Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘The supreme concept of bourgeois society’: liberalism and the technique of security
- 2 Emergency? What emergency?
- 3 From social to national security: on the fabrication of economic order
- 4 Security, identity, loyalty
- 5 The Company and the Campus
- Notes
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘The supreme concept of bourgeois society’: liberalism and the technique of security
- 2 Emergency? What emergency?
- 3 From social to national security: on the fabrication of economic order
- 4 Security, identity, loyalty
- 5 The Company and the Campus
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The forces of law and order have to be reminded about life and its sanctity. Don't let the bastards off the hook. They try to act like we arenay real live human beings. They arenay trained in seeing us properly, us people I am talking about, these Security fuckers man it is trained out of them.
James Kelman, You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004)On 4 August 1999, the Atlanta Journal reported that a flight from Atlanta to Turkey the previous day had been prevented from taking off by the FBI, with all 241 passengers forced to leave the plane. A huge ‘security operation’ then ensued: passengers questioned; luggage unloaded and matched to passengers; the plane searched by humans and dogs; one man detained. The reason for all this was that the detained man was thought to be ‘a potential threat to national security’. And the reason he was thought to be a potential threat to security was that the man, who was eventually released, had paid for his ticket in cash. A few years later, following the introduction of yet more stringent ‘security measures’ as part of the global ‘war on terror’, a woman was arrested under the UK Prevention of Terrorism Act for walking on a public cycle path in the harbour area of Dundee. The official reason given for the arrest was that ‘the woman was in a secure area which forbids people walking’, and so she was ‘seen as a security risk’, although the authorities conceded that if she had been on a bike security would not have been threatened.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Critique of Security , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008