Persuasive summary of the key issues supporting your decision

CAN:

"Feasibility"

SHOULD: "Making the

Case"

Persuasive summary of the key issues supporting your decision to support or reject the legislation. This is where you as a political leader speak to the heart.

Explaining why this is worthy of being focused on by your party (in light of what the party is trying to accomplish in Congress)

Make the case knowing that you might be making enemies for supporting (or opposing) this piece of legislation

Politics is a battle of ideas and agendas—how are you going to make the case knowing that you might make enemies, and knowing that if your party leadership focuses on your legislation, it might mean that someone else's agenda will be stymied?

MAY: “Authority”

 Is the piece of legislation supported by Biblical principles?

 Is the piece of legislation in keeping with the enumerated powers listed in the Constitution?

Political Feasibility: Does the bill have a chance of passing the House and Senate and being signed by the President? What public opinion polls are relevant?

Financial Feasibility: How much would the legislation cost, particularly in light of current budget constraints? What impact would there be on the economy?

Practical Feasibility: what are the key hurdles for implementing this legislation in terms of timing, logistics, resources, and technology? As a lawmaker, you have to anticipate those challenges in order to weigh the merits of the legislation.

Running head: H. R. 312 1

H.R. 312 “The Mars Exploration Act”

Kahlib J. Fischer

February 11, 2015

PADM 550-B01

Dr. Kahlib Fischer

H.R. 312 2

Defining the Problem

Space exploration has been limited since the moon landing to space station visits and the

deployment of the Hubble telescope and satellites (2015). In 2012, President Obama signed into

law H.R. 312, “The Mars Exploration Act” (2012). This bill provides funding for the

development and deployment of: 1) the “rovers”; 2) deep space transportation for humans; and 3)

laboratory and housing facilities on Mars (Robinson & Smith, 2012).

May

Biblical guidelines: Of course, the Bible says nothing about space exploration. Government is

charged primarily with protecting the inalienable rights of its citizens (Fischer). HR 312 does

not violate these rights. The Biblical notion of “sphere sovereignty” implies that there are other

spheres of society, such as non-profits and industry, which might be considered as participants in

space exploration (Monsma, 2008). In the past, space exploration has been linked to national

defense, for fear that other nations would gain the upper-hand in space and use that advantage

against American citizens (Neuhaus, 2012). Since government has a divine mandate to protect

its citizens, space exploration might be supported.

Constitutional guidelines: The “common defense” portion of the preamble supports passage of

this bill. Article 1 section 8 provides further points of support: the promotion of science and

progress, the development of a sound military, and the regulation of commerce with foreign

nations.

Can

Political Feasibility: Generally, the public favors further mars exploration and colonization

(Smith, 2014). The passage of the bill was largely bi-partisan, but a significant Republican

minority tried to block passage arguing that the funding was not present for the bill and that the

H.R. 312 3

President was merely doing this to distract from criticism of his health care legislation and other

scandals (Neuhaus, 2012). Since passage, some experts have argued that Mars colonization is

not obtainable as NASA is currently constructed and has argued for either repeal of HR 312 or

significant modification (Richards, 2015).

Financial feasibility: Total cost of the bill was estimated at $20.5 billion, according to the

Congressional Budget Office (“H.R. 312”). At the time of passage, Democrats and Republicans

were grappling with the debt ceiling crisis (Barnes, 2011).

Practical feasibility: The bill was set up to fund NASA efforts for Mars exploration over 20

years. The major challenge was the development of sufficiently fast and safe space travel for

humans (Geyer, 2012). Rovers have been sent to Mars, so, in effect, Phase 1 has been achieved.

Significant challenges exist for phases 2 and 3, however, as NASA grapples with developing the

proper technology for long-term space exploration and colonization (Richards, 2015).

Should

HR 312 passes the May portion of the analysis, with the caveat that government should allow for

business and non-profit participation. The Can portion of the analysis is more challenging,

simply because of current levels of deficit spending in the federal government as well as the

technological challenges. Nevertheless, HR 312 represents a legitimate area for government

involvement. Space exploration, if not simply for the sake of military defense, should continue

and thus government must be involved. We are not able to choose ideal times for something as

lofty and abstract as space exploration; yet it must remain a national priority.

