Bioterrorism, Public Health, and Civil Liberties
Authors: Bonino Stefano 
Published: July 2022

While the risk posed by biological agents is not new, the particular emphasis that governments seem to place on bioterrorist threats is paradigmatic of the anxieties that are a feature of risk societies in late modernity. After providing an outline of the sociopolitical context in which bioterrorist threats are placed, a historical account of the use of biological weapons will be sketched. This paper will show that the risk of a bioterrorist attack is low, while the management of this amplified risk could be employed by governments and lobbies to further social insecurities. Concern for public health and the need to restrict individual liberties in the face of bioterrorist threats will be placed in the context of late modernity. In addition, employing the United States as a paradigm, the contrasting values and requirements that emerge when prioritizing the common good over individual rights will be discussed. The relationships between bioterrorism, public health and civil liberties cannot be investigated without analyzing the sociopolitical context of contemporary societies, since this relationship is incorporated into their structures and is a direct consequence of the developments, changes, and orientations of governments and societies of late modernity (1980s onward). While Young sharply defines modern society as “a bulimic society where massive cultural inclusion is accompanied by systematic structural exclusion” 1 (emphasis in original), Garland provides a broader picture of late modernity, arguing that recent changes in social structure have reshaped the previous collective absence of awareness of crime into a palpable perception of it as a normal fact. Garland opines that the advancement of mass consumption, the reorganization of the middle class, more fragile networks and social institutions, a labor market in which women play a significant part, a change in the provision of security through responsibilization strategies, the involvement of the private sector, and the withdrawal of public support are some of the many changes that have contributed to the increased sense of insecurity that is deeply embedded in everyday life.2 The recent public and political reactions to these anxieties have primarily taken the direction of an overcriminalization of delinquents and, mainly, of a severe punitiveness toward crime. A display of toughness and power of this kind – that Foucault posits serves States in reaffirming their sovereignty 3 – goes along with a modern idea of social control. This social control, in its discipline, is not authority-abiding, moral, and committed to the mandate of the welfare State, but, instead, uses crime and risk as tools to mold an “ontologically insecure individual,”4 a “docile body” that “may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. 5 In this way, people’s behaviors are oriented, shaped and affected by social practices,6 while social problems are governed by an apparatus whose first means is risk.7 To expand this argument, Simon even asserts that crime has become a governmental means at both the local and national levels, by which preventive (for example, surveillance) and incapacitative (for example, imprisonment) measures have been advanced all over America and Europe.8Melossi’s stance is similar, in stating that “controlling crime has often been but an instrument used in order to control society.”9 The threat posed by bioterrorism, whose perceived potential danger is amplified and exaggerated by the modern culture of fear and risk outlined above, should also be contextualized in the recent field of global micro-structures. Like global financial markets, in which the field of global micro-structures was originally applied,10albeit with different mechanisms, new terrorist systems “do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction patterns.”11 In other words, these are not related to any formal authority, but are micro-structured, dispersed, and temporally complex systems based on an interaction order now played out in a global domain and not on a face-to-face scale, as Goffman12 postulated. Furthermore, Knorr Cetina also argues that the employment of a scopic system, through the means offered by modern technologies, allows new terrorist systems to achieve internal global coordination, projecting activities, events, and interests to scattered users in the same way, and external global communication, presenting identical messages and images to the public, regardless of space and time 13 This will be important when considering bioterrorism as an (often) overstated threat resulting from this kind of mediated and informational world and not as a realistically likely occurrence in the natural and material world.