Private security companies (PSCs) are struggling to define how they should fit into Europe’s traditionally state-dominated security and intelligence sector, and to persuade policymakers that their industry deserves formal recognition to reinforce its legitimacy.
Many PSCs would like to see action by the EU authorities in support of a system of certification, preferably industry-led. But there is still considerable reluctance to countenance this within the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, which represents the EU’s 27 national capitals. The two authorities are keeping an arm’s length distance from the highly controversial nature of outsourcing public security and intelligence functions to the private sector.
Yet the PSC trend is growing within Europe and internationally. How to deal with the many sensitive privatization issues surrounding this most sensitive of government functions was the focus of debate at a closed half-day workshop here on 30 March. The workshop was organized by the independent policy group, the Italian Center for International Perspectives (CIPI) - with support from the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center (ESISC), a think tank and consultancy in the security sector. Both are based in the Belgian capital.
The event brought together policy officials from the EU and NATO, diplomats from national governments, PSC executives and security experts from other business sectors such as IT (information technology) service providers for a non-attributable discussion of the issues. Selected members of the press, including ISN Security Watch, were invited to attend the debate, which was moderated by Paolo Raffone, CIPI’s secretary general, and Claude Moniquet, ESISC’s president.
The workshop examined two broad subjects: whether new policy in Europe is needed regarding PSCs, and whether a limited privatization of intelligence carries security risks or opportunities and for whom.
The PSCs image problem
As CIPI noted in a background paper circulated during the debate, “there is a need to better assess both the potential benefits and risks resulting from the current privatization and outsourcing trend - with the ultimate objective of ensuring more effective protection and assistance for individuals, groups and corporate interests of any sort. The present moment is therefore a critical one to establish regulation or, more accurately, ‘control’ for the industry not only on a national, but also - ideally - on an international level.”
After a quick tour de table of opinion by the workshop’s 40 participants, it became clear that a divide exists between PSCs and governments about the nature of their relationship.
In general, representatives from the private security companies - many of whom employ former officials from military and government intelligence agencies - said they want some kind of government policy in place that recognizes their status and the importance of their work.
While most PSCs are involved in ordinary information-gathering tasks or security-of-infrastructure work, their sector’s reputation has suffered from bad publicity generated by certain players involved in abusive or clandestine activities in recent international conflicts such as those of Iraq, Afghanistan and across the African continent.
As the PSCs themselves admit, they have an image problem in the eye of the general public, whose view of their sector, however unfair it may be, is one of cloak-and-dagger companies immersed in less-than-ethical behavior in an unregulated operational environment.
Moniquet categorically rejected that perception. “PSCs are legitimate members of the intelligence and information-gathering community and should be acknowledged as such. We must dispel the myth that they are engaged in espionage or underhanded techniques. The vast majority want information and inside intelligence but they want it obtained legally. And so do we,” he told the workshop.
Surprisingly, one of the obstacles across the EU to a more balanced public view of PSCs is a general lack of awareness of their existence in the first place, according to Raffone.
He pointed to two exceptions: the UK - where PSCs have mushroomed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 - and France “where you can find just about all the entities involved in intelligence, public or private owned, listed openly on the internet. Contrast that to Italy, my own country, where the government considers that this sector doesn’t exist,” he observed.
“Yet go to the telephone directory and you’ll find more than 1,700 Italian companies providing some form of intelligence, information or security services. They wouldn’t be there if someone wasn’t buying their services.”
Weighing the risks
But PSCs surely won’t get the legitimacy conferred by official recognition as long as doubts remain within governments about the risks attached to using their services or, more important, outsourcing to the private sector activity currently handled by state-supervised agencies.
“A dedicated [i.e., purpose-built and controlled] security network is very, very important for intelligence purposes. And by that I don’t mean merely ‘information’ but intelligence,” an EU security official said. “Looking at military intelligence alone, I don’t see a big place for PSCs.”
A government official from a small EU member state framed the issue just as succinctly but from a different angle.
“I think it would be ridiculous to deny that PSCs exist - they do. But the risk as I see it is that they will pursue profit at the expense of security [that governments need],” said the official, who added that “to avoid that risk, PSCs should be regulated by governments and not by voluntary codes of conduct.”
One European PSC executive expressed doubt about that approach, however. “I’m not sure that the over-regulated public [intelligence] sector should be married with the under-regulated private one. There is already a degree of self-regulation in the latter where those companies that provide bad information or engage in illegal activity are eliminated in the marketplace.”
The UK aside, whether the cleansing effect of self-regulation would be enough to persuade more national capitals or inter-governmental organizations in Europe to use PSCs is wide open to any interpretation for the time-being.
One NATO source later told ISN Security Watch he agreed that the profit-motive behind PSCs posed a great concern: “Privatizing domestic intelligence is one thing; outsourcing the same for the military’s use is not on my radar screen. I see way too many possibilities for diluted information or hugely redundant sources of information produced by competing players, each of whose sources would have to be verified by the ultimate customer - us. It’ll be too complicated and eat up valuable resources we could use elsewhere if we go that way,” said the source.
As for legally regulating the sector, there is no official debate - let alone any convergence of views - among the 27 EU member states about what policy to formulate regarding PSCs.
For example, at a public conference held in Brussels in December on the role of PSCs in international military conflicts, Robert Cooper, the Council of Ministers’ director general for political and military affairs, declared that regulation was simply not on the Council’s agenda. “There’s no consensus because it is not being discussed right now,” he said. European Commission officials present at the same meeting essentially expressed the same sentiment.
Indeed, more than a few of the CIPI workshop’s non-PSC participants, including one from Europe’s IT sector, expressed doubts that privatization in the sector would spread very quickly from the UK to other EU countries. “What would be the incentive for the public security sector to move toward privatization? I don’t see that [developing] so much in Europe,” an IT executive told the group.
Such attitudes should not discourage the sector from its goal of getting official recognition, said Raffone. “We’d like to see something coming from the Commission, either as a statement or a [consultative stakeholder] green paper or whatever,” he told ISN Security Watch. “This issue has to be addressed.”
Ultimately, the growth prospects for PSCs may lie elsewhere, as Moniquet observed. “Good business intelligence is critical for our economies’ growth and preserving jobs: we should not overlook that basic fact,” he said.