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As many anthropologists and sociologists have long argued, understanding the meaning and place of secrets is central to an adequate representation of society. This article extends previous accounts of secrecy in social, governmental and organizational settings to configure secrecy as one form of visibility management among others. Doing so helps to remove the secret from a post-Enlightenment value system that deems secrets as bad and openness as good. Once secrecy itself is seen as a neutral phenomenon, we can focus, rather, on the politicality or ethics of any particular distribution of the visible, sayable, and knowable as well as the conditions that underpin a regime of visuality. Alongside understanding the work secrecy performs in contemporary society, this article argues that we can also seek inspiration from the secret as a methodological tool and political tactic. Moving beyond the claim to privacy, a claim that has lost bite in this era of state and consumer dataveillance, a 'right to opacity' – the right to not be transparent, legible, seen - might open up an experience of subjectivity, responsibility and even liberty beyond the circumscribed demands of the current political and technological management of visibilities.

Although expansions of state secrecy and the countervailing leaks of classified documents imbue the anthropology of secrecy with urgent relevance, secrecy has a long-standing status as a paradigmatically anthropological topic. In the ethnographic record, initiatory secrets often stand for the quiddity of culture, and the revelation of concealed realities is an organizing trope