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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 30 of 50
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Humor And Surveillance - “That’S Not Funny” (Or Is It?): For Professor Serge Gutwirth On His Retirement, Gary T. Marx
Humor And Surveillance - “That’S Not Funny” (Or Is It?): For Professor Serge Gutwirth On His Retirement, Gary T. Marx
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Review, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden And The American Surveillance State, By Barton Gellman, Patrice Mcdermott
Review, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden And The American Surveillance State, By Barton Gellman, Patrice Mcdermott
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Review, Democracy And Fake News: Information Manipulation And Post-Truth Politics, Peter Krapp
Review, Democracy And Fake News: Information Manipulation And Post-Truth Politics, Peter Krapp
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Being Curious With Secrecy, Clare Stevens, Elspeth Van Veeren, Brian Rappert, Owen D. Thomas
Being Curious With Secrecy, Clare Stevens, Elspeth Van Veeren, Brian Rappert, Owen D. Thomas
Secrecy and Society
This article contributes to ongoing attempts to broaden out theorizations of secrecy from an intentional and willful act of concealment to a cultural and structural process. We do so by fostering a conversation between secrecy and curiosity. This conversation is enabled through a review of central themes in secrecy studies and curiosity studies, but also through an examination of a collaboration between the science center “We the Curious” and a network of academic researchers. In doing so, this article makes a case for the benefits of paying more attention to curiosity as a means of facilitating a multifaceted understanding of …
(Not) Accessing The Castle: Grappling With Secrecy In Research On Security Practices, Lilly P. Muller, Natalie Welfens
(Not) Accessing The Castle: Grappling With Secrecy In Research On Security Practices, Lilly P. Muller, Natalie Welfens
Secrecy and Society
This article discusses how to deal with secrecy and limited access in ethnographically inspired research of security fields. Drawing inspiration from recent debates about secrecy in Critical Security Research and from Franz Kafka’s The Castle, we propose to treat access limitations and the secrecy we encounter as methodological tools that provide insights into social relations and power structures of security fields. We develop the argument in two steps. First, we argue for a more fine-grained taxonomy of secrecy, that allows to distinguish between mystery, concealment and the relational dimension of secrecy. Second, we apply the taxonomy to our respective …
Technologies And Time Tempers: How Things Mediate A State’S (Cyber Vulnerability) Disclosure Practices, Clare Stevens
Technologies And Time Tempers: How Things Mediate A State’S (Cyber Vulnerability) Disclosure Practices, Clare Stevens
Secrecy and Society
State secrecy and disclosure practices are often treated as processes of intentional and strategic human agency, and as forms of political time management (Bok 1982; Horn 2011). Through a critical analysis of the United States government’s disclosure practices in the context of their discourse around the cybersecurity “Vulnerabilities Equities Process” (VEP), this paper will present a two-fold argument against these conventional treatments of secrecy and disclosure. While government secrecy and disclosure can certainly be understood as a form of (agential) timing, orientation and control (Hom 2018), this paper will also show how government secrecy practices are emergent at the point …
Daunting Encounters: La Hague’S Infrastructures Of Secrecy, Agnes Villette
Daunting Encounters: La Hague’S Infrastructures Of Secrecy, Agnes Villette
Secrecy and Society
The article explores secrecy, more particularly, nuclear secrecy in relation to two nuclear facilities situated at the tip of the Norman peninsula of La Hague, in France. Both sites - the CSM nuclear waste repository and the close-by refueling plant - were developed at the end of the 1960s in connection with France’s extensive civil and military nuclear program. While institutional archives and access to the sites remain tedious, the article contends that the nuclear secrecy shielding the facilities can be approached by unpacking the numerous accidents that took place at the site. Silenced and subjected to amnesia, spills and …
Carceral Data: The Limits Of Transparency-As-Accountability In Prison Risk Data, Becka Hudson, Tomas Percival
Carceral Data: The Limits Of Transparency-As-Accountability In Prison Risk Data, Becka Hudson, Tomas Percival
Secrecy and Society
Prison data collection is a labyrinthine infrastructure. This article engages with debates around the political potentials and limitations of transparency as a form of “accountability,” specifically as it relates to carceral management and data gathering. We examine the use of OASys, a widely used risk assessment tool in the British prison system, in order to demonstrate how transparency operates as a means of legitimating prison data collection and ensuing penal management. Prisoner options to resist their file, or “data double,” in this context are considered and the decisive role of OASys as an immediately operationalized technical structure is outlined. We …
