Secrecy and security in transatlantic terrorism finance tracking

Abstract

Access to and diffusion of information relating to the Terrorism Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) has become a focal point for discussions about secrecy and democracy in the European Union. This paper analyses the dynamics of secrecy and publicity in the context of post-9/11 security programmes, in particular, the TFTP. Far from a binary between secrecy and transparency, the TFTP involves complex dynamics of knowledge, and strictly regulated information distribution. The purpose of the article is threefold. First, we contribute to debates on EU secrecy and democratic oversight, by advancing an understanding of secrecy as practice. Second, we document and discuss the longer trajectory of the contested secrecy and publicity of the TFTP, through examining three 'secrecy controversies' . Third, we ask whether the logics of secrecy in the EU are being revised and challenged in the context of transatlantic security cooperation. The rationales of secrecy deployed in security practice hinge on particular notions of potential future harm that, we argue, are shifting in the face of current understandings of the terrorist threat.

Everyday secrecy: Oral history and the social life of a top-secret weapons research establishment during the Cold War

“…New secrecy research moves us beyond a focus on policies and laws and engages secrecy regimes and the play of concealment and disclosure at the level of socio-technical practices (De Goede and Wesseling, 2017). This article argues that this move is important for generating a more complex understanding of the politics and power relations of concealment, but it can fruitfully be complemented by a concern with the everyday ways in which secrecy is lived, negotiated, practised and subverted by those entangled in its forms and norms.…”

“…Building on some of the fundamental insights generated by early sociological (Simmel, 1906) and social-psychological (Goffman, 1959) analyses of concealment, security researchers are moving beyond the study of this or that secret, and beginning to focus on secrecy, understood as the social processes of keeping and revealing secrets (Costas and Grey, 2016: 7). In the past few years we have seen an exciting wave of security research exploring secrecy (De Goede and Wesseling, 2017; Kearns, 2017; Neocleous, 2003; Paglen, 2010; Anaïs and Walby, 2015; Grondin and Shah, 2016), or ‘adjacent concepts’ (Costas and Grey, 2016: 2) like in/visibility (Van Veeren, 2017), ignorance (Rappert, 2012), conspiracy and non-knowledge (Aradau, 2017) and also the methodological challenges of researching ‘closed’ worlds (De Goede et al, 2020). I call this work ‘new secrecy research’ to distinguish it from the more conventional focus on revealing and exposing security secrets, or assessing the strategic merits of secrecy.…”

Truth and consequences? Reconceptualizing the politics of exposure

“…Research has often focused on thick descriptions of how secrecy operates as a set of relations or practices, with secrecy conceptualized not as simply the blacking out of information, but as a set of practices and social relations that make knowledge accessible, shareable or articulable in certain circumstances but not others (e.g. Aradau, 2017; De Goede and Wesseling, 2017; Gusterson, 1996; Kearns, 2016; Masco, 2002; Paglen, 2010; Van Veeren, 2014; Walters, 2015). Literature in this vein often focuses on analysing how secrecy occurs, and what it looks like in practice, rather than practical questions of whether the state can keep information from the public, or normative questions about whether it ought to do so.…”

Security in the balance: How Britain tried to keep its Iraq War secrets

“…The issue is not only that the law authorizes the executive to judge the potential harm caused by disclosure (Sagar, 2013: 4), but that this harm-based discourse is itself problematic. Second, showing how decisions are made contributes to a growing interest in the enactment of secrecy (Kearns, 2017; De Goede and Wesseling, 2017; Walters and Luscombe, 2016). The article shows how such decisions rely on balance metaphors and specific articulations of risk, which have been shown elsewhere to underpin exceptional states policies that would otherwise violate liberal democratic values (Waldron, 2003; Neocleous, 2007; Bigo, 2010; Stavrianakis, 2018).…”

“…Doing so would reduce disclosure debates entirely to a zero-sum game of security trumps, to the detriment of democracy. Transparency, as De Goede and Wesseling (2017) have noted, should not be conflated with meaningful scrutiny of the value and effectiveness of security practices. Only by shifting the debate back to the question of democratic values, rather than harm-avoidance, can this scrutiny be achieved.…”