Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- Political Science (14)
- Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration (14)
- Arts and Humanities (11)
- Sociology (10)
- Communication (8)
-
- History (8)
- Law (8)
- Science and Technology Studies (6)
- American Politics (5)
- Critical and Cultural Studies (4)
- International Relations (3)
- International and Area Studies (3)
- Other Sociology (3)
- Business (2)
- Communication Technology and New Media (2)
- Defense and Security Studies (2)
- Education (2)
- Legal Studies (2)
- Politics and Social Change (2)
- Social Influence and Political Communication (2)
- Speech and Rhetorical Studies (2)
- Theory, Knowledge and Science (2)
- American Studies (1)
- Anthropology (1)
- Business Administration, Management, and Operations (1)
- Civic and Community Engagement (1)
- Criminology (1)
- Curriculum and Social Inquiry (1)
- Digital Humanities (1)
Articles 1 - 29 of 29
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.
(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 …
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
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 …
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 …
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 …
Review, The New Era Of Secret Law, Patrice Mcdermott
Review, The New Era Of Secret Law, Patrice Mcdermott
Secrecy and Society
In a recent Brennan Center report, The New Era of Secret Law, Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein articulates, examines, and evaluates the claims for and objections to secret law. Under this banner, the report includes any law that is withheld from the public, regardless of whether it may be shared among agencies or with certain members or committees of Congress.” Goitein’s underlying goal is to propose procedural and substantive reforms. Secret Law is a deeply-researched and highly valuable policy brief with an aim of making specific policy recommendations. And readable to boot.
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 …
The Rhetorical Algorithm: Wikileaks And The Elliptical Secrets Of Donald J. Trump, Atilla Hallsby
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
#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 …
Secrecy, Democracy And War: A Review, Brian Martin
Secrecy, Democracy And War: A Review, Brian Martin
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
The Tension Between Privacy And Security, Susan Maret, Antoon De Baets
The Tension Between Privacy And Security, Susan Maret, Antoon De Baets
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Could Technology End Secrecy?, Chris Hables Gray
Could Technology End Secrecy?, Chris Hables Gray
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Secrecy, Confidentiality And "Dirty Work": The Case Of Public Relations, Sue Curry Jansen
Secrecy, Confidentiality And "Dirty Work": The Case Of Public Relations, Sue Curry Jansen
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Humpty Dumpty Was Wrong - Consistency In Meaning Matters: Some Definitions Of Privacy, Publicity, Secrecy, And Other Family Members, Gary T. Marx
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
Six Answers To The Question “What Is Secrecy Studies?”, Clare Birchall
Six Answers To The Question “What Is Secrecy Studies?”, Clare Birchall
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.
The Charm Of Secrecy: Secrecy And Society As Secrecy Studies, Susan Maret
The Charm Of Secrecy: Secrecy And Society As Secrecy Studies, Susan Maret
Secrecy and Society
No abstract provided.