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Similar Journals
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Secrecy and Society
Number of Followers: 1  Open Access journalISSN (Online) 2377-6188 Published by San José State University  [5 journals]
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- Giants: The Global Power Elite
Authors: Susan Maret
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:42:22 PST
- Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain
Authors: Diana Clark Gill
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:42:14 PST
- Matthew Potolsky’s The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics
of Government Secrecy
Authors: Nolan Higdon
Abstract: 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.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:42:08 PST
- Secrecy in U.S. National Security: Why a Paradigm Shift Is Needed
Authors: Steven Aftergood
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:42:02 PST
- State Secrecy: A Literature Review
Authors: Stephane Lefebvre
Abstract: 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.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:41:56 PST
- “Pick a Card, Any Card”: Learning to Deceive and Conceal
– with Care
Authors: Brian Rappert
Abstract: 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 forms of inter-relation and coordination been all those present will be used to appreciate how intentional concealment and deception can be situationally and jointly accomplished. The stakes and possibilities of that accomplishment will be explored by re-imagining magic as a practice of care.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:41:48 PST
- Questions of Professional Practice and Reporting on State Secrets: Glenn
Greenwald and the NSA Leaks
Authors: Rebecca M. Rice
Abstract: 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 involved in the "re-secreting" of NSA behavior as they focused their coverage on Greenwald. This essay finds that secrets are communicatively revealed and concealed using different rhetorical appeals. In an age of political hostility toward journalists, the success of leak journalism in starting public discussion has significance for democratic deliberation.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:41:39 PST
- The Rhetorical Devices of the Keepers of State Secrets
Authors: Stephane Lefebvre
Abstract: 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 secrets. Once they have been created and have become commonly known to secret keepers, and validated by the judiciary through court precedents, they can be reproduced and passed on from a generation to the next. This article documents the use of these devices and their interrelationships.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:41:31 PST
- Teaching Trade Secret Management with Threshold Concepts
Authors: Haakon Thue Lie et al.
Abstract: 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 management and educational sciences, as well as those of innovation studies and jurisprudence.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:41:20 PST
- Today’s Fake News is Tomorrow’s Fake History: How US History Textbooks
Mirror Corporate News Media Narratives
Authors: Nolan Higdon et al.
Abstract: 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 that historical narratives largely mirror corporate media reporting, while countervailing investigative journalism is often missing from the textbooks. This study demonstrates the need for critical media literacy inside the pedagogy of history education and teacher training programs in the US.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:41:10 PST
- Revealing Challenges of Teaching Secrecy
Authors: Jack Z. Bratich et al.
Abstract: 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 people can better evaluate efforts to keep secrets and appreciate the need for certain types of secrets while also being able to critique problematic forms. This secrecy literacy can provide a foundation for the skills needed to better manage secrecy in our professional and everyday lives.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:40:59 PST
- Keeping Secrets from Ourselves: Understanding Self-deception Through
Theory, Evidence and Application
Authors: Mathew J. Creighton
Abstract: 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 of self-deception with implications at the individual- and group-level.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:40:50 PST
- Concealing in the Public Interest, or Why We Must Teach Secrecy
Authors: Susan Maret
Abstract: 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 on the subject of teaching secrecy.
PubDate: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 10:40:44 PST
- Review, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate
Conspiracies in America’s Heartland, by Stephen E. Towne
Authors: Evan Rothera
Abstract: Review of Stephen E. Towne's Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland.
PubDate: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:36:40 PDT
- Writing the Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee
Authors: Michael Goodman
Abstract: 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.
PubDate: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:36:30 PDT
- Historical Amnesia: British and U.S. Intelligence, Past and Present
Authors: Calder Walton
Abstract: 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 reveal the long history of many subjects seen in today’s news-cycle: Anglo-American intelligence cooperation, interference by countries in foreign elections, disinformation, and the use and abuse of intelligence by governments. Newly declassified records also add to our understanding of major chapters of international history, like Britain’s post-war end of empire. Without overcoming our historical amnesia disorder about U.S. and British intelligence, citizens, scholars and policy-makers cannot hope to understand the proper context for what secret agencies are doing today.
PubDate: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:36:23 PDT
- Writing About Espionage Secrets
Authors: Kristie Macrakis
Abstract: This article describes the author’s experiences researching three books on espionage history in three different countries and on three different topics. The article describes the foreign intelligence arm of the Ministry for State Security; a global history of secret writing from ancient to modern times; and finally, my current project on U.S. intelligence and technology from the Cold War to the War on Terror. The article also discusses the tensions between national security and openness and reflects on the results of this research and its implications for history and for national security.
PubDate: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:36:14 PDT
- Collaboration and Research Practice in Intelligence
Authors: Minna Räsänen
Abstract: 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 change processes. However, such collaboration raises fundamental ethical issues that are complex and highlight various academic, institutional, and personal perspectives. Collaborations should not be a set of “how-to” recipes, but rather a research activity that can have substantial rewards for researchers and practitioners alike.
PubDate: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:36:00 PDT
- Ethnographic Research in the U.S. Intelligence Community: Opportunities
and Challenges
Authors: Bridget Nolan
Abstract: 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 of how these powerful institutions operate.
PubDate: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:35:52 PDT
- Secrecy vs. Disclosure of the Intelligence Community Budget: An Enduring
Debate
Authors: Anne Daugherty Miles
Abstract: 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.
PubDate: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:35:45 PDT
