Climate Change & the New Techno-Politics

CLIMATE CHANGE & THE NEW TECHNO-POLITICS

OF BORDEREXCLUSION & ZONE DENIAL

SteveWright
School of Applied Global Ethics
LeedsMetropolitanUniversity

1. INTRODUCTION

The UN has estimated that climate change will yield up to a billion people on the move, migrating both internally and across state lines. Many governments and researchers are concerned about the social and political implications of such massive migration. However few researchers are currently studying what the military has planned for such contingencies in terms of the ongoing revolution in military affairs.

In the last decade there has been increasing experimentation with
sub-lethal paralysing and maiming technologies for perimeter control and
area denial. These are based on a range of mechanisms including kinetic
energy, laser, microwave, chemical and biological systems and
electroshock. Very little has appeared in the media but substantial sums
of money, especially in the US, have been released for such programs.
Partially this has been to find a less lethal variant of the
anti-personnel land-mine, partially it has been to do with new military
doctrines to encompass targeting combatants and civilians together.
Increasingly the trend is to build algorithmic intelligence into such
systems to make them autonomous and such moves are consistent with other
emerging military doctrines on layered defence and so called “tunable lethality,” where a rheostatic capacity is sought to cause increasing levels of
physical damage and pain to any incursion into a control zone such as
borders.

The presentation will summarise the available technology, including weapons
available now such as taser mines; metal storm 1,000000 rounds per
minute virtual minefield mortars; projected lightening systems and the
Micro-millimetre Silent Guardian or Active Denial Systems as well as
innovations on the horizon such as the pulsed energy projectile,and
micro-encapsulation of calmatives and other paralysing technologies.
The presentation will show company literature of some of these
developments and their anticipated scenarios including armed unmanned
aerial vehicles programmed to "hunt" anyone entering a controlled zone.
The final part of the presentation will discuss Wright and Martin's
approaches to finding countermeasures to this technology both physical
and political, as we all enter a period where authoritarian states may
choose to "fix" their border control issues via technological rather
than legal or political or humane approaches. How can “research activists make a difference?

This work has come out of research undertaken at the PRAXIS Centre at Leeds metropolitan University, partially funded by a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Work is continuing and is being incorporated now into taught undergraduate and postgraduate peace and conflict courses at Leeds Met’s School of Applied Global Ethics (SAGE). This work will eventually be expanded as a research stream into the new Senator George Mitchell centre of Peace and Conflict Resolution currently under construction in LeedsCity centre. In the meantime a new group of experts has been assembled to examine the cutting edge of innovation in new chemical, biological and directed energy systems capable of causing human paralysisi and incapacitation: The Threshold Group, further detail of which is given below. At this stage some presentation work is being undertaken to share some of our concerns with other researchers in forums like this. Most of the material discussed here is already beyond prototype stage but there has been little effort to challenge the claims of the manufacturers or bring them within a more democratic frame of legal accountability. What follows is essentially a summary of recently published work on surviving climate change,[1] and work on making oppressive systems “backfire” that I have developed with Brian Martin and available on the web.[2]

2. CLIMATE CHANGE CONSEQUENCES & CONFLICT

Professor Dave Webb of LeedsMetropolitanUniversity’s Praxis centre and SAGE has summarised some of the scarier predictions of anticipated migration flows because of climate change in the recent Pluto Book on Surviving Climate Change. His cue comes from a 2003 Pentagon report written by peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network.[3] They depict a global catastrophe due to sudden but extreme weather changes over a relatively short timescale. These encompass both conflict in Europe over food and water supplies; border skirmishes in Bangladesh and floods of refugees from the Caribbean into South East US and Mexico by 2012. From 2020-2030, their predictions are much more dire with 10% of Euroepan populations moving to a different country. Deterioration of internal conditions within China leads to civil war. There are riots in India, South Africa and Indonesia Webb summarises “elsewhere, countries begin looking closely at their neighbours’ resources as they lose the ability to feed and care for their own populations. Along the Nile, Danube and Amazon, which serve large numbers of states, the possibility of conflict over war ersourecs increases. As the authors grimly put it, ‘humans fight when they outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment. Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid.’

Can we expect a benevolent response to such migration? Well ordinary people can respond with tremendous generosity when coming directly face to face with migrants who have suffered tremendous devastation. For example the spontaneous reactions of holiday makers in the Canary islands finding migrants from Africa washed up on beaches in recent years.

Indeed, there is a legal obligation of states to provide protection. According to Article 33 of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, 'No Contracting State shall expel or return ("refouler") a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.'

