano.

Aquí voy a decir algo para lo que ni yo ni nadie tiene todavía cifras claras. Me parece que la premisa de que la policía federal es más corrupta o viola más los derechos humanos es errónea. Me parece que las policías municipales rurales estarían en la cima, pero los ciudadanos en los municipios remotos no tienen ni las armas para denunciar, ni acceso a las comisiones de derechos humanos o las ONG y en muchas ocasiones ni siquiera el conocimiento suficiente para saber cuáles son sus derechos y cuando son violados.

Lo que sí sé, es que el entrenamiento de la policía federal es el mejor de México, con la excepción de algunas de las policías del DF. Dista mucho de ser siquiera bueno, pero es el mejor. Si el trabajo ha de continuar, esa debe ser la vara para medir a todas las demás.

Por último, yo no veo porque la seguridad pública semi centralizada atente contra el régimen municipal, si así se entiende en el reparto de competencias. No sería –de lejos- la única función exclusiva de la federación. Además, una policía eficiente –la que sea- me parece que es mejor que una policía municipal ineficiente.

Entrevistando a un policía municipal de un municipio rural de SLP, me describió como recibió a “los zetas” que llegaron en 4 suburbans negras blindadas, abrieron el techo y del que asomaron sus cabezotas dos sicarios en cada camioneta, con sus cuernos de chivo y dos tenían en la mano sendas granadas. Me describía todo eso con su jefe de la policía al lado; jefe de 7 hombres del campo más, armados con rifles de caza de su propiedad y sin ningún entrenamiento. ¿esa es la primera línea de defensa contra los poderosos carteles?

El mando único no resuelve el problema, pero si cambia la relación de fuerzas. Sin ella, no veo otra fuerza de despliegue rápido con tamaño territorial y recursos, además del ejército….y estoy seguro que los dos estamos de acuerdo que el ejército en las calles no es el mejor escenario en ningún caso.

Pos ahí está mi muy humilde opinión.

Te mando un abrazo Memo!

Rodrigo Nieto Gómez.

Technorati Tags: Human rights,law enforcement,Mexico Mexico,War on drugs,Homeland Security

Life got in the way!

2010-09-24T08:03:00.001-07:00

To the 3 readers of this blog I owe an apology. In the last few months a lot has happened in my personal life; mostly good stuff.

Things will keep moving for a while –literally, as I get the pleasure of moving to a new place in California- and then, I hope, I will be able to resume with a more regular schedule for the blog posts.

In the meantime I have had the opportunity to visit Arizona to discuss with members of the Homeland Security community there, and to try to find with them game changers for the region.

I’ll be updating more about border technology and policy, as this is going to become a big part of my research agenda in the foreseeable future.

Thank you for your patience!

Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez, PhD

The ebooks you thought you owned.

list of recent thesis I have advised or co advised.

One of the privileges of working at CHDS/NPS is that I get to advice great thesis and learn during the process.

[PDF] LESSONS ON POLICING TERRORISM: STUDYING POLICE EFFECTIVENESS IN ITALY AND GERMANY

[PDF] THE BALLOON EFFECT AND MEXICAN HOMELAND SECURITY: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE AMERICAS'SECURITY CHAIN

[PDF] DENATIONALIZED CITIZENSHIP THEORY: WHAT IS THE ROLE OF CITIZENSHIP THEORY IN HOMELAND SECURITY?

[PDF] THE PERFECT STORM: THE RELIGIOUS APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION AND PERSONAL DISASTER PREPAREDNESS

The Power of the few. Disruption and technology evolution for homeland security

INTRODUCTION

HERACLITUS AND ASIMOV WERE RIGHT

THE POWER OF THE FEW:A 2001 ‘CELL’ HAS THE SIZE OF A 1941 EMPIRE

The Limits of Current Homeland Security’s Adaptability to Disruption

PUSHING THE BORDERS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE:DISRUPTING POSITIVELY THE HOMELAND SECURITY ENVIRONMENT

CONCLUSION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Distributed Denial of Service Attack: an online strike-like behavior!

Time got it wrong with its person of the year.

The Homeland Security Challenges of Technological Evolution and Convergence in the Next Ten Years

9/11/1973: WHY NOT?

WE DON’T REINVENT THE WHEEL – WE APPROPRIATE IT!

CONCLUSION: HOMELAND SECURITY: THE EARLY ADOPTER DISCIPLINE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hacking Mexico: My Tedx talk.

why and how Steve Jobs changed the world. The non linear simplifier/disruptor (extract from the economist)

Las consecuencias geopoliticas para Mexico de la politica de “Homeland Security” estadounidense.

Testing mobile publishing

coke distribution

About the “unified command” for the police departments in Mexico (in spanish)

Life got in the way!

THE POWER OF THE FEW:
A 2001 ‘CELL’ HAS THE SIZE OF A 1941 EMPIRE

PUSHING THE BORDERS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE:
DISRUPTING POSITIVELY THE HOMELAND SECURITY ENVIRONMENT