File:Neoconopticon-report.pdf

NeoconOpticon - The EU Security Industrial Complex - June 2009

Summary of the report

In 2006, Statewatch and the Transnational Institute published Arming Big Brother, a briefing paper examining the development of the European Union’s Security Research Programme (ESRP). Th e ESRP is a seven year, €1.4 billion programme predicated on the need to deliver new security enhancing technologies to the Union’s member states in order to protect EU citizens from every conceivable threat to their security (understood here purely in terms of bodily safety).

The ESRP also has the explicit aim of fostering the growth of a lucrative and globally competitive ‘homeland security’ industry in Europe. To this end, a number of prominent European corporations from the defence and IT sectors have enjoyed unprecedented involvement in the development of the security ‘research’ agenda.

Arming Big Brother set out a number of concerns about the pending ESRP, including the implicit threat posed to civil liberties and fundamental rights by EU ‘research’ into surveillance and other security technologies. Th e report was also highly critical of the corporate infl uence on the EU security research programme and warned of various dangers in actively pursuing a ‘security-industrial complex’ in Europe.

Arming Big Brother, published in 2006, was widely distributed and debated. The online version has been downloaded over 500,000 times. This follow-up report contains new research showing how the European Security Research Programme continues to be shaped by prominent transnational defence and security corporations and other vested interests. Th ough technically a Research and Development (R&D) programme, the ESRP is heavily focused on the application of security technologies (rather than objective research per se), and is increasingly aligned with EU policy in the fi elds of justice and home affairs (JHA, the ‘third pillar’), security and external defence (CFSP, the ‘second pillar’).

Aligned to the EU’s policy objectives, the corporate-led research under the ESRP favours the public procurement of new security technologies and EU security policies that mandate their implementation. Th is largely hidden influence is now exerting a tremendous influence on the EU policy agenda in an expanding cycle of largely unaccountable and highly technocratic decision-making.

The report is comprised of two substantial sections. The first revisits the development of the European Security Research Programme to date. It shows that the design of the ESRP has been outsourced to the very corporations that have the most to gain from its implementation. The second focuses on the implementation of the ESRP and the broader consolidation of the EU security-industrial complex. It examines the role played by specifi c actors, and the relationship between specifi c EU ‘research’ projects and EU policy measures. Th is report examined all 95 of the projects funded so far under the security research programme (to the end of 2008) and looked at several thousand related EU- -funded R&D projects from other thematic programmes. What emerges from the bewildering array of contracts, acronyms and EU policies is the rapid development of a powerful new ‘interoperable’ European surveillance system that will be used for civilian, commercial, police, security and defence purposes alike.

Despite the oft en benign intent behind collaborative European ‘research’ into integrated land, air, maritime, space and cyber-surveillance systems, the EU’s security and R&D policy is coalescing around a high-tech blueprint for a new kind of security. It envisages a future world of red zones and green zones; external borders controlled by military force and internally by a sprawling network of physical and virtual security checkpoints; public spaces, micro-states and ‘mega events’ policed by high-tech surveillance systems and rapid reaction forces; ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘crisis management’ missions that make no operational distinction between the suburbs of Basra or the Banlieue; and the increasing integration of defence and national security functions at home and abroad.

It is not just a case of “sleepwalking into” or “waking up to” a “surveillance society”, as the UK’s Information Commissioner famously warned, it feels more like turning a blind eye to the start of a new kind of arms race, one in which all the weapons are pointing inwards. Welcome to the NeoConOpticon.

Ben Hayes, June 2009

• 1 Global Homeland Security 2009-2019, ASD reports, see: http://www.asdreports.com/shopexd.asp?ID=1442.
• 2 Hayes, B. (2006) Arming Big Brother: The EU’s Security Research
• 3 Waking up to a surveillance society, Information Commissioner’s Office Press Release, 2 November 2006, see: http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/pressreleases/2006/waking_up_to_a_surveillance_society.pdf.