Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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.

An Economics Primer For Cyber Security Analysts, John T. Harvey

Military Cyber Affairs

One of the ingredients necessary to an understanding of the impact of cyber attacks is a reliable model of the economy. We face great challenges in trying to protect an already potentially unstable system from cyber aggression and operating with a flawed understanding of the determinants of output, employment, asset prices, et cetera, surely condemns us to failure. This is so not only because we need to know where points of leverage might exist for bad actors to disrupt and disable our system, but because policy recommendations may face significant push back from both selected scholars and powerful vested interests. …

Sticking To Their Guns: The Missing Rma For Cybersecurity, Lior Tabansky

Military Cyber Affairs

Why has cybered conflict disrupted the security of the most developed nations? A foreign adversary contemplating an attack on a developed nation's heartland certainly faces multiple state-run military-grade lines of defense on land, sea and air. A foreign adversary launching a direct cyber-attack on a non-military homeland target will meet none. Armed forces do not shield a society from cyber-attacks originated by foreign adversaries, no longer provide a buffer between the enemy and homeland, nor can they identify the attacker after an attack occurred.

Adversaries succeed in waging cybered conflict against the U.S. and its allies. Having repeatedly inflicted economic …

Cyber Futures And The Justice Motive: Avoiding Pyrrhic Victory, Mark Raymond

Military Cyber Affairs

Evaluating, and choosing between, possible cyber futures requires making collective decisions about values. Tradeoffs exist in the design of any governance arrangement for information and communications technologies (ICTs). At minimum, policymakers will be required to choose between governance arrangements that optimize for speed and scale on the one hand, and those that optimize for diversity and decentralization on the other. As in any other political domain, every eventual outcome will create winners and losers, at least in relative terms. Actors dissatisfied with outcomes may perceive a discrepancy between entitlements and benefits. In some such cases, they will act on this …

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.