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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Review, Democracy And Fake News: Information Manipulation And Post-Truth Politics, Peter Krapp Aug 2023

Review, Democracy And Fake News: Information Manipulation And Post-Truth Politics, Peter Krapp

Secrecy and Society

No abstract provided.


Technologies And Time Tempers: How Things Mediate A State’S (Cyber Vulnerability) Disclosure Practices, Clare Stevens Aug 2023

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 …


Classified: Secrecy And The State In Modern Britain, Diana Clark Gill Jan 2021

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 Jan 2021

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.


Questions Of Professional Practice And Reporting On State Secrets: Glenn Greenwald And The Nsa Leaks, Rebecca M. Rice Jan 2021

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 …


Today’S Fake News Is Tomorrow’S Fake History: How Us History Textbooks Mirror Corporate News Media Narratives, Nolan Higdon, Mickey Huff, Jen Lyons Jan 2021

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 Jan 2021

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 …


Joint Declaration On Freedom Of Expression And “Fake News,” Disinformation, And Propaganda, Mickey Huff Feb 2018

Joint Declaration On Freedom Of Expression And “Fake News,” Disinformation, And Propaganda, Mickey Huff

Secrecy and Society

No abstract provided.


Murky Projects And Uneven Information Policies: A Case Study Of The Psychological Strategy Board And Cia, Susan Maret Feb 2018

Murky Projects And Uneven Information Policies: A Case Study Of The Psychological Strategy Board And Cia, Susan Maret

Secrecy and Society

This case study discusses the Truman and Eisenhower administration's (1951-1953) short-lived Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). Through the lens of declassified documents, the article recounts the history and activities of the Board, including its relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and clandestine projects that involve human experimentation. Primary documents of the period suggest that institutional secrecy, coupled with inconsistent information policies, largely shielded CIA's BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and MKULTRA from the Board. This subject has not been previously reported in the research literature, and supplements existing historical understanding of the PSB's mission under the broad umbrella of psychological warfare.


Trivialized Content, Elevated From: Aesthetics Of Secrecy In Turkish Politics In The 2000s, Doruk Tatar Feb 2018

Trivialized Content, Elevated From: Aesthetics Of Secrecy In Turkish Politics In The 2000s, Doruk Tatar

Secrecy and Society

This essay will first provide a brief history of the Islamist party's coming to power by means of its effective use of a populist imagery. The paper will then focus on the emergence of a new regime of secrecy in Turkish politics by looking at two high-profile legal cases, Ergenekon and the “Cosmic Room,” in which one can observe the blueprints of a struggle between different factions for taking over the state. During the investigations, secret documents about the wrongdoings of the secular establishment were leaked to and widely covered by the media. Sober debates on the contents of such …


A Tale Of Two Paranoids: A Critical Analysis Of The Use Of The Paranoid Style And Public Secrecy By Donald Trump And Viktor Orbán, Andria Timmer, Joseph Sery, Sean Thomas Connable, Jennifer Billinson Feb 2018

A Tale Of Two Paranoids: A Critical Analysis Of The Use Of The Paranoid Style And Public Secrecy By Donald Trump And Viktor Orbán, Andria Timmer, Joseph Sery, Sean Thomas Connable, Jennifer Billinson

Secrecy and Society

Within the last decade, a rising tide of right-wing populism across the globe has inspired a renewed push toward nationalism. Capitalizing on an increasingly chaotic public sphere, leaders are stoking fear in their constituents such that their radical ideologies and hardline policy decisions may be enacted. This article offers a comparative study of two leaders exploiting the vulnerabilities of their respective citizenries: United States President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán. Drawing from and reimagining Richard Hofstadter’s germane essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” we argue that both represent a new manifestation of the paranoid style as …


The Rhetorical Algorithm: Wikileaks And The Elliptical Secrets Of Donald J. Trump, Atilla Hallsby Feb 2018

The Rhetorical Algorithm: Wikileaks And The Elliptical Secrets Of Donald J. Trump, Atilla Hallsby

Secrecy and Society

Algorithms were a generative force behind many of the leaks and secrets that dominated the 2016 election season. Taking the form of the identity-anonymizing Tor software that protected the identity of leakers, mathematical protocols occupied a prominent place in the secrets generated during the presidential campaign. This essay suggests that the rhetorical trope of ellipsis offers an equally crucial, algorithmic formula for explaining the public production of these secrets and leaks. It then describes the 2016 DNC leak and Donald Trump’s “I love Wikileaks” moment using the trope of ellipsis, which marks a discursive omission or gap in official executive …


#Whitegenocide, The Alt-Right And Conspiracy Theory: How Secrecy And Suspicion Contributed To The Mainstreaming Of Hate, Andrew F. Wilson Feb 2018

#Whitegenocide, The Alt-Right And Conspiracy Theory: How Secrecy And Suspicion Contributed To The Mainstreaming Of Hate, Andrew F. Wilson

Secrecy and Society

This article considers the relationship between “hashtag activism” as it is currently being used by the alt-right and the tendency to draw on conspiracy theory that Richard Hofstadter identified as being prevalent among what he termed “pseudo-conservatives” half a century earlier. Both the alt-right and Hofstadter’s “pseudo-conservatives” can be characterised by a pronounced populist nationalism that understands its aims as protecting a particular way of life whilst drawing on an aggrieved sense of injustice at being conspired against by an unseen enemy. That this “enemy” is typically foreign in actuality or in spirit confirms the cultural dimension on which their …