H.R. 312 4

References

Barnes, A. (2011). The Debt ceiling crisis. National Review Online. Retrieved from

http://www.nro.com/dc_13

Fischer, K. Biblical principles of government [PDF document]. Retrieved from Lecture Notes

Online website: https://learn.liberty.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-6267706-dt-content-rid-

43218699_1/courses/PADM550_B01_201520/Biblical%20Principles%20of%20Govern

ment%281%29.pdf

Geyer, A. (2012). To mars and beyond. Space. 15(1), 52-56. doi:10.1108/03090560710821161

H.R. 312 (2012). The Mars Exploration Act. Congressional Budget Office. Retrieved from

www.cbo.gov.HR312.

Monsma, S. (2008). Healing for a broken world. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Neuhaus, J. (2012). Mars madness. Space Exploration. Retrieved from

http://www.spaceex.com/mmhr312

Richards, D. (2015). The Mars question. Journal of Science and Politics, 10(2), 38-42. Retrieved

from http://www.jsp.org

Robinson, J. & Smith, B. (2012). What does HR 312 mean for the future of space exploration?

Journal of Science and Politics, 4(2), 3-12. doi:10.1108/988890560710821161

Sires, D. (2015, October 9). Has NASA lost its way? Popular Science, 8, 27-29.

Smith, R. (2014). Does the public even care? Space Exploration. Retrieved from

http://www.spaceex.com/pubhr312

Politics and Governance (ISSN: 2183–2463) 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages 5–12

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v6i2.1335

Article

Privatizing Political Authority: Cybersecurity, Public-Private Partnerships, and the Reproduction of Liberal Political Order

Daniel R. McCarthy

School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, 3051 Melbourne, Australia; E-Mail: [email protected]

Submitted: 30 December 2017 | Accepted: 28 February 2018 | Published: 11 June 2018

Abstract Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of public security concerns about critical infrastructure protection and private secu- rity concerns around the protection of property rights and civil liberties. Public-private partnerships have been embraced as the best way to meet the challenge of cybersecurity, enabling cooperation between private and public sectors to meet shared challenges. While the cybersecurity literature has focused on the practical dilemmas of providing a public good, it has been less effective in reflecting on the role of cybersecurity in the broader constitution of political order. Unpacking three accepted conceptual divisions between public and private, state and market, and the political and economic, it is possible to locate how this set of theoretical assumptions shortcut reflection on these larger issues. While public-private partnerships overstep boundaries between public authority and private right, in doing so they reconstitute these divisions at another level in the organization of political economy of liberal democratic societies.

Keywords capitalism; critical infrastructure protection; critical theory; cybersecurity; public-private partnerships

Issue This article is part of the issue “Global Cybersecurity: NewDirections in Theory andMethods”, edited by Tim Stevens (King’s College London, UK).

© 2018 by the author; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY).

1. Introduction

The politics of infrastructure are central to the gover- nance of modern societies. Large Technical Systems (LTS) shape all aspects of our everyday lives, in ways both visi- ble and hidden. The ubiquity of infrastructures and their capacity tomediate relations between different social ac- tors demand careful analytical attention and the develop- ment of conceptual frameworks appropriate to capture the complex social, political and economic processes that drive their development and reproduction. As a practi- cal political issue this task is important; clarifying where the power to shape modern life lies is central to under- standing how our world is made, illuminating issues of political and moral responsibility that surround the poli- tics of technology.

As this thematic issuemakes clear, studies of cyberse- curity require further theoretical and conceptual ground- clearing to produce these insights. By and large, the lit-

erature on critical infrastructure protection and cyber- security has remained within a problem-solving frame- work, in which the existing social order forms the back- ground premises within which a problem is posed (Cox, 1981; Dunn Cavelty, 2013, p. 106). The provision of cyber- security has been studied within a relatively narrow set of assumptions, with questions central to security stud- ies, and politics more broadly, circumscribed. This is par- ticularly evident in the literature on public-private part- nerships (PPPs) as a route to the provision of cybersecu- rity in liberal democracies. Building on an emerging lit- erature that seeks to sharpen the analytical focus of an often vague or underspecified set of issues (Carr, 2016; Dunn Cavelty, 2014), the starting point for this article is a rather simple question: what is cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection for?

