The chain of security

Abstract

Increasingly, private companies – including Twitter, airlines, and banks – find themselves in the frontline of fighting terrorism and other security threats, because they are obliged to mine and expel suspicious transactions. This analytical work of companies forms part of a chain, whereby transactions data are analysed, collected, reported, shared, and eventually deployed as a basis for intervention by police and prosecution. This article develops the notion of theChain of Securityin order to conceptualise the ways in which security judgements are made across public/private domains and on the basis of commercial transactions. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this article understands the security chain as the set of practices whereby commercial transactions are collected, stored, transferred, and analysed, in order to arrive at security facts. Understanding the trajectory of the suspicious transaction as a series of translations across professional domains draws attention to the processes of sequencing, movement, and referral in the production of security judgements. The article uses the chain of financial suspicious transactions reporting as example to show how this research ‘thinking tool’ can work. In doing so, it aims to contribute to debates at the intersection between International Relations (IR) and Science-and-Technology Studies (STS).

Taking the trouble: science, technology and security studies

“…On an empirical level, the contributions demonstrate how STS allows scholars to identify and make visible security issues that are often not part of a traditional CSS research agenda (such as jellyfish!). On a methodological level, the collection highlights the value of object-driven research that bring us into contact with the multiple actors, devices and practices that constitute contemporary security policies (Amicelle, Aradau, and Jeandesboz 2015;de Goede 2018;Salter 2015Salter , 2016. In turn, these encounters require security scholars to embark upon a transdisciplinary path, where the exchange between STS and CSS may be just one step of many.…”

Circumventing Sovereignty: Extraterritorial Sanctions Leveraging the Technologies of the Financial System

“…Operational risk management builds on a number of additional technological instruments that enable and support the comprehensive observation of all business activities. Apart from the managerial technology of systematically exposing business activities to rationalisation in terms of operational risk itself, screening technologies are the backbone of such risk management (De Goede 2018). Manual screening routines enshrined in KYC (‘know your client’) procedures and due diligence requirements subject transactions and client relationships to (operational) risk‐based information gathering and examination by bank personnel, including highly specialized compliance officers.…”

Moving on withsaudade: On bordered countries and vague terms

“…But the binary division has also attracted criticism. Some criticize the migrant/refugee divide for neglecting ‘internally displaced people’ (Cohen, 2007), for helping less to protect people than to sustain bureaucracy (Scalletaris, 2007) and for making migration sound opportunistic or even criminal (De Goede, 2018; Huysmans, 2006). Yet others ask whether this binary divide makes sense: in short, they note ‘there is no clear border between mobility that is forced or voluntary, driven by economic drives or by fear of persecution’ (Scheel & Squire, 2014) and that this is better understood as a continuum (Casas-Cortes et al, 2015).…”