CIAO DATE: 4/00

Preface

Judith Reppy, Editor

Secrecy and Knowledge Production
Peace Studies Program, Cornell University
Occasional Paper #23
October 1999

Secrecy surrounds us. It binds people together while simultaneously erecting boundaries secure from penetration by others. It is a potent force for social organization and a tool for social control. Individuals as well as institutions produce and keep secrets; indeed, secrecy and its cousin privacy are at the core of current debates over national security, intellectual property regimes in an age of digital information, and the relationship between knowledge and social context. If secrecy is the opposite of openness and truthtelling, as night is to day, then secrecy has few advocates outside the realm of military security. However, dusk and dawn separate night and day; secrecy and openness catch their own image in each other’s eyes. Our goal in the following papers is to capture that twinkling image and make readers aware of the multiplicity of secrets and the ways in which we might understand their many ways of working.

The origins of this publication lie in a workshop on “Secrecy and Knowledge Production” sponsored by Cornell’s Peace Studies Program and held in Ithaca, New York on 18-19 April 1998. The workshop brought together interested scholars and practitioners from the worlds of national security and business to discuss the relationship of secrecy to the production of scientific and technical knowledge, the practice and consequences of secrecy in the national security arena, and the ways in which secrecy operates in private corporate settings. In addition to the invited papers that are collected here, our discussion was informed by the insightful comments of Sheila Jasanoff, Stefan Senders, and Susan Christopherson.

In the workshop we were interested in exploring how insights from the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) could be used to analyze public policy issues. S&TS scholarship on issues such as tacit knowledge, the labor of producing credible and reliable knowledge, and the mutual interactions of context and content in knowledge production has immediate ramifications for the study of secrecy in defense research. For example, John Cloud and Keith Clarke’s chapter on the Corona satellite program describes the work that went into maintaining a wall of secrecy and the ways in which information from the program nevertheless passed to the civilian sector.

Given the growing importance of intellectual property issues in everyday life, we also sought to investigate the similarities and differences between corporate and military secrecy, although the sanctions for industrial espionage pale next to the provisions for capital punishment for military spying. The chapters by Steven Aftergood and Frank Kapper offer analyses of government secrecy practices from two different perspectives. Secrecy appears as pervasive in the boardrooms as it has been in the situation room. Mark Fruin’s chapter on Japanese business practices highlights international differences in how corporations manage information dissemination, while Alec Shuldiner’s study of secrecy practices at Corning, Inc. and Susan Wright and David Wallace’s investigation of growing secrecy in both academe and corporations in the field of biotechnology reveal the variation among U.S. industries and institutions.

With the recent allegations over the transmission of nuclear secrets to China, our publication is remarkably timely. At the same time, the arguments offered here in chapters by Michael Dennis and Hugh Gusterson rule out the possibility of a quick, surgical fix for whatever problems plague the nation’s weapons laboratories. The designs of the W-88 warhead or neutron bomb are not the only loss, if published allegations are true; what is lost is the credibility and culture of the national laboratories. How stricter security will affect researchers is a question we cannot answer. We can, however, observe that the claim of openness as a prerequisite for scientific growth and change appears highly problematic, given the science done under totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century.

The workshop was organized by Judith Reppy and Michael Dennis with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s institutional training grant to the Peace Studies Program. Elaine Scott and Sandra Kisner provided essential administrative support for the workshop, and Sandra Kisner contributed significantly to the task of turning the workshop papers into an edited publication.

For example, could we not argue that the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957 was simply arms control by other means? That is, by measuring the earth’s gravitational field and producing sophisticated maps of the Arctic, Russia and the U.S. acquired the information necessary to allow inertial guidance systems to fly to their targets with a greater degree of accuracy. That is, more information allowed for greater claims of inevitable destruction.