National Security and Its Threats

One of the most crucial government aspects of any county is the safety of its inhabitants and soil. Each country on earth has its own type of national security. According to Gale, national security is an umbrella term that refers to the stability of a country’s political, economic, and territorial integrity, as well as the preservation of its physical environment and the health of its citizens. When a government creates national security policies, they help protect the country and its interests against threat, and they also secure the county’s role in the world. Who are responsible for creating national security policies? Although it might vary depending on the government, but national security policies are achieved through collaboration between the military, diplomatic, and social welfare agencies. National security policies can be either short-term policies or long-term policies, it’s all depended on the circumstances. Traditionally, national security was primarily conceived primarily on the military security and defense, but now national security includes non-military dimensions, such as illegal immigration, economic sustainability, terrorism, energy security, espionage, economic espionage, food security, environmental security, cybersecurity, political stability, and many more.

The definition of what composes as a threat to national security has expanded over the years. “The distinctive meaning of national security means freedom from foreign dictation” (Harold Lasswell, 1950). Others, like Walter Lippman, stated that “a nation has security when it does not have to sacrifice its legitimate interests to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by war” (Walter Lippmann, 1943). Illegal immigration refers to when an individual gain entry to another country illegally, which resulted into that country’s immigration laws being violated. There are a lot of factors as of why an individual would leave his country of origin, such as lack of local access to resources, family reunification, better living, and economic prosperity. Despite sometimes an illegal immigrant might have good intention, but illegal immigration will end up hurting a country one way or another. For instance, illegal immigration provides the means necessary and the opportunity for terrorism to exist, it also paves a way for crime. According to the Department of Homeland Security, there has been a total of 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, as of 2015.

Terrorism refers to violence—or the threat of violence—used to achieve a political goal. Terrorism may be carried out by individuals or groups that operate by stealth rather than by open assault. Terrorism is nothing new or a modern phenomenon. Dating back to ancient times, the Greeks used it (terrorism) against their enemies, and some of the Roman emperors used it against those they saw as a political threat. Terrorism can be either domestic or international. Domestic terrorism occurs when the action takes place within national border, while international terrorism refers to terrorist acts that happens on foreign soil. According to the U.S. Department of State, on average, there were 715 terrorist attacks, causing 1,563 deaths, injuring 1,623 people, and involving 745 hostages or kidnap victims per month, worldwide in 2017.

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Another current national security threat is attack on cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is about protecting government and corporate networks by making it more difficult, if not impossible, for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities. Although not many people know much about it, cybersecurity plays a big role in society, such as a hacker bringing down a power grid or even worse attack a hospital network and power system, as it can be seen, that would have been really catastrophic. Other ways attackers might attack a country’s cybersecurity space are phishing, backdoor, polymorphic attacks, tampering, and so on. Phishing is the most used form of cyberattack use by hackers, where they attempt to retrieve sensitive information such as passwords, usernames, or credit card information from the users. Phishing is typically done by sending an email to the user, which then prompt the user to enter details at a fake site whose look and feel are almost identical to the original one.

Espionage is one of the most subtle threats to any country’s national security. Espionage is when a country’s government uses spies in order to obtain military or political information from another country. Espionage is a very hard threat to catch since spies are difficult to recognize. Spy is an individual who’s secretly collects information on the activities, updates, plans of a competitor or enemy. Although espionage might seem like a throwback related to the World Wars and the Cold War period, but it’s more prolific than ever, since espionage can be found in so many levels and organization. Nowadays, spies don’t just focus on passing government information to their foreign country, but they also are passing universities and businesses information by posing as students and scientists. Another type of espionage is economic espionage. According to the Economic Espionage Act (Title 18 U.S.C. §1831), economic espionage is any person who knowingly performs targeting or acquisition of trade secrets to knowingly benefit any foreign government, foreign instrumentality, or foreign agent. Usually, economic espionage targets high-tech and defense-related industries, but nowadays no industry is immune to that threat, either small or large. In order to counter espionage threat, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division develops a lot of outreach materials and training to inform industry leaders and raise public awareness.

One of the most basic things for human survival apart from water is food. Food is being define as any type of nutritious substances that people or animals eat or drink, even the plants need that type of nutritious substances in order to maintain life growth. Since in ancient times, governments and countries have been trying to gain complete control on how food is being produce and consume, that’s when food security comes in to play. Food security is state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable food, or food security can be described as a measurement of availability that a country or an individual has. Food security has been an issue over 10,000 years ago, starting with ancient Egypt and ancient China, where they would release foods to people in times of famine and economic distress. Providing food to more than seven billion people living on this planet is one of the most challenging things that world leaders have to face. According to Baer-Nawrocka, food security is also “related to social efforts taken to reduce excessive regional disparities in combating hunger”. Compare to other county in the world, the United States government is doing a great job about food security. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A), there was 87.7 percent of U.S. households that were food secure throughout 2015 and that number jumped to 88.2 (112.3 million) percent in 2017, which only leave 4.5 percent of households with very low food and 7.3 percent households with low food security.

To conclude, although enforcing national security policies is very challenging thing to do, but government throughout the globe are becoming more proactive when it comes on protecting their soils and the lives of their citizens. Even if some policy might differ from another policy depending on the country’s governmental structure, but they all are reaching for the same goals.