Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters
Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters
Arun Kundnani and Mizue Aizeki
Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha
Capitalism / Fiction & Literary Nonfiction / Art & Culture
This is the century of homeland security.
The federal government created a monster. They said it would keep us safe. The monster hatched in November 2002. It was named the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). An appetite for control and conquest was in its DNA. Its early influences, in the years after 9/11, were paranoia and vengeance.
The DHS is the only new department the United States has spawned in this century. With its birth, issues that were previously seen as separate—immigration control, policing, and counter-terrorism—were brought into a single, sprawling entity. Twenty-two preexisting agencies were absorbed into what became the nation’s third largest government department. Today it has a budget of over $100 billion and employs a quarter of a million people. Every danger is now conceived of as a threat to “homeland security,” and as the 9/11 Commission said in 2003, “the American homeland is the planet.”
Product Details
Copublished with Surveillance Resistance Lab
ISBN: 9781945335266
Published: October 15, 2024
Format: 5.5 x 7.5
Page count: 38 pages, full color
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Surveillance Resistance Lab investigates and makes visible the often obfuscated ways in which tech-fueled governance increases state and corporate power over our lives. It undermines our right to dissent and organize, and intensifies the policing of migrants, workers, communities of color, and more.
By translating research into action, we work with movement partners to nurture and accumulate the power of organizing and resistance—locally and transnationally. We challenge how dominant notions of “security” fuel criminalization, exclusion, and dispossession, and protect our ability to build a world where we can all thrive.