Introduction To The Special Issue On Secrecy And Technologies, Clare Stevens, Sam Forsythe
Introduction To The Special Issue On Secrecy And Technologies, Clare Stevens, Sam Forsythe
Secrecy and Society
Many scholars have treated the inscrutability of technologies, secrecy, and other unknowns as moral and ethical challenges that can be resolved through transparency and openness. This paper, and the special issue it introduces, instead wants to explore how we can understand the productive, strategic but also emancipatory potential of secrecy and ignorance in the development of security and technologies. This paper argues that rather than just being mediums or passive substrates, technologies are making a difference to how secrecy, disclosure, and transparency work. This special issue will show how technologies and time mediate secrecy and disclosure, and vice versa. This …
Giants: The Global Power Elite, Susan Maret
Classified: Secrecy And The State In Modern Britain, Diana Clark Gill
Classified: Secrecy And The State In Modern Britain, Diana Clark Gill
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Matthew Potolsky’S The National Security Sublime: On The Aesthetics Of Government Secrecy, Nolan Higdon
Matthew Potolsky’S The National Security Sublime: On The Aesthetics Of Government Secrecy, Nolan Higdon
Secrecy and Society
Matthew Potolsky’s brilliantly woven The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy offers a powerful and engaging discussion of national security and government secrecy. His findings concerning the influence artists have on citizens’ perception of national security is a major contribution to the field. It highlights Americans false sense of awareness regarding government secrecy, that in itself enables government secrecy. Potolsky has made a massive contribution to the study of government secrecy that is sure to spark future research concerning the intersection of national security and aesthetics.
Secrecy In U.S. National Security: Why A Paradigm Shift Is Needed, Steven Aftergood
Secrecy In U.S. National Security: Why A Paradigm Shift Is Needed, Steven Aftergood
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
State Secrecy: A Literature Review, Stephane Lefebvre
State Secrecy: A Literature Review, Stephane Lefebvre
Secrecy and Society
What is secrecy? What is a state secret? Which state secrets deserve protection from disclosures? How are state secrets protected from disclosure? In this review, I use these questions as an organizing framework to review the richness of a very disparate, largely US-centric, but also multidisciplinary literature. In doing so, I highlight the social nature of secrecy - that it is a social construct with social effects and consequences - and the need for further research to unveil those rationalities that specific discourses on state secrecy put forward to legitimize the nondisclosure of state secrets.
“Pick A Card, Any Card”: Learning To Deceive And Conceal – With Care, Brian Rappert
“Pick A Card, Any Card”: Learning To Deceive And Conceal – With Care, Brian Rappert
Secrecy and Society
Because of the asymmetries in knowledge regarding the underlying hidden mechanisms as well as because of the importance of intentional deception, entertainment magic is often presented as an exercise in power, manipulation, and control. This article challenges such portrayals and through doing so common presumptions about how secrets are kept. It does so through recounting the experiences of the author as a beginner learning a craft. Regard for the choices and tensions associated with the accomplishment of mutually recognized deception in entertainment magic are marshalled to consider how it involves ‘reciprocal action’ between the audience and the performer. Attending to …
Questions Of Professional Practice And Reporting On State Secrets: Glenn Greenwald And The Nsa Leaks, Rebecca M. Rice
Questions Of Professional Practice And Reporting On State Secrets: Glenn Greenwald And The Nsa Leaks, Rebecca M. Rice
Secrecy and Society
In 2013, journalist Glenn Greenwald met with Edward Snowden, who leaked the most documents in the history of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Greenwald reported on these documents and proved that the NSA spied on millions of American citizens. However, he also provided commentary about the state of journalism and argued that journalists are often complicit in the keeping of state secrets. Using a rhetorical analysis of Greenwald's writings in The Guardian and his later book, this essay argues that journalists function as a technical audience that debates professional standards for leaking secrets. In Greenwald's case, journalists were …
The Rhetorical Devices Of The Keepers Of State Secrets, Stephane Lefebvre
The Rhetorical Devices Of The Keepers Of State Secrets, Stephane Lefebvre
Secrecy and Society
This article examines a set of rhetorical devices forming a linguistic practice that are used repeatedly by secret keepers in the United States and the United Kingdom when legally and popularly arguing against the disclosure of state secrets. Each of these devices (using lists, using the future conditional, arguing from ignorance and authority, arguing from consequences, and arguing by analogy) play a role in shaping our social understanding of state secrecy. More importantly, these devices provide secret keepers a means by which to assert their knowledge and expertise, and to legitimize, if judges agree with them, the nondisclosure of state …
