‘Delayed Disclosure’: National Security,Whistle-Blowers and the Nature of Secrecy

Abstract

The significance of Edward Snowden’s revelations has been viewed primarily through the prism of threats to citizen privacy. Instead, we argue that the most dramatic change has been a decline of government secrecy, especially around national security. While the ethical aspects of state secrets and ‘whistle-blowing’ have received recent attention, few have attempted to explain the dynamics of this growing climate of exposure. Our argument is largely technological and we ground our analysis in the changing nature of intelligence work, which is increasingly merging with ‘big data’. But we also identify a related cultural change: many intelligence contractors are at best agnostic about the national security state. Meanwhile, the Internet itself provides the perfect medium for the anonymous degradation of secrets. Because the main driver is technology, we suggest this trend is likely to accelerate, presenting national security chiefs with one of their biggest future challenges.

Keywords

intelligence Internet privacy secrecy whistle-blowers

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adey

(2009) Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2): 274–295.

Aftergood

(2008) Reducing Government Secrecy: Finding What Works. Yale Law and Policy Review 27 (2): 399–416.

Aid

(2009) The Troubled Inheritance The National Security Agency and the Obama Administration. In: Johnson

(ed.) The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.243–256.

Aldrich

(2010) GCHQ: The Untold Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency. London: HarperCollins.

Alrwais

Yuan

Alowaisheq

et al . (2016) Catching Predators at Watering Holes: Finding and Understanding Strategically Compromised Websites. In: Proceedings of the 32nd annual conference on computer security applications, Los Angeles, CA, 5–8 December. New York: ACM.

Amoore

(2011) Data Derivatives: On the Emergence of a Security Risk Calculus for Our Times. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (6): 24–43.

Andrews

Burrough

Ellison

(2014) The Snowden Saga: A Shadowland of Secrets and Light. Vanity Fair, 8 April. Available at: http://vanityfair.com/ (accessed 15 July 2017).

Bauman

Bigo

Esteves

et al . (2014) After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance. International Political Sociology 8 (1): 121–144.

Belasco

Daggett

(2004) Congressional Research Report RL32422, the Administration’s FY2005 Request for $25 Billion for Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, 22 July. Washington DC: The Library of Congress.

10.

Born

Leigh

(2005) Making Intelligence Accountable: Legal Standards and Best Modes of Intelligence Surveillance. Oslo: Parliament of Norway.

11.

Bratich

(2007) Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies. Cultural Studies 21 (1): 42–58.

12.

Bratton

(2016) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

13.

Calderone

(2011) New York Times Considers Creating EZ Pass Lane for Leakers. The Cutline, 25 January. Available at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110125/ts_yblog_thecutline/ny-times-considers-creating-an-ez-pass-lane-for-leakers (accessed 23 July 2017).

14.

Costas

Grey

(2016) Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

15.

Crabb

(2005) Out in the Open. People Management, 13 October, pp. 4–7.

16.

Curtin

(2014) Overseeing Secrets in the EU: A Democratic Perspective. Journal of Common Market Studies 52 (3): 1–17.

17.

Dawes

Cresswell

Pardo

(2009) From ‘Need to Know’ to ‘Need to Share’: Tangled Problems, Information Boundaries, and the Building of Public Sector Knowledge Networks. Public Administration Review 69 (3): 392–402.

18.

Dragland

(2013) Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World’s Data Generated Over Last Two Years. Science Daily, 22 May. Available at: http://www.sintef.no/home/Press-Room/Research-News/Big-Data--for-better-or-worse/ (accessed 28 September 2016).

19.

Edgar

(2017) Beyond Snowden: Privacy, Mass Surveillance and the Struggle to Reform the NSA. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

20.

Eisler

Vanden Brook

(2013) Security Clearances: Holes in the System? USA Today, 30 September. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/30/problems-with-security-clearances/2897303/ (accessed 10 April 2017).

21.

Ellsberg

(2003) Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Penguin.

22.

Florini

(1998) The End of Secrecy. Foreign Policy 7 (1): 53–55.

23.

Florini

(2004) Behind Closed Doors: Governmental Transparency Gives Way to Secrecy. Harvard International Review 26 (1): 18–19.

