The Homeland Security Dilemma: Imagination, Failure and the Escalating Costs of Perfecting Security
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract.Besieged by insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq and gripped by mounting pressure to enhance security and public safety at home, officials in Washington and Ottawa are now confronted with a serious homeland security dilemma: the greater the financial costs, public sacrifice and political capital invested in security, the higher the public's expectations and corresponding standards for measuring performance, the more significant the public's sense of insecurity after each failure, and, paradoxically, the higher the pressure on governments and citizens to sacrifice even more to achieve perfect security. The paradox of security dilemmas at the international level (Jervis, 1976, 1978) explains why perfectly rational decisions to enhance power actually diminish security by promoting unstable spirals in competitive defence spending—a common account of escalating military budgets throughout much of the Cold War. The homeland security dilemma represents the post-9/11 equivalent for domestic politics in the war on terrorism. The paper's central argument can be summed up by the following counterintuitive thesis:the more security you have, the more security you will need, not because enhancing security makes terrorism more likely (although the incentive for terrorists to attack may increase as extremists feel duty bound to demonstrate their ongoing relevance), but because enormous investments in security inevitably raise public expectations and amplify public outrage after subsequent failures. Résumé.Assaillies par des insurrections en Afghanistan et en Irak et bousculées par la pression de plus en plus grande d'améliorer le système de sécurité publique à l'intérieur du pays, les autorités de Washington et d'Ottawa se trouvent confrontées à un sérieux dilemme en ce qui concerne la sécurité intérieure : plus les coûts financiers, les sacrifices publics et le capital politique investis dans la sécurité sont importants, plus les attentes du public et les standards de mesure du rendement correspondants sont élevés, plus le sentiment général d'insécurité augmente après chaque échec, et, paradoxalement, plus la pression sur les gouvernements et les citoyens de faire des sacrifices encore plus lourds pour parvenir à une parfaite sécurité s'intensifie. Le paradoxe du dilemme sécuritaire au niveau international (Jervis, 1976, 1978) explique pourquoi des décisions parfaitement rationnelles prises pour renforcer le pouvoir réduisent en fait la sécurité en encourageant des spirales instables de dépenses militaires concurrentielles—voir l'escalade des budgets militaires pendant la guerre froide. Le dilemme de la sécurité intérieure en est l'équivalent en politique nationale, depuis le 11 septembre, dans le contexte de la guerre contre le terrorisme. L'argument principal de cet article peut se résumer par la thèse contre-intuitive qui suit : plus on a de sécurité, plus il en faut. Pas parce que le renforcement de la sécurité rend le terrorisme plus probable (bien que la motivation des terroristes risque de s'exaspérer quand les extrémistes se sentent obligés de démontrer que leur pertinence perdure), mais parce que des investissements massifs dans la sécurité augmentent inévitablement les attentes et que l'opinion se scandalise encore davantage de tout échec subséquent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".