This is nothing short of a becoming dangerous of activism that is invoked on the potential of such activism to act other than peacefully. In the world of security the guilt is already assumed and innocence proven. This
line is clearly taken by the influential Heritage Foundation in the United States. In particular by one of its leading voices, James Carafano, who makes no attempt to hide his ideological stripes by drawing a connection between International Terrorism, what are termed ‘al-Qaedaisms’, and Domestic Terrorism, which includes the disruption and violence involving the anti-globalisation movement, and animal
rights groups et cetera et cetera et cetera. Connectivity is established in these cases on the basis that, to quote Carfano, ‘cooperation might occur not out of shared motivations or planning, but rather out of a common desire to wreak violence and destruction’.

Following this logic all ‘disaffected groups’ are therefore open to influence, penetration and exploitation by the master of disaffected ceremonies - al-Qaeda, even if they merely replicate organisational designs and adapt non-violent strategies. This approach it must be noted is not only unique to the US but has
been clearly replicated in Europe. The reaction by the security apparatus in Genoa is particularly instructive, and has been reinforced by the enactment in June 2002 of a joint framework in order to combat ‘terrorism’. By establishing a joint definition that is applicable to all member countries, its implementation could mean as Marjorie Cohn (a professor at Thomas Jefferson School in San Diego, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists) states, that ‘a general strike or a large demonstration against the World Trade Organisation, where property is damaged and considerable expense is incurred to mobilize a police force, could be punished as terrorism’.

In many ways through such indirect association we are nonetheless faced with a becoming-al-Qaeda of activism. It has become the floating signifier to attach all threat towards. And it is important to note in
this case, that it is not a clear declaration of association or lack of that should concern us, but the dangerous-becoming and effective securitisation its official sanction draws based upon the potentiality of those who might roam within their midst. So whilst it is the political of all such autonomous formations
that alerts and informs the threat, officially in this situation security technologies are assembled, thereby blending the traditional ‘we’ into barbaric ‘they’, in order to safeguard the ‘we’ from the potentiality of the ‘they’.This is modern ‘democracy in action’, in that you are permitted peaceful protest but the system you are protesting against will nonethe-less securitise you, albeit for your own security. So here we find that in order toprotect a certain politics or in James Rubin’s Clash of Civilisations inspired language ‘our way of life’, that the actual strategies of securitising the life of the activist and terrorist alike in effect draw no distinction.

Whilst there are numerous examples that we can point reference to which would support this contention, particularly poignant in this regard is the security approach adopted during the protests against the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) in Miami November 2003. The full extent of this securitisation was so apparent that for Naomi Klein writing in the Guardian of London the FTAA summit represented nothing less than ‘the official homecoming of the War on Terror’. Effectively, the Miami police made no distinction between the activist and terrorist, as its Chief of Police John Timoney classified the dissenters as ‘outsiders coming in to terrorise and vandalise our city’. Armed with this mindset, all the political violent and nonviolent
alternatives agendas blended as the War on Terror’s strategies were re-applied to domestic protest. Revealed for instance with the embedding of official journalists within the security apparatus, reminiscent of the War on Terror’s tour of duty in Iraq. This policy invariably conforms to the requirement of removing the political and focusing upon the risk management of population control. This securitisation of protest – of the political alternative, which incidentally was funded by revenue appropriated from the Iraq war budget, was in the words of the Miami Mayor Manny Diaz ‘a model for homeland defence’.

With the cases that have been presented up to this point, a charge could be made that they were perceived or at least given public official sanction to securitise through their apparent exceptional characteristics. Which law-abiding citizen would not after all wish to be secure from such exceptional violence? Therefore following on from this and to challenge my approach it could be claimed that any association to be drawn with the forms concerned were directed in a ‘targeted’ way to the movements’ extreme elements. That is whether the extreme elements reside within the Islamic faith or the extreme elements within the antiglobalisation movement more generally. From this approach, it is argued that the potentiality or the ‘virtuality’ of global terror that modern security has sought to prevent has always focused directly upon the exceptionality of the threat. Times however are changing - publicly.