24.

Friedman

(2015) My Way: Silvio Berlusconi. London: Biteback.

25.

Fung

(2014) 5.1 Million Americans Have Security Clearances: That’s More Than the Entire Population of Norway. Washington Post, 24 March. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/03/24/5-1-million-americanshave-security-clearances-thats-morethan-the-entire-population-of-norway/ (accessed 27 October 2016).

26.

Gallagher

(2013) Snowden’s NSA Post in Hawaii Failed to Install ‘Anti-Leak’ Software. Arstechnica, 18 October. Available at: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/snowdens-nsa-post-in-hawaii-failed-to-install-anti-leak-software/ (accessed 24 February 2017).

27.

Gates

(2011) Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. New York: New York University Press.

28.

Goode

(2015) Anonymous and the Political Ethos of Hacktivism. Popular Communication 13 (1): 74–86.

29.

Goold

(2004) CCTV and Policing: Public Area Surveillance and Police Practices in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

30.

Greenwald

(2014) No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State. London: Hamish Hamilton.

31.

Gupta

(2008) Transparency Under Scrutiny: Information Disclosure in Global Environmental Governance. Global Environmental Politics 8 (2): 1–7.

32.

Hall

Zarro

(2012) Social Curation on the Website Pinterest.com. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 49 (1): 1–9.

33.

Harding

(2014) The Snowden Files. London: Faber & Faber.

34.

Harrison

(2013) Accounting for Secrets. Journal of Economic History 73 (4): 1008–1040.

35.

Hattem

(2015) Background Check Company that Screened Snowden to Forfeit $30m. The Hill, 20 August. Available at: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/251549-background-check-company-that-screened-snowden-to-forfeit-30-million (accessed 21 January 2017).

36.

Hayden

(2016) Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. New York: Random House.

37.

Johnson

(2014) An INS Special Forum: Implications of the Snowden Leaks. Intelligence and National Security 29 (6): 793–810.

38.

Karatzogianni

Gak

(2015) Hack or Be Hacked: The Quasi-Totalitarianism of Global Trusted Networks. New Formations 84 (1): 130–147.

39.

Kelty

(2005) Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology 20 (2): 185–214.

40.

Leigh

Harding

(2011) WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. London: Public Affairs.

41.

Lester

(2015) When Should State Secrets Stay Secret? Accountability, Democratic Governance, and Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

42.

Lyon

(2015a) Surveillance after Snowden. Cambridge: Polity.

43.

Lyon

(2015b) The Snowden Stakes: Challenges for Understanding Surveillance Today. Surveillance & Society 13 (2): 139–152.

44.

Marx

Muschert

(2009) Simmel on Secrecy. In: Rol

Papilloud

(eds) Soziologie als Möglichkeit. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp.217–233.

45.

Massey

(2013) Towards the End of Secrecy: Technological and Human Considerations. Available at: http://bohr-conference2013.ku.dk/documents/papers/Massey_Towards_the_End_of_Secrecy_Technological_and_Human_Considerations.pdf (accessed 12 January 2017).

46.

Mazzetti

Schmidt

(2013) Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden’s Leaks. The New York Times, 14 December. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/us/officials-say-us-may-never-know-extent-of-snowdens-leaks.html (accessed 12 December 2016).

47.

Melley

(2012) The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. New York: Cornell University Press.

48.

Miller

(2011) The Death of Secrecy: Need to Know … with Whom to Share. Studies in Intelligence 55 (3): 13–18.

49.

Moran

(2013) Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

50.

Moran

Aldrich

(2017) Trump and the CIA: Borrowing from Nixon’s Playbook. Foreign Affairs, 24 April. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-04-24/trump-and-cia (accessed 3 June 2017).

51.

Moynihan

(1999) Secrecy: The American Experience. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

52.

Nicol

(2017) Plane Spotters with £2.99 App Expose Top Secret UK Spy Plane off Russia. Daily Mail, 29 April. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4459044/Plane-spotters-2-99-app-expose-secret-UK-spy-plane.html (accessed 14 October 2017).

53.

Agrawal

Rao

(2013) Community Intelligence and Social Media Services: A Rumor Theoretic Analysis of Tweets during Social Crises. MIS Quarterly 37 (2): 407–426.