Answering this question, while not straightforward, can be clarified by problematising a set of common- sense assumptions apparent within studies of PPPs

Politics and Governance, 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages 5–12 5

about how political life can and should be organized. The literature on cybersecurity and critical infrastructure pro- tection needs to be theoretically ‘deepened’ to clarify a broader grasp of what cybersecurity is for, and to high- light potential political alternatives. Considering what cy- bersecurity is for requiresmoving beyond a narrow issue- specific focus to consider how cybersecurity practices re- late to existing social formations. To foreshadow the ar- gument developed below, the central move in this arti- cle is an interrogation of the conceptual separation of the political and the economic, and its related binaries of public/private and state/market, in the field of cyber- security. Once we being to question the seeming natural- ness of this divide it becomes possible to articulate the wider stakes of cybersecurity with greater clarity.

This article will proceed as follows. First, it will set out the dominant approach that views cybersecurity as a public good, and thereby frames its provision as a col- lective action problem. The United States will serve as the empirical referent point. Understood in these terms, everyone benefits from cybersecurity. Second, it will dis- cuss the conceptual binaries, noted above, that form the starting point for these analyses. These sections will dis- cuss how the assumption of state autonomy in collec- tive action models underpins the conceptual divisions between public and private, state and market, and pol- itics and economics. Schematic in nature, these sections nevertheless draw attention to a series of problematic theoretical assumptions around these binaries. Finally, it will argue that assuming a division between these var- ious spheres of social life obscures the role of PPPs in (re)producing the specific forms of liberal political order. PPPs are a method of collaboration designed to repro- duce the privatization of political power that character- izes modern liberal capitalist society. This article thereby contributes a growing literature seeking to clarify how relations of power and accountability operate in cyber- security PPPs, outlining the limits liberalism itself sets on making certain forms of social power accountable.

2. Public-Private Partnerships, Public Goods, and Problem Solving Theories

Provision of security, physical or otherwise, is classically the function of the state. Whether applied to national security or domestic policing, in modern liberal capitalist societies it is the state that has been tasked to carry out these duties. So central is the state to the provision of se- curity that the shift away from this liberal norm, evident in the greater use of private military and security con- tractors (PMSCs) globally, has generated substantial an- alytical and political attention (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2010; Avant, 2005). Privatizing the provision of security has generated concern around private firms’ potential conflicts of interests, with PMSCs accountable to both public authorities and their shareholders.

Cybersecurity, by contrast, does not centre on the pri- vatization of existing security functions. Concerns about

the outsourcing of cybersecurity are largely misplaced; states are not contracting out security functions to the private sector, and thus security is not being privatized in the same manner as it is for other security issues (Eichensehr, 2017, pp. 471–473; cf. Carr, 2016). Cyber- security and critical infrastructure protection policies at- tempt to secure infrastructures owned by both the pub- lic and private sectors. The objects of protection in this space—from critical infrastructures to information and data—are overwhelmingly in private hands, with over 90% of critical infrastructures in the United States owned by the private sector (Singer & Friedman, 2014, p. 19). This includes hardware and software infrastructures as they extend inside the homes of ordinary Americans; cur- rent estimates place internet penetration rates at 88%, an indication of how broadly the problem of cybersecu- rity extends (Pew Research Center, 2017). Cybersecurity requires private citizens, corporations, and the state to contribute to the provision of security for the networks on which they depend. Indeed, successive American ad- ministrations have stressed this point, emphasizing the need for ‘awareness raising’ to promote better ‘cyber hy- giene’, using public health metaphors to emphasize the shared nature of the challenge (Stevens & Betz, 2013; United States Department of Homeland Security, 2017).