Teaching Trade Secret Management With Threshold Concepts, Haakon Thue Lie, Leif Martin Hokstad, Donal O'Connell
Teaching Trade Secret Management With Threshold Concepts, Haakon Thue Lie, Leif Martin Hokstad, Donal O'Connell
Secrecy and Society
Trade secret management (TSM is an emerging field of research. Teaching trade secret management requires the inclusion of several challenging topics, such as how firms use secrets in open innovation and collaboration. The threshold concepts framework is an educational lens well suited for teaching subjects such as TSM that are transformative and troublesome. We identify four such areas in trade secret management and discuss how threshold concepts can be a useful framework for teaching. We then present an outline of a curriculum suited for master’s programs and training of intellectual property (IP) managers. Our main contribution is to fields of …
Today’S Fake News Is Tomorrow’S Fake History: How Us History Textbooks Mirror Corporate News Media Narratives, Nolan Higdon, Mickey Huff, Jen Lyons
Today’S Fake News Is Tomorrow’S Fake History: How Us History Textbooks Mirror Corporate News Media Narratives, Nolan Higdon, Mickey Huff, Jen Lyons
Secrecy and Society
The main thrust of this study is to assess how the systematic biases found in mass media journalism affect the writing of history textbooks. There has been little attention paid to how the dissemination of select news information regarding the recent past, particularly from the 1990s through the War on Terror, influences the ways in which US history is taught in schools. This study employs a critical-historical lens with a media ecology framework to compare Project Censored’s annual list of censored and under-reported stories to the leading and most adopted high school and college US history textbooks. The findings reveal …
Revealing Challenges Of Teaching Secrecy, Jack Z. Bratich, Craig R. Scott
Revealing Challenges Of Teaching Secrecy, Jack Z. Bratich, Craig R. Scott
Secrecy and Society
All teaching has something to do with transmission of hidden knowledge, secrecy, and revelation. But the teaching of secrecy itself faces particular challenges. Drawing on the authors’ experiences teaching secrecy-themed seminars to first-year university students, this paper pinpoints four such challenges: how to determine the range of phenomena to cover in a short course, how to prevent excessive interpretation of secrets, how to encourage students to take a fun topic with seriousness, and how to engage students in their own practices of secrecy. In laying out these challenges, we aim to contribute to a secrecy literacy: a needed competency so …
Keeping Secrets From Ourselves: Understanding Self-Deception Through Theory, Evidence And Application, Mathew J. Creighton
Keeping Secrets From Ourselves: Understanding Self-Deception Through Theory, Evidence And Application, Mathew J. Creighton
Secrecy and Society
Self-deception is a difficult concept to share with students. Although few students find it implausible that they are capable of keeping secrets from themselves, the social theory, application, and practical demonstration of self-deception is far from straightforward. This work offers a three-step approach to teach a theoretically-grounded, evidence-based, and application-reinforced understanding of self-deception. Rooted in work on identity by Mead (1934), the approach outlined here engages with interdisciplinary case studies derived from social psychology (Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz 1998) and behavioral economics (Ariely 2012). The theory and case studies build toward a peer evaluation that offers students a concrete demonstration …
Concealing In The Public Interest, Or Why We Must Teach Secrecy, Susan Maret
Concealing In The Public Interest, Or Why We Must Teach Secrecy, Susan Maret
Secrecy and Society
Secrecy as the intentional or unintentional concealment of information is the subject of investigation within the humanities, social sciences, journalism, law and legal studies. However, the subject it is not widely taught as a distinct social problem within higher education. In this article, I report personal experience with developing and teaching a graduate level course on a particular type of secrecy, government secrecy, at the School of Information, San Jose State University. This article includes discussion on selecting course materials, creating assignments, and navigating controversial histories. This article also sets the stage to this special issue of Secrecy and Society …
Writing The Official History Of The Joint Intelligence Committee, Michael Goodman
Writing The Official History Of The Joint Intelligence Committee, Michael Goodman
Secrecy and Society
This article recounts the experience of a professional historian in being given the keys to the kingdom: access to the classified vaults of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee. This article includes some of the problems in having access, but complying with the sensitivities around official accounts, difficulties in writing a global history, or trying to make the work of a committee interesting and accessible, and of trying to determine the impact of intelligence on policy.
