Elintärkeää tekniikkaa

otteita infrastruktuurien suojaamisen historiasta

Authors

• Antti Silvast

Abstract

Vital Technology: Historical Excerpts from the Protection of Infrastructures

Large socio-technical systems and infrastructures like electricity supply form a classical research topic within histories of technology. Recently, the protection and vulnerabilities of such systems have provoked wide discussions all around the world. According to a common notion, modern societies have become increasingly dependent on different large infrastructures while the threats to these systems have also grown significantly in number. The electricity infrastructure has received particular attention in this context alongside issues like severe storms, sales of electrical networks, and electricity blackouts, for example.

My article opens up these issues from the perspective of history of technology and links with international research on large socio-technical systems, infrastructures, and contemporary security problems. Working from these vantage points, it proposes that historical knowledge provides important new insights into understanding contemporary problems of infrastructures. The article describes what Finnish security experts have understood by critical infrastructures and their threat scenarios at different times and claims that definitions of risks and threats has significantly shaped how these experts have acted upon issues. Empirically, the text moves from early economic defence planning to national systems of stockpiling vital raw resources, the critique of these arrangements during the oil crises of the 1970s, the subsequent birth of Finnish “emergency supply” practices, and to more recent national infrastructure security strategies, where the starting point is that both the systems and their risks have become inherently global.