Introduction to the Special Issue on Secrecy and Technologies

Abstract

Many scholars have treated the inscrutability of technologies, secrecy, and other unknowns as moral and ethical challenges that can be resolved through transparency and openness. This paper, and the special issue it introduces, instead wants to explore how we can understand the productive, strategic but also emancipatory potential of secrecy and ignorance in the development of security and technologies. This paper argues that rather than just being mediums or passive substrates, technologies are making a difference to how secrecy, disclosure, and transparency work. This special issue will show how technologies and time mediate secrecy and disclosure, and vice versa. This article will therefore draw out the ways that themes of time, infrastructure, methodologies, and maintenance demonstrate the productive as well as negative dialectics of secrecy.

Keywords

• disclosure
• infrastructures
• mediation
• methodologies
• power
• secrecy
• secrecy studies
• security
• technology
• technologies
• temporality
• transparency