However, within Europe, huge 'Eurodac' databases have been set up to fingerprint every refugee to use this convention so that attempts to enter one EU country are prevented when another EU country previously refused permission (SEMDOC 2002). Rapid advances in computation technologies using eye and face recognition will enable such tracking to become algorithmic and 'official non-residents' could be effectively barcoded and electronically branded when passing through external and internal gateways. The ongoing ‘war against terror’ is yielding a fearful set of official responses which is geared more to exclusion than inclusion and if rapid migration was on the cards we can anticipate that many states will adopt fortress style approaches towards excluding them. A recent Christian Aid study suggests that the numbers involved could be gargantuan – up to 1 billion by 2050.[4]

With such scenarios, very few states will adopt benevolent approaches. We have essentially two choices to quickly adopt contract and converge strategies but Schwartz and Randall conclude that we may be beyond the tipping point already. The state focussed option is to securitize the social and political fallout through technical fixes by maintaining a public order rather than a humanitarian approach.

3. THE EMERGENT PHILOSOPHY OF TUNEABLE LETHALITY

In the recent Pluto publication I ask “How could military forces possibly deal with hundreds of thousands of refugees swarming over borders?” My answer is “Well, we know with the ending of the Cold War, attention has increasingly turned to Military Operations Other than War (MOUT). Some of this thinking has focussed on evolving a 2nd generation of incapacitating technology, hi-tech, lucrative and capable of industrialising repression.” It is worth presenting some of those conclusions for this audience:

“Post 9/1, US homeland security initiatives have rapidly encouraged new blue skies thinking from corporates, who see state security supplies as potentially one of the most rapid and profitable areas of growth in future defence markets. It has previously been argued that the impacts of some of the crowd control weapons in this burgeoning market are ‘tantamount to torture’ and that we are witnessing the beginnings of a new policy, using the macro-induction of pain to control both mass movement and large protests (Wright,2002; Amnesty,2003).The technologies discussed below include lethal electro-shock fences; automated sentry guns; taser mines which shoot out darts carrying 50,000 volts; optical and acoustic technologies; directed energy systems that project lightening at crowds or heat them up to unbearable temperatures; bio-chemical weapons which target specific human receptor sites to induce fear and terror; and energy projectiles which create a disabling shockwave by turning the water which surrounds our body as a by-product of metabolism, into plasma.

Amnesty International’s files are replete with cases involving push-button torture. Events at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, reveal a willingness to reverse the democratic consensus of more civilised nations and re-introduce torture as a government service. America’s will fight its ‘war against terror’, with new doctrines of ‘full spectrum dominance’ and novel strategies. These include notions such as ‘layered defence’ – a military doctrine which imagines it will be possible to produce a rheostat-like controlled violence from maiming at one end of the spectrum, to full scale ‘tuneable lethality’ at the other. What does this really mean?

Well, the emergent US doctrine assumes a layered battlefield, rather like an onion where bystanders and non-combatants are on the less-lethal outskirts and each layer becomes progressively more lethal to the centre where armed insurgents can be addressed with exclusively lethal force. We have new technologies (including allegedly ‘harmless’ non-lethal weapons using directed energy systems, chemical and biological agents, robotics, acoustic waves, microwave, laser and unmanned aerial vehicles), but how will the rationale affect real life outcomes? The assumptions are difficult to test.

The new technology includes directed energy weapons which have effects which can be increased in severity and yet as Dominique Loye of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has pointed out, in the context of hostile operations, the temptation for security forces will always be to use the maximum setting – otherwise how can they predict which maimed or dazed target still has the wherewithal to fire back? Even with the best intentions, experts at specialist security and border control conferences, tend to embody state security rather than human security perspectives. It is easy within this context to reframe “the threat“of the refugee issue from a matter of humanitarian assistance into proposals for a new techno-politics of exclusion.”

4. EXISTING IMMOBILIZING BORDER SECURITY TECHNOLOGIES

To summarise, “here are essentially two classes of immobilizing technologies, namely: (i) current off-the-shelf technologies which are already on the market and (ii) future variants of weaponry which do not exist in a commercial format. Some are passive or victim activated; others are active or victim seeking. Existing non-lethal border control technologies include the familiar razor wire barriers and electrified fences, (though some of these are now twin switched to provide a lethal option). Commercial off the shelf variants also include fences with semi-intelligent integral sensor technology, which detect an intrusion, report the proximity of people or vehicles and automatically alerts a central control or security guard.

More lethal variants are essentially the outlawed anti-personnel landmines (APL) which continue to infest border zones between Cambodia and Thailand, North & South Korea, the borders of India, Pakistan and Kashmir, to name but a few. This technology itself is changing, as companies attempt to get around the Ottawa anti-personnel landmine treaty of 1997, and seek markets desiring to retain some of the military utility of APL’s. Whilst 154 have signed up, 40 have not, including Russia, China and the USA.

New systems include the allegedly less-lethal claymore mine which is filled with rubber balls manufactured by companies such as (currently fitted to vehicles in Iraq as a modular crowd control munition); the taser mines (discussed below), area denial systems based on laser dazzlers and semi-intelligent mine networks such as the Matrix and the Spider. These last two can be switched on or off via a master unit increasing the uncertainty around whether an area is safe or not. The US has engaged in a substantial research programme to develop alternative mines. These include the Hornet Wide-Area Munition Product Improvement Program (WAM PIP) – a so called self-destructing mine system; the nonself-destructing alternative system, or NSD-A which has software which enables a man in the loop to switch a minefield on or off.[5] Such programmes will include both lethal and allegedly ‘non-lethal’ variants.[6]

There are differing perspectives on the safety of these hi-tech versions. At a Japanese Anti-Landmine conference I asked a high ranking US military officer and his diplomatic counterpart about their reliability. The diplomat was willing to take his family through a switched off or self-destructing minefield: the soldier said he valued his comrades too much.

Other lethal systems rely on victim seeking small arms. Examples include the US based Autaga Arms, which is a camera-mounted gun with some basic intelligence. The gun can be set on automatic or the camera used merely to set a safe distance between the weapon and firer.Another US Company, Precision Remotes produces a similar system which has both a ‘man-in-the-loop’ or an automatic capacity. A truly robotic sentry gun is slowly emerging and even garage inventors can see a big buck opportunity in this field of security[7].”

5. BORDER CONTROLS SYSTEMS ON THE HORIZON

(Wright and Martin 2006) identified at least eight new mechanisms for such immobilizing technologies including (i) taser anti-personnel mines; (ii) immobilizing nets; (iii)stickums’ and slickums; (iv)high powered microwaves;; (v)acoustic devices/vortex rings; (vi) ionizing and pulsed energy lasers; (vii) chemical calmatives, incapacitants, convulsants, bioregulators and malodurants; and (viii) robotic self-deciding vehicles. These technologies are roughly consistent with those being announced in recent Joint Non Lethal Weapons Program newsletters.[8]

Examining selected variants of weapons already considered for a future border control function, we find a range of companies pitching actual technologies or fielding the following prototypes:-

5.1 Taser anti-personnel minesA taser is an electroshock weapon. It delivers a high voltage, typically 50,000 volts, to the target, resulting in excruciating pain and a shutdown of major muscle groups, causing physicalcollapse. A typical weapon used in policing fires two darts at the target, with trailing wires.Once an electrical connection is made, the voltage is turned on, disabling the target even through clothing, with an extremely painful electrical shock. When a group of volunteers experienced the effect of a taser,only one was willing to accept exposure for the full five seconds before the voltage wasautomatically cut off, and not a single one volunteered for a second shock.The idea of the taser landmine is to arm a landmine not with an explosive but with a taser.A person triggering the mine would be hit by multiple taser darts and immobilised. The taser gives regular shocks over an extended period, up to an hour. A field of taser landminescould serve as a form of non-lethal border protection. An areawould be mined; a few guards would be available to arrest or release victims of the mines.

The turning point in this technology came when two US companies, Primex which was became General Dynamics) teamed with Tasertron which became Taser Technologies and successfully bid to the JNLWP for a Technology Insertion program (TIP).[9]

5.2 High powered microwaves These devices enable a pencil beam of microwave radiation to be focused on a human body atome distance. The result is near instant pain that can only be alleviated by moving out of the beam’s path.

At the time of writing this device is a mobile platform but it is not difficult to imagine suchtechnologies being deployed at borders in roving beam fashion. It has obvious countermeasures include either physical destruction of the device via someform of disruption, including rocks, or to mirror the beam back to source. The danger of suchresistance is that it is likely to provoke the deployment of more lethal technology. A more defensive technology might be to set up a water curtain spray (if water is readily available),because this would dissipate the directed energy into the water as heat. For individuals,aluminium foil blankets and mirror sunglasses afford some protection and could be used onvehicles too. A high-tech form of countermeasure might be the use of ‘microwave bridges’ toredirect the radiation back to source. However whilst such techno-jiu-jitsu devices areappealing in principle, without the ability to properly field-test such devices they are likely toremain the domain of government-funded countermeasure programmes – which alreadyinvestigating how to overcome such border control devices.