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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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
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 …
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 …
Murky Projects And Uneven Information Policies: A Case Study Of The Psychological Strategy Board And Cia, Susan Maret
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
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 …
#Whitegenocide, The Alt-Right And Conspiracy Theory: How Secrecy And Suspicion Contributed To The Mainstreaming Of Hate, Andrew F. Wilson
#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 …