Encountering ethnographic gestures: Reflections on the banality of cybersecurity and STS ecologies of practice

This chapter examines how cybersecurity emerges time and again as a seemingly uncontroversial and rather banal tool of governance within the ambit of so-called critical infrastructure defence (Amoore and De Goede, 2008). This chapter queries how, under the guise of banality, cybersecurity further expands and entrenches policing practices in the context of National Critical Functions and the United States' counterterrorism policy, animating connections across scales of police power from the domestic to the imperial. Addressing questions of scale, opacity, and location, this chapter meditates on the conjunction of critical infrastructure and cybersecurity within a political moment marked by both continuity and departure in US approaches to global counterterrorism as well as on how we, as scholars of technology and security, might productively engage these entanglements of police power across scales of violence and state power.