Goatsucker: Toward a Spatial Theory of State Secrecy

Abstract

While the question of state secrecy has become a topic of much political debate, relatively little attention has been paid to the topic in academic literature. Most of the literature adopts one of several frameworks. In the legal literature, state secrecy has been examined as a historical and constitutional question. Social scientists have tended to follow Weber in examining secrecy as a question of regulation and bureaucracy or have focused on the cultural play of visibility and invisibility that is often characteristic of state secrecy. This paper, by way of contrast, uses the development of the F-117A ‘stealth fighter’ as a case study to give a spatial account of secrecy. I show how state secrecy gives rise to numerous spatial, political, juridical, and even ecological contradictions and propose that a spatial understanding of state secrecy foregrounding these contradictions provides a fruitful basis for a deeper understanding of state secrecy.

Assembling cybersecurity: The politics and materiality of technical malware reports and the case of Stuxnet

“…Secondly, paying attention to materials, to intangible artifacts, though only ever partial, and showing where they resist or refused, shows us how secret operations are not just acts of occluding/hiding information, of segregating knowledge, but are intensely spatial and material. These are insights already artfully demonstrated in the literature on secrecy practices that bear examination in the light of cybersecurity knowledge practices (Anaïs & Walby, 2016;Birchall, 2014;Paglen, 2010). This approach casts a critical eye on the way that the traces are produced by technics and spokespersons.…”

Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn’t There in the Study of Science and Security

“…9 Similarly, attempts to sequester awaysuch as in erasing secret government sites from maps or removing the deceased from places of dying-can create an absence that evokes a sense of what is missing. 10 An example of how presence can imply absence is given in the interpretations prominent scholars have made of photographs. Rather than the photo fixing an immobile moment, it has been interpreted as a trace ever haunted by what is outside the frame.…”

Where States Lie: A Historical Sociological Investigation into the Art of Cover Storying in a Secret Cold War Intelligence Operation

“…Yet a crucial weakness of this literature is the tendency to use the concept of secrecy as if it were a variable attribute mediating the relation between fixed and stable entities (with notable exceptions, e.g., Bail 2015;Best and Walters 2013;Birchall 2011;Bratich 2006;Costas and Grey 2014;Dean 2001;Gibson 2014;Ku 1998;Masco 2002;Paglen 2010a;Weiskopf and Willmott 2013). In a more contemporary and influential contribution on secrecy in government, Pozen (2009) suggests that secrecy can be indexed according to four interrelated continua: the number of people in the know; the kind of people in the know; how much of the secret they possess; and when they came to possess the secret.…”

“…In this final section, I want to develop the notion of 'cover storying' into a general concept that can supplement existing scholarship on the sociology of secrecy and deception in government and in organizations (e.g., Arendt 2001;Bail 2015;Becker 1996;Best and Walters 2014;Bratich 2006;Gibson 2014;Goffman 1969Goffman , 1986Harrington 2009;Ku 1998;Mearsheimer 2011;Paglen 2010a;Piché 2012). Although I present this concept before the analysis of Cobra Mist, thereby following the standard formula of scientific argumentation, this is largely misleading.…”

“…Second, from the geography of the site to the publicly visible architecture, the art of cover storying is bound to and constituted by its physical presence in the world (Herzfeld 2009;Paglen 2010a;Perkins and Dodge 2009). Here we would do well to make better use of recent work in actor-network theory to help clarify the role of agentive objects or actants in the translation of deception into operable technologies of cover storying (e.g., Bourne 2012;Latour 2005;Law 2009;Law and Callon 1988;Mol 2002).…”