Suchergebnisse

Since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, finance and security have become joined in new ways to produce particular targets of state surveillance. In Speculative Security , Marieke de Goede describes how previously unscrutinized practices such as donations and remittances, especially across national borders, have been affected by security measures that include datamining, asset freezing, and transnational regulation. These "precrime" measures focus on transactions that are perfectly legal but are thought to hold a specific potential to support terrorism. The pursuit of suspec

AbstractIncreasingly, private companies – including Twitter, airlines, and banks – find themselves in the frontline of fighting terrorism and other security threats, because they are obliged to mine and expel suspicious transactions. This analytical work of companies forms part of a chain, whereby transactions data are analysed, collected, reported, shared, and eventually deployed as a basis for intervention by police and prosecution. This article develops the notion of theChain of Securityin order to conceptualise the ways in which security judgements are made across public/private domains and on the basis of commercial transactions. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this article understands the security chain as the set of practices whereby commercial transactions are collected, stored, transferred, and analysed, in order to arrive at security facts. Understanding the trajectory of the suspicious transaction as a series of translations across professional domains draws attention to the processes of sequencing, movement, and referral in the production of security judgements. The article uses the chain of financial suspicious transactions reporting as example to show how this research 'thinking tool' can work. In doing so, it aims to contribute to debates at the intersection between International Relations (IR) and Science-and-Technology Studies (STS).

Securitization has a dual rationality that twins a financial sense to one of
modern statecraft and national security. This forum contribution advocates a
focus on material practices as a means of further exploring the entanglement of
finance and security. In particular, it advances a notion of 'chains of
securitization', arguing that such a concept provides researchers with a
concrete way to analyze how 'financial' objects, such as derivatives, are
assembled to generate (in)securities, as well as how 'security' objects, such as
suspicious transactions, are assembled across public/private domains.

This essay was originally published in The Routledge Handbook of New Security
Studies (Burgess, 2010), and has since become a key reference point in debates
on the finance-security nexus. It is reproduced here as a starting point for the
present forum, which aims to further advance efforts to conceptualise the
relations between finance and security.

In August 2013, a report was leaked to the Washington Post in which it was revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) violated its own privacy rules 2,776 times over a one-year period (Gellman 2013). The privacy violations documented in the report range from technical errors to serious violations such as operations without consent from the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance (FISA) court and breach of the five-year data retention period. Other breaches are described as "broad syntax" errors, which are related to imprecise queries. This type of fault is presumed reducible "if analysts had more complete and consistent information available about targets." Following the recent disclosures concerning the NSA's PRISM program, which has the capacity to search and connect numerous social network databases in the name of security, the importance of the publication of this privacy report cannot be overestimated. While much of the public discussion concerning PRISM has so far focused on the person of Edward Snowden and his unlikely journeys to Hong Kong and Russia, relatively few questions have been raised about the value and legitimacy of the PRISM program itself. The Washington Post revelations concerning the NSA privacy breaches have grabbed the headlines and may lead to Congressional Hearings (Blake 2013). As with other security and surveillance programs, privacy is a key anchor for critical questioning and public debate (for example, Lyon 2003; Salter 2007; Bigo and Tsoulaka 2008). Adapted from the source document.

This article examines the "SWIFT affair", whereby United States security authorities acquired access to financial data of European citizens, and argues that it is a powerful lens through which to understand current shifts in European security governing. The affair demonstrates the institutional challenges produced by the deployment of private, commercial data for security, and analyzes the ad hoc innovations produced in European Union (EU) governing as a result. Furthermore, the SWIFT affair has allowed the EU to position itself in the global security landscape as a normative power that promotes the values of privacy and data protection. However, the development of a European Terrorism Financing Tracking System, coupled with the way in which the EU itself is keenly implementing risk-based and data-led internal security measures, means that critical attention to the EU's own security practices remains urgent. Adapted from the source document.