54.

Omand

(2015) Understanding Digital Intelligence and the Norms That Might Govern It. CIGI Paper series No. 8. Available at: https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/gcig_paper_no8.pdf.

55.

Perkins

Dodge

(2009) Satellite Imagery and the Spectacle of Secret Spaces. Geoforum 40 (4): 546–560.

56.

Phythian

(2007) The British Experience with Intelligence Accountability. Intelligence and National Security 22 (1): 75–99.

57.

Pozen

(2010) Deep Secrecy. Stanford Law Review 62 (2): 257–338.

58.

Priest

(2005) Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor. The Washington Post, 30 December. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122901585.html (accessed 15 December 2016).

59.

Qin

(2015) Hero on Twitter, Traitor on News: How Social Media and Legacy News Frame Snowden. The International Journal of Press/Politics 20 (2): 166–184.

60.

Quinn

(2014) GCHQ Chief Accuses Tech Giants of Becoming Terrorists. ‘Networks of Choice’. The Guardian, 3 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/03/privacy-gchq-spying-robert-hannigan (accessed 14 November 2016).

61.

Roberts

(2012) WikiLeaks: The Illusion of Transparency. International Review of Administrative Sciences 78 (1): 116–133.

62.

Robertson

(1987) Intelligence, Terrorism and Civil Liberties. Conflict Quarterly 7 (2): 43–62.

63.

Rogaway

(2015) The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work. IACR Cryptology, ePrint Archive, Report 2015/1162.

64.

Rule

(2007) Privacy in Peril. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

65.

Ruths

Pfeffer

(2014) Social Media for Large Studies of Behaviour. Science 346 (6213): 1063–1064.

66.

Sagar

(2013) Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

67.

Schlesinger

Jr (1987) Preface. In: Banisar

(ed.) Government Secrecy: Decisions without Democracy. Washington DC: People for the American Way, pp.5–6.

68.

Schoenfeld

(2011) Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

69.

Shachtman

(2009) Google Earth Shows U.S. Drones at Pakistani Air Base. Wired 19 February. Available at: http://cryptome.org/2012-info/obl-raid-mockup/obl-raid-mockup.htm.

70.

Shane

(2012) Cost to Protect U.S. Secrets Doubles to over $11 Billion. The New York Times, 21 February. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/us/politics/cost-to-protect-us-secrets-doubles-in-decade-to-11-billion.html (accessed 23 May 2016).

71.

Shorrock

(2008) Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. New York: Simon & Schuster.

72.

Sifry

(2011) In the Age of WikiLeaks, the End of Secrecy? The Nation, 3 March. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/age-wikileaks-end-secrecy/ (accessed 18 May 2016).

73.

Swire

(2015) The Declining Half-Life of Secrets. New America Cybersecurity Fellows Paper, No. 1. Available at: http://peterswire.net/publications_post/the-declining-half-life-of-secrets-and-the-future-of-signals-intelligence/ (accessed 13 October 2017).

74.

Thomson

(2015) Secret Canberra: Security Vetting Costs Millions as Public Service Job Freeze Thaws. The Canberra Times, 1 April. Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/national/secret-canberra-security-vetting-costs-millions-as-public-service-job-freeze-thaws-20150330-1may3e.html (accessed 14 May 2016).

75.

Van Buren

(2012) Obama’s Unprecedented War on Whistleblowers. Salon, 9 February. Available at: https://www.salon.com/2012/02/09/obamas_unprecedented_war_on_whistleblowers/ (accessed 12 May 2016).

76.

Vincent

(1998) The Culture of Secrecy: Britain 1832–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

77.

Vincent

(2016) Privacy: A Short History. Cambridge: Polity Press.

78.

Watts

(2012) David Davis Says Case for Secret Courts Based on a ‘Falsehood’. The Guardian, 15 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/may/15/david-davis-secret-courts-falsehood (accessed 15 October 2016).

79.

Weber

(1918) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Chap. ix, pt. 2. Tubingen: Paul Siebeck, pp.730–731.

80.

Wicker

(2013) Cellular Convergence and the Death of Privacy. New York: Oxford University Press.

81.

Zegart

(2007) Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.