Historical Amnesia: British And U.S. Intelligence, Past And Present, Calder Walton
Historical Amnesia: British And U.S. Intelligence, Past And Present, Calder Walton
Secrecy and Society
Many intelligence scandals in the news today seem unprecedented - from Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, to British and U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring activities of their citizens. They seem new largely because, traditionally, intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were excessively secretive about their past activities: even the names “GCHQ” and “NSA” were airbrushed from declassified records, and thus missing from major historical works and scholarship on on post-war international relations. The resulting secrecy about British and U.S. intelligence has led to misunderstandings and conspiracy theories in societies about them. Newly opened secret records now …
Collaboration And Research Practice In Intelligence, Minna Räsänen
Collaboration And Research Practice In Intelligence, Minna Räsänen
Secrecy and Society
Close, intensive research collaboration between universities, companies, and the public sector can open up new and different opportunities for qualitative research, and provide analytic and empirical insights that otherwise might be difficult to obtain. The aim of this paper is to explore collaboration as a means of doing research with the intelligence community. Experiences from a research project concerning dilemmas the practitioners face in their organization within the Swedish Armed Forces, serve as a starting point for this reflective discussion. It is argued here that collaboration is suitable when change is required. The mutual learning between the actors feeds into …
Ethnographic Research In The U.S. Intelligence Community: Opportunities And Challenges, Bridget Nolan
Ethnographic Research In The U.S. Intelligence Community: Opportunities And Challenges, Bridget Nolan
Secrecy and Society
This article considers lessons learned from conducting research inside the intelligence community. Drawing on a year of ethnographic field work and interviews at the National Counterterrorism Center, I show that “boundary personnel”- people who navigate between the worlds of academia and national security - provide value added in the form of tacit knowledge that outside researchers would not be able to deliver. At the same time, these people face delays, challenges to freedom of information, and ethical considerations that are unique to their positions. Despite setbacks, social scientists must continue their engagement with national security organizations to further our understanding …
Secrecy Vs. Disclosure Of The Intelligence Community Budget: An Enduring Debate, Anne Daugherty Miles
Secrecy Vs. Disclosure Of The Intelligence Community Budget: An Enduring Debate, Anne Daugherty Miles
Secrecy and Society
Little known U.S. congressional documents, dating from the 1970s, debate public disclosure of Intelligence Community (IC) budget. The documents offer a rich repository of the arguments on both sides of the debate and shine a light on the thoughtful, measured congressional oversight practiced in formative years of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Troping The Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, And The Big Data Black Boxes Of National Security, Robert Albro
Troping The Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, And The Big Data Black Boxes Of National Security, Robert Albro
Secrecy and Society
This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community's (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of …
Secrets And Lies — Exposed And Combatted: Warrantless Surveillance Under And Around The Law 2001-2017, Patrice Mcdermott
Secrets And Lies — Exposed And Combatted: Warrantless Surveillance Under And Around The Law 2001-2017, Patrice Mcdermott
Secrecy and Society
Before June 2013, civil society and much of Congress were largely in the dark about the extent of the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency and the circumlocutions of statute undertaken by the White House and the Department of Justice. After the releases by Edward Snowden to specific journalists, the mendacity of Intelligence Community lawyers and leaders, the evasions of the law and manipulation of the FISA Court by the White House working with the Justice Department, and the scope of the violations of the Fourth Amendment protections of U.S. Persons (USPs) became increasingly apparent.2 This article reviews the …
Secrecy And Intelligence: Introduction, Kathleen Vogel, Brian Balmer
Secrecy And Intelligence: Introduction, Kathleen Vogel, Brian Balmer
Secrecy and Society
The catalyst for this special issue of Secrecy and Society stems from a workshop titled “Secrecy and Intelligence: Opening the Black Box” at North Carolina State University, April, 2016. This workshop brought together interested scholars, intelligence practitioners, and civil society members from the United States and Europe to discuss how different facets of secrecy and other practices shape the production of knowledge in intelligence work. This dialogue aimed to be reflective on how the closed social worlds of intelligence shape what intelligence actors and intelligence analysts, who include those within the intelligence establishment and those on the outside, know about …