‘It was one of the worst things I've seen in my lifetime’, commented Carlton Brown, a commodities broker, about what he witnessed on 11 September 2001. ‘All I could think about was getting them the hell out’, he says. ‘Before the building collapsed, all we could think about was, let's get those clients out’. Out of the buildings about to collapse, presumably? No: Brown was concerned about clients becoming trapped in the gold market, which he knew would close once the World Trade Center towers collapsed. As the planes were hitting the towers ‘the first thing you thought about was “Well, how much is gold up?”’. As fortune would have it, he adds, ‘in the next couple of days we got them all out’. And fortune really was smiling at some people that day, because ‘everybody doubled their money’. So for some people 11 September 2001 turned out to be a real ‘blessing in disguise’. ‘Devastating, you know, crushing, heart-shattering. But … for my clients that were in the [gold] market, they all made money’, he says. ‘In devastation there is opportunity. It's all about creating wealth.’

In devastation there is opportunity. And since one of the things supposedly devastated on that day was the established notion of security, the outcome of which has been the launching of a new global war in the name of ‘national security’, perhaps there is also opportunity in security.