The State Of Secrecy

Richard Norton-Taylor reveals the secrets of his forty-year career as a journalist covering the world of spies and their masters in Whitehall. Early in his career, Norton-Taylor successfully campaigned against official secrecy, gaining a reputation inside the Whitehall establishment and the outside world alike for his relentless determination to expose wrongdoing and incompetence. His special targets have always been the security and intelligence agencies and the Ministry of Defence, institutions that often hide behind the cloak of national security to protect themselves from embarrassment and being held to account. Encouraged by his trusted contacts in intelligence agencies and Whitehall departments, Norton-Taylor was among the first of the few journalists consistently to attack the planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequently covered for the Guardian the devastating evidence of every witness to the Chilcot inquiry. He also enjoyed unique access to a wide array of defence sources, giving him a rare insight into the disputes among top military commanders as they struggled to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with under-resourced and ill-equipped troops. Described by a former senior Intelligence official as a 'long-term thorn in the side of the intelligence establishment', and winner of numerous awards for his journalism, Norton-Taylor is one of the most respected defence and security journalists of his generation. Provocative, and rich in anecdotes, The State of Secrecy is an illuminating, critical and, at times, provocative account of the author's experiences investigating the secret world.

There is a hidden country within the United States. It was formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them. The government secrecy industry speaks in a private language of codes and acronyms, and follows an arcane set of rules and customs designed to perpetuate itself, repel penetration, and deflect oversight. It justifies itself with the assertion that the American values worth preserving are often best sustained by subterfuge and deception. Deep State, written by two of the country's most respected national security journalists, disassembles the secrecy apparatus of the United States and examines real-world trends that ought to trouble everyone from the most aggressive hawk to the fiercest civil libertarian. The book: - Provides the fullest account to date of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance program first spun up in the dark days after 9/11. - Examines President Obama's attempt to reconcile his instincts as a liberal with the realities of executive power, and his use of the state secrets doctrine. - Exposes how the public’s ubiquitous access to information has been the secrecy industry's toughest opponent to date, and provides a full account of how WikiLeaks and other “sunlight” organizations are changing the government's approach to handling sensitive information, for better and worse. - Explains how the increased exposure of secrets affects everything from Congressional budgets to Area 51, from SEAL Team Six and Delta Force to the FBI, CIA, and NSA. - Assesses whether the formal and informal mechanisms put in place to protect citizens from abuses by the American deep state work, and how they might be reformed.

Fascinating account of the British state's post-war obsession with secrecy and the ways it prevented secret activities from becoming public.

A series of five interlaced, in-depth biographical studies from across the spectrum of writers-turned-spies recruited by the Stasi.

Richard Norton-Taylor reveals the secrets of his forty-year career as a journalist covering the world of spies and their masters in Whitehall. Early in his career, Norton-Taylor successfully campaigned against official secrecy, gaining a reputation inside the Whitehall establishment and the outside world alike for his relentless determination to expose wrongdoing and incompetence. His special targets have always been the security and intelligence agencies and the Ministry of Defence, institutions that often hide behind the cloak of national security to protect themselves from embarrassment and being held to account. Encouraged by his trusted contacts in intelligence agencies and Whitehall departments, Norton-Taylor was among the first of the few journalists consistently to attack the planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequently covered for the Guardian the devastating evidence of every witness to the Chilcot inquiry. He also enjoyed unique access to a wide array of defence sources, giving him a rare insight into the disputes among top military commanders as they struggled to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with under-resourced and ill-equipped troops. Described by a former senior Intelligence official as a 'long-term thorn in the side of the intelligence establishment', and winner of numerous awards for his journalism, Norton-Taylor is one of the most respected defence and security journalists of his generation. Provocative, and rich in anecdotes, The State of Secrecy is an illuminating, critical and, at times, provocative account of the author's experiences investigating the secret world.

In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly.

Secrets and Leaks examines the complex relationships among executive power, national security, and secrecy. State secrecy is vital for national security, but it can also be used to conceal wrongdoing. How then can we ensure that this power is used responsibly? Typically, the onus is put on lawmakers and judges, who are expected to oversee the executive. Yet because these actors lack access to the relevant information and the ability to determine the harm likely to be caused by its disclosure, they often defer to the executive's claims about the need for secrecy. As a result, potential abuses are more often exposed by unauthorized disclosures published in the press. But should such disclosures, which violate the law, be condoned? Drawing on several cases, Rahul Sagar argues that though whistleblowing can be morally justified, the fear of retaliation usually prompts officials to act anonymously--that is, to "leak" information. As a result, it becomes difficult for the public to discern when an unauthorized disclosure is intended to further partisan interests. Because such disclosures are the only credible means of checking the executive, Sagar writes, they must be tolerated, and, at times, even celebrated. However, the public should treat such disclosures skeptically and subject irresponsible journalism to concerted criticism.

Traces the development of secrecy as a government policy over the twentieth century and its adverse effects on Cold War policy making