NickBlack.com

In thinking about the possible military response to the increasing mass migrations from failing states it’s not necessary to invoke science fiction scenarios. It’s closer than you think. The infrastructure for military government is already well established in most of the West. Well before rafts of Somalis were drifting across the Mediterranean annoying sunbathers and the Italian Coastguard, police tactics and surveillance were becoming ever more military. There is more surveillance in Britain on a daily basis than the Stasi or KGB dreamed of in their wildest flights of authoritarian fancy. Estimates run at over 4 million cameras. There are 32 within sight of George Orwell’s flat in Canonbury Square. As Open Europe’s recent paper “How Brussels is watching you – the rise of Europe’s surveillance state” makes plain, Europe is in the process of following Britain’s lead, and no democratically elected body has the right to veto it.

Another aspect of this militarization is the rise of SWAT, that is to say Special Weapons and Tactics, policing. SWAT began in Delano, California as a response to protests by Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Union. It’s interesting that this was a response to what was essentially a migration issue: the treatment of Mexican farm workers. SWAT teams are now taken for granted all across America and, although the acronym SWAT isn’t used, increasingly the same squads are in place in Europe. It is now routine for members of these police teams to be trained by and with members of special forces, including Delta Force and SEALS. Of course it is a natural career choice for those leaving those same parts of the armed services. Never mind for the moment the rise of private ‘executive security’ – I don’t mean the fat guy in uniform standing at the door of the supermarket. I mean Blackwater (now Xe, LLC), ESTS, etc. These are the same guys. There is a vast informal network of former special forces personnel employed in all these organizations. You think they didn’t keep each other’s email and phone numbers when they left the service? The lines that have traditionally separated soldiering and policing have now all but disappeared.

The third arm of this militarization is a function of computing. Before the advent of the network and the titanic server farms that store petabytes of data it was simply impossible to collect and analyse data on the scale necessary to implement a database state. Yes, it’s true the Stasi was credited with having nearly 100 miles of files, but it was a scrapbook compared to what Google can do, never mind the NSA. For example, there seems to be little information published on the byte size of the UK DNA database, NDNAD, but it is said to hold the records of 5 million people, or 7% of the population. Perhaps most impressive is the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s World Trace Archive database of all the DNA sequences published by the science community. In January 2006 it hit a billion records, was 22 terabytes and doubling every 10 months, so I assume it’s getting pretty big by now. You get the idea.

The point here is not that databases are by definition part of some global conspiracy, but that they allow previously unimagined levels of personal data to be held by governments and corporations, neither of which have a particularly great record in this regard. In the UK, this week’s news is that millions of phone contract records were stolen and sold to rival mobile phone companies, by employees of T-Mobile. The list of incompetent or dishonest data security breaches is legendary. But it is now past the point of recall. Privacy is history and it would be idiotic to assume that should a more military government come to power under the pressures of resource shortages, depression and climate chaos, it would not seek to use databases for its own purposes.

So the answer to two of the questions posed in my last post seem to be straightforward. What kind of government does that call for? Probably more military than we imagine right now. What does it look like and how would it happen? It looks remarkably similar to life now, and all it takes is some ‘emergency’ – whether it is from terrorism or economics or climate is irrelevant. The infrastructure is there: the combination of surveillance, combat policing and the database state form the critical technological triumvirate for an emerging military response to ecologically driven mass migration.

The third question, ‘at what point are people scared enough of the influx to want what is essentially a military government?’ is not quite so easy.