Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/103039
I inside industry Security and the legacy of mega events For over 20 years Colin Bennett has been exploring issues of privacy. His latest book, Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega Events (www.security-games.com), looks at how public-private arrangements, technology and institutional motivation have led to government security practices. The professor with the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria recently spoke with Vanguard about the rise of the security-industrial complex in the context of the recent Olympic Games. Are you the Eisenhower of today? Are you saying that governments need to be careful about the influence, the power of the security-industrial complex? I didn't invent that term, "security-industrial complex," but since 9/11 in particular, the community of people who are concerned with this thing called "security" has increased dramatically all over the world. It's become more transnational, and the knowledge transfer has become more rapid, more efficient. And within that community are a set of assumptions about risk, about what security does and should mean, and which are very difficult to challenge from the outside, especially during a big event like an Olympic Games. It's very easy to say there's all kinds of economic motivations going on here; there clearly are. And there are important security challenges we need to take measures against. But it is also a political force in advanced industrial states and beyond, and a very powerful mechanism through which to think about security and technology. Have governments, and therefore citizens, become so baffled by the increased security requirements they think are necessary that privacy is becoming less important in their thinking? You have to have a lot of sympathy for governments. They know that if they are told about a potential risk, and nothing is done about it, then the consequences if something happens are absolutely catastrophic – from a political point of view, from an economic point of view, and so on – because security has become such a politicized issue. Concerning privacy, we shouldn't see this as a dichotomy. There is plenty of evidence that you can develop appropriate security measures without compromising privacy, but it's expensive. That's the problem...There are ways to achieve the security goals of law enforcement and our security interests, but at the same time protect the privacy of innocent people. The problem, however, is they tend to be expensive, time-consuming, and in times of fiscal restraint, difficult to recommend. What are the inter-agency, inter-governmental legacy aspects of these events. Do the relationships endure? I think institutional cooperation is one of the less-recognized legacies of these events. And to be fair, that's probably one of the positive things that occurs. Of course, one doesn't know exactly the level of information sharing that goes on between these agencies. What we saw in Vancouver, for example, is a recognition that whatever inter-agency cooperation 10 DECEMBER 2012/JANUARY 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com was occurring between federal-provincial, city-provincial, city-federal, and all three with the United States, sort of worked. There was no major incident. So if Vancouver or another Canadian city has to do this kind of thing again, you can draw on those lessons. And that's my point about the larger security industrial complex, that it is a community sharing its knowledge. These are not discrete events. Securing big event sites is a process. Does the perception of the threat become greater with each event? I think it's a very powerful assumption. But I don't know that it's true. A terrorist event anywhere in Britain, and not at an Olympic site, would have created an extraordinary disruption. It's not a linear progression, but it seems to be the trend. And you see plenty of examples where local cities say, right, we're getting an Olympic Games, we can get a new subway system out of this, but that subway system's got to be secure, so we're going to have to put some video cameras up, and so on. Those powerful motivations occur. And that's part of the legacy. Th aw T an m ex pr For the complete interview with Prof. Bennett, see www.canadiangovernmentexecutive.ca • IT investment: A time to buy 2013 could be the year of government IT procurement. Both the federal CIO, Corinne Charette, and the president of Shared Services Canada, Liseanne Forand, suggested as much during the annual Government Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC) in November. If the message of past GTEC conferences has been about the progress of consolidating the federal government's 43 email systems and 300 data centres as well as the move to a single, shared telecommunications infrastructure, this year's event marked the first discussion about procuring new IT systems. In a keynote address, Forand said that the work to date now provides an enterprise-wide view of the government's many systems, and will lead to a solicitation phase in 2013, with contracts to follow. Charette acknowledge vendor frustration with the rate of change but said the IT industry "will see more in next 12 months," and greater procurement opportunities in the next years. Earlier this year, Shared Services Canada conducted its first industry day on its Email Transformation Initiative, followed shortly by a request for information seeking industry feedback on the service delivery model for the initiative. Charette said the government would have an IT strategy in the coming months and would be seeking to make progress on open data, cloud computing and mobility. "Our modernization horizon is this decade," she said. • R a R a T t