Tags: Pre-crime strategy, Proactivity, Pre-emption, Prevention, Precaution, Profiling, Prediction, & Privacy

To monitor the future, to colonise it in the name of specific knowledge and know-how coming from computer science, criminology, psychology, and military/police security industries is presented as an optimum management of risk by the managers and the transnational guild of professionals of (in)security. Some researchers consider that it leads us to a new form of governmentality rooted in the knowledge of catastrophic events reframing the arrow of time in terms of responsibility and decision, and suggesting that the anticipation and prevention of these events has to trump individual freedom, to reframe the relation between liberty and security in favour of security and prevention. The diagnosis may be accurate in terms of the programme of the discursive practices, but it seems to me that we have to discuss the pretence of these forms of knowledge concerning the future to be scientific when they want to apply to specific individuals and not large trends. The (in)security approach of the future is embedded into a myth of computerisation exchange of information, and profiling, as predicting the true behaviour of very specific individuals while the practices show the limits of the categorisations of future human behaviour, and the tendency to transform prediction into a justification of previous arbitrary actions. Their predictions concerning human beings are forms of sacrificial astrology by other means applied to small groups, and which destabilise and reconfigure presumption of innocence, freedom, privacy, justice, and even anthropological conception of human beings for all. In conclusion I will briefly come back to the link between this trend towards prediction and the (in)securitization process which is the result of a de-differentiation and reshaping of the boundaries of the different security institutions as well as one of the symptom of a governmentality of unease.