Expansion and Entrenchment of the National Security State after Crises: Why Rolling Back Surveillance Policies is So Difficult

In times of crisis and emergency, political authorities claim a right to expand executive discretion and restrict the rights of their subjects. This paper investigates the politics of normalizing and reinforcing executive discretion—such as the expansion of the surveillance state—during national emergencies, and it explains why attempts to roll back and contain policies expanded during emergencies so often fail. Specifically, this paper applies an historical institutionalist approach to explain the persistence and expansion of the US national security state after 9/11. Despite President Obama’s explicit promises to rollback key features of the national security state established after 9/11 by President George W. Bush’s administration, those reform attempts had meager success. Rapid institutional changes after 9/11 created three mutually reinforcing constituencies with vested interests in institutional maintenance and expansion—the “fearful public,” “SLICC (self-licking ice cream cone) bureaucrats,” and private contractors. Together they produce a positive feedback loop between public and private interests in favor of growing the national security state. Power is redistributed such that initial choices become more robust to change efforts. The result is the entrenchment of the new national security state and the creation of a new normal.