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Article by Peter Galison on government secrecy

Available here is the article "Removing Knowledge" by Peter Galison, co-director of SECRECY, on the subject of government secrecy which appeared in the academic journal Critical Inquiry in 2004. The article describes the increasing size and scope of the secrecy system which developed in the United States during the Cold War, looking at both the practical, historical, and epistemological implications of the every-increasing regime of classified knowledge.

An excerpt from the introduction:

In fact, the classified universe, as it is sometimes called, is certainly not smaller and very probably is much larger than this unclassified one. No one has any very good idea how many classified documents there are. No one did before the digital transformation of the late twentieth century, and now—at least after 2001—even the old sampling methods are recognized to be nonsense in an age where documents multiply across secure networks like virtual weeds. ... Some suspect as many as a trillion pages are classified (200 Libraries of Congress). That may be too many. In 2001, for example, there were thirty-three million classification actions; assuming (with the experts) that there are roughly 10 pages per action, that would mean roughly 330 million pages were classified last year (about three times as many pages are now being classified as declassified). So the U.S. added a net 250 million classified pages last year. By comparison, the entire system of Harvard libraries—over a hundred of them—added about 220,000 volumes (about 60 million pages, a number not far from the acquisition rate at other comparably massive universal depositories such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the New York Public Library). Contemplate these numbers: about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.

Galison's full article is available for download here.

Article by Robb Moss on making of SECRECY

Available here is the article "This Documentary Moment" by Robb Moss, co-director of SECRECY, on the creation of the film, from the magazine Media Ethics (Fall 2007). The article addresses the difficulty of making a film about secrecy:

While perhaps an important topic, it is in many ways a terrible idea for a film. Nobody wants to speak with you. There is nothing to see. Unlike other kinds of secrecy, government secrecy in the U.S. carries with it the carapace of an enormous infrastructure designed to keep the uninitiated out. Clearances, the need to know and the fearful imperative of national security align themselves against inquiry. How do we penetrate this world? What is there to film in any case? What kinds of visual invention are permissible? How do we verify what people say? Indeed, how will we know what we don't know?

Moss's full article is available for download here.

Other works by the Directors

• Objectivity (with Lorraine Daston, 2007)
  Scientific Objectivity often passes for good science itself—objectivity is not the same as truth, accuracy, precision, reliability, or pedagogical utility. In fact, using the history of scientific "atlases," compendia of scientific images, one can see that objectivity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, accompanying a dramatic transformation in the character of the scientist.
  (New York: Zone)
  
• Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (2003)
  The most famous physics paper of all time, Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity, reformed the very idea of time—using a "metaphor" of trains and clocks; this book argues that that was more than a metaphor, that Albert Einstein and his competitor, Henri Poincaré, were at the center of very real networks of trains, maps, and coordinated clocks.
  (New York: W. W. Norton)
  
• The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (2000)
  A documentary film about the people and decisions that led to the creation of the hydrogen bomb.
  Writer/producer, 44 minutes.
  Premiere: The History Channel, 2000.
  
• Picturing Science, Producing Art (edited with Caroline A. Jones, 1998)
  Art and science join most interestingly not in famous pictures with microscopes in them, but in the image-making practices of art and science. This volume assembles a wide range of historians of art, historians of science, philosophers, and sociologists to look at how representations are put to work.
  (New York: Routledge)
  
• Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1997)
  Two great, competing traditions of argument in modern laboratory physics have stood against one another for the last century—arguments form images and arguments from logic and statistics. Image and Logic tracks that struggle.
  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
  
• How Experiments End (1987).
  Analyzes how scientists come to the view that their results are real and not artifacts of the apparatus or the environment—from table top experiments to massive particle physics collaborations.
  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
  

• Secrecy (2008)
  A film about the vast, invisible world of government secrecy.
  Producer/director (with Peter Galison), non-fiction feature DV 85 min.
  Premiere: The Sundance Film Festival ('08)
  
• The Same River Twice (2003)
  Follows five friends from youth to middle-age.
  Producer/director/camera, non-fiction, 35mm color 78 min.
  Premiere: The Sundance Film Festival ('03)
• Lessons From Thin Air (1997)
  In collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution I made various films during this
  period about learning and teaching science.
  Director/camera/editor, beta 58 min.
  Nationwide Public Television broadcast (Oct. '97)
• The Tourist (1991)
  A filmed meditation on fertility, futility, and documentary filmmaking.
  Shot in Belize, Death Valley, Ethiopia, Japan, Hungary, Liberia, Nicaragua, Texas, St. Martin.
  Producer/director/camera/editor/writer, non-fiction, 16mm, color, 58 min.
  Premiere: The Telluride Film Festival ('91)
• Africa Revisited (1983)
  Explores the racial tension in a group of black and white Americans living in a West African village.
  Filmed in The Gambia. Producer/director/camera/editor, 16mm, color, 53 min.
  Premiere: WNET's "Independent Focus" 1984
  Rebroadcast on Best of Independent Focus 1985
• Riverdogs (1982)
  Dreamy 280 mile Colorado River trip signifying the end of the filmmaker's greatly extended adolescence, shot in Northwest Arizona.
  Producer/director/camera/editor, 16mm, color, 30 min.
  Premiere: The Moab Film Festival ('03)

Secrecy sites

Below are a select list of web resources for people interested in the history and practice of government secrecy.

• Secrecy News blog from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a regularly updated news site run by Steven Aftergood (interviewed in the film) that highlights secrecy issues
• Project on Government Secrecy from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a repository for information relating to U.S. secrecy policy
• National Security Archive at George Washington University maintains the largest non-governmental depository for declassified documents
• "Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Goverment Secrecy," chaired by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1997) (file hosted by FAS), a historic report on the history and problem of secrecy in U.S. government