Corporations—run largely by the same elites that run states—will pressure political units to protect economies and the rules that make capitalism and trade possible. Sooner or later they will lobby to create processses—already developing to protect intellectual property rights, for example—designed to criminalize behavior that makes business riskier.

States cooperate on security only reluctantly, but we know from NATO that if they perceive a great enough threat they can overcome fear and jealousy and act collectively. This will happen if terrorism presents such a threat.

Note that Edwards says it would “allow members to voluntarily share financial, police, customs and immigration intelligence.” So each member would presumably decide what it would put into CITO (otherwise, why the adverb ‘voluntarily’?). But it does not mention ‘domestic intelligence’ as we might normally use the term—by ‘police’ it is not clear that Edwards means the domestic intelligence branch of the FBI or organizations like MI-5.

I can also see a quasi-problem with customs and immigrations data-sharing: say a US citizen flies from Montreal to Havana, evading the US ban on travel to Cuba, but this data would be in the new CITO database presumably. Unless CITO barred non-terrorism prosecution uses, which would be difficult to define, it would be a new mechanism for governments to enforce unique national laws.

Sending reams of data to a central database sounds unwieldy on technical, privacy, and security levels. More helpful would be a set of procedures for querying other governments on suspects. Rather than rely on bilateral means for the US asking Germany about say, a suspected Pakistani national who entered the US via Germany or has called people in Germany from the US, the CITO members would be contacted jointly. It may be that Italy has more information. Of course, if bilateral or mini-lateral procedures like this are already strong, then this might be superfluous in most cases.

Which, of course, is productive, if successful. Restraining loons is a good thing.

There’s also good work on the broader history of this topic by M. Deflem and by H-H. Liang, respectively showing: how effective police co-operation requires that the police forces involved have a degree of ‘functional autonomy’ from their political masters; and how police co-operation didn’t develop as a technocratic process, but as an aspect of inter-state relations.

Jason Lane’s research on the impact of the Anglo-Irish agreement on RUC/GS co-operation suggests also that a more formalised approach actually damages long-standing informal connections.

But apart from that, nice one, Edwards.

Henry may be right about the potential advantages of such a scheme, but if anything he underestimates the difficulties and problems.

Productive of what, exactly?

http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=3382

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14320452/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1543162,00.html

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Doubts_over_whether_intelligence_law_update_0911.html
.

On the U.S. side, such an agreement would go a long way towards rejuvenating our soft power. If Guantanamo were closed, and moved to Dresden. this would be good PR indeed.