Cybersecurity, like national security more broadly, thereby appears to have the character of a public good: it is non-rivalrous and non-excludable (Assaf, 2008, p. 13; Shore, Du, & Zeadally, 2011). Rational choice approaches to politics suggest that public goods should be provided by the state, as private actors incentive structure pushes them to free ride, inducing market failure. However, state provision of cybersecurity is not a straightforward option. Dunn Cavelty and Suter (2009, p. 179) high- light the contradictions at the heart of critical infrastruc- ture protection:

[Privatization policies] have put a large part of the crit- ical infrastructure in the hands of private enterprise. This creates a situation in which market forces alone are not sufficient to provide security in most of the CI [Critical Infrastructure] ‘sectors’. At the same time, the state is incapable of providing the public good of security on its own, since overly intrusive market in- tervention is not a valid option either; the same in- frastructures that the state aims to protect due to na- tional security considerations are also the foundation of the competitiveness and prosperity of a nation.

The problem for governments is how to provide the pub- lic good of cybersecurity in a context in which interven- tion in economic decision-making presents its own dis- tinct risks. Caught between the Scylla of market failure in cybersecurity provision and the Charybdis of state planning, policymakers face a difficult decision: too lit- tle intervention and the required public good will not be provided; but too much and other facets of national security are undermined. Navigating these dilemmas is

Politics and Governance, 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages 5–12 6

thereby understood as the central political task faced by policymakers.

PPPs present themselves as an effective middle way, allowing the state to engage in ex ante decisions regard- ing cybersecurity outcomes in careful consultation with the private sector. This combination of planning with market-led flexibility is embraced by policymakers as a central rationale for promoting PPPs (United States Na- tional Science and Technology Council, 2011). While co- operation is not straightforward, there are shared inter- ests at work here, even if the precise motivations behind those interests are distinct. As Eichensehr notes, cooper- ation allows government to control public expenditure costs and avoid private sector interference with crucial state functions, while helping the private sector secure its intellectual property and, relatedly, its business repu- tation (Carr, 2016, p. 55; Eichensehr, 2017, pp. 500–504).

The devil is, of course, in the details.Working out how to make these partnerships function effectively, both in the United States and elsewhere, has been the focus of sustained analysis (Carr, 2016; Givens & Busch, 2013; Harknett & Stever, 2011). Analysis revolves around de- termining the institutional forms, policy processes, and levels of state intervention through which PPPs canmost effectively provide security. These problems have been largely (but not exclusively) understood as collective ac- tion problems—everyone has an interest in the provi- sion of cybersecurity, but everyone also has an incen- tive to free ride if possible. Solutions to these problems seek ways to alter these incentive structures through, for instance, institutions designed to share information, such as the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Information Sharing and Collaboration Programme (CISCP), or via the creation of trust build- ing mechanisms between firms and between firms and the state.

Practical and normative questions are inevitably raised when considering PPPs in cybersecurity, in keep- ing with the broader literature on PPPs (Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2011; Linder, 1999). Defining the scope of private sector authority and responsibility for cybersecu- rity, particularly as it impacts upon other aspects of na- tional security such as intelligence collection, has gener- ated both policy-centred proposals, such as those noted above, and more abstract reflection on the appropri- ate level of political authority assumed by private actors. Practically, it has involved attempts to parse apart the re- sponsibilities of different sets of cybersecurity actors in order to develop clear rules around the scope of respon- sibility for the public and private sector. Understanding who has power to affect change, and how this occurs, is important for this task.

Normative discussion has focused upon issues of po- litical authority and accountability. This last aspect be- gins to hint at the larger political issues posed by PPPs as a solution to cybersecurity provision. Carr (2016, p. 60) notes that ‘If responsibility and accountability can be de- volved to private actors, the central principle that polit-

ical leaders and governments are held to account is un- dermined’. Aswith the literature on PMSCs, concern over the conflicting interests of private firms has led analysts to caution against any easy recourse to market-led cyber- security frameworks (Assaf, 2008; Carr, 2016, p. 62). Mul- tiple lines of accountability may, it is suggested, under- mine the responsiveness of PPPs to the public.

Steps in this direction are important to deepening the study of cybersecurity. Yet, to date, this not resulted in consideration of how cybersecurity policies relate to political order. Questions of where political responsibil- ity can and should lie—with the state, the private sec- tor, or a combination of these—are constituted by the specific institutional order of modern liberal capitalism and its attendant social imaginaries. Accepting a series of divisions between the private and the public, the state and the market, and the political and the economic lim- its our view of how these options are produced and re- produced. Achieving a more holistic view of the relation- ship between cybersecurity practices and political order requires ‘deepening’ our approach to cybersecurity. It is to this task that we now turn.

3. Security for Whom? Deepening Cybersecurity Studies

Often confused with a ‘levels-of-analysis’ problem, in which identifying the object of security as either the in- dividual, state, or international system is the central fo- cus, deepening security studies requires embedding the study of securitywithin amore fundamental political the- ory, from which concerns about ‘security’ and its opera- tion are derived (Booth, 2007, p. 157). In Booth’s (2007, p. 155) terms, ‘Deepening, therefore,means understand- ing security as an epiphenomenon, and so accepting the task of drilling down to explore its origins in the most basic question of political theory’. Drilling down in this context requires that we examine the fundamental as- sumptions about politics as they exist in the literature on PPPs in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure pro- tection. Three conceptual divisions structure this litera- ture and its subsequent analysis of cybersecurity: (1) the distinction between the public and private and subse- quently, (2) between states and markets; (3) the division between public political power and private economic power generated by the separation of the political and the economic in liberal capitalist societies.

First, and most obviously, the literature on PPPs and critical infrastructure protection and cybersecurity ac- cepts, as its analytical starting point, the division be- tween the public and the private in liberal societies. Viewing PPPs as requisite to grapple with complex gov- ernance challenges has been described as a ‘truism’ (Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2011, p. 2). Like most tru- isms, however, it is revealing for the truth-conditions it contains. For the most part the nature of this divide, its historical constitution, and the role that it plays in structuring an historically specific form of political or-

Politics and Governance, 2018, Volume 6, Issue 2, Pages 5–12 7

der are not considered.1 This is not to suggest that the shifting divides between greater public or greater pri- vate involvement in the management of critical infras- tructure and information technologies is ignored. Privati- zation of telecommunications and critical infrastructure protection often forms the background to analysis of the present (e.g. Carr, 2016; Dunn Cavelty, 2013). This offers an important insight, one ignored in themost straightfor- ward problem solving approaches. Nevertheless, these potted histories trace vacillations in the scope of pub- lic or private governance, not the constitution of these divisions as they are embedded within liberal order as such. Taking the existing division between the public and the private as given, much of the cybersecurity litera- ture treats the public-private divide in the register of problem-solving theory, in Cox’s (1981, p. 129) sense: it takes the world as it is and seeks to make it work as smoothly as possible. This allows for a fine-grained anal- ysis of specific problems, as this literature has demon- strated, but at the cost of a more holistic considera- tion of how cybersecurity policies relate to, and help (re)produce, forms of political order writ large.

In conceptualizing cybersecurity and critical infras- tructure protection as a public good the analytical accep- tance of the division between the public and the private is already operative. This becomes apparent when we consider how the state is viewed in these frameworks. Analyses of PPPs, particularly those derived from a ra- tional choice perspective, often treat the state as a uni- tary actor (Christensen & Petersen, 2017; Dunn Cavelty & Suter, 2009, p. 181; cf. Givens & Busch, 2013). Seem- ingly innocuous, conceptualizing the state as a unitary ac- tor carries with it a series of analytical implications. First, the state is distinguished from other actors in, for exam- ple, American society; it is one actor among a field of ac- tors, each with their own aims and purposes.2 The state and other actors in civil society thereby appear to be ex- ternally related to each other; as we shall see, this un- derstanding of the state can only partially grasp the re- lationship between states and markets. Second, suggest- ing that there are clearly defined boundaries between state and society implies that the interests of the state are derived from its position as a state as such, rather than from its embeddedness within a society whose so- cial forces shapes it policies.

This view of state and society makes it difficult to understand the purposes of cybersecurity PPPs. Treat- ing the state as distinct from society lends itself to func- tionalist treatments. Functionalism portrays the aims of state policy as pre-given by its social function; the pur- pose of the state is to provide the conditions for the re- production of social order. In the literature on PPPs the state is assumed to play this functional role in social or- ganization in that its purpose is to provide public goods.

That is, the role of the state is the generic provision of public goods, to the benefit of society as a whole (Dunn Cavelty, 2014; cf. Carnoy, 1984, pp. 39–40; Olson, 1971, pp. 98–102). Whereas other concepts of th

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