Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things : The Politics of Infrastructure Security

Summary An examination of how post-9/11 security concerns have transformed the public view and governance of infrastructure. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. After September 11, 2001, infrastructures—the mundane systems that undergird much of modern life—were suddenly considered “soft targets” that required immediate security enhancements. Infrastructure protection quickly became the multibillion dollar core of a new and expansive homeland security mission. In this book, Ryan Ellis examines how the long shadow of post-9/11 security concerns have remade and reordered infrastructure, arguing that it has been a stunning transformation. Ellis describes the way workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others used the threat of terrorism as a political resource, taking the opportunity not only to address security vulnerabilities but also to reassert a degree of public control over infrastructure. Nearly two decades after September 11, the threat of terrorism remains etched into the inner workings of infrastructures through new laws, regulations, technologies, and practices. Ellis maps these changes through an examination of three U.S. infrastructures: the postal system, the freight rail network, and the electric power grid. He describes, for example, how debates about protecting the mail from anthrax and other biological hazards spiraled into larger arguments over worker rights, the power of large-volume mailers, and the fortunes of old media in a new media world; how environmental activists leveraged post-9/11 security fears over shipments of hazardous materials to take on the rail industry and the chemical lobby; and how otherwise marginal federal regulators parlayed new mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric power industry into a robust system of accountability. "In the long-shadow of September 11, 2001, infrastructures have undergone a significant reorganization. Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things examines how new fears and worries over security have transformed the material and social outlines of infrastructure. The book follows three infrastructures-the postal system, freight rail, and the electric power system-and documents the subtle and explicit changes that have remade these systems. The book places the rise of "critical infrastructure protection"-a buzzword, a governing logic, and a multi-billion dollar funding priority-within a larger historical framework. Drawing from thousands of pages of regulatory filings, court documents, and other governmental documents, the book pieces together a larger story about risk and infrastructure. It identifies the political origins of infrastructure vulnerability-demonstrating how decades of political and economic restructuring ("deregulation") created system that were both politically unaccountable and vulnerable to systemic failure; and it examines how a cross-section of actors-including workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others-attempted to leverage new fears about infrastructure danger into reinvigorated systems of public accountability. Put another way, it examines the social and technical processes that made infrastructure dangerous; and then follows the ways in which these "dangerous things" were made safe and secure. The book offers a reminder that infrastructures always order they organize different publics, uses, ideas about what and who a system is for, into a tentative hierarchy. And security presents an opportunity to revisit and in some case remake these orders. The book provides a window into how infrastructures are made and remade sometimes in surprising and contradictory ways"-- Provided by publisher Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 5 1. Stumbling toward Resilience: The Overlooked Virtues of Regulation 33 2. The Political Origins of Infrastructure Vulnerability: The Hidden Vices of Deregulation 89 3. Imagination Unbound: Risk, Politics, and Post-9/11 Anxiety 139 4. Infected Mail: Labor, Commerce, and the 2001 Anthrax Attacks 165 5. Green Security: The Environmental Movement, the Transportation of Hazardous Materials, and the War on Terror 185 6. Regulating Cybersecurity: The Unexpected Remaking of Electric Power 209 Conclusion: The Politics of Critical Infrastructure Protection 239 Notes 253 Introduction 253 Chapter 1 257 Chapter 2 276 Chapter 3 296 Chapter 4 304 Chapter 5 310 Chapter 6 318 Coda 325 Bibliography 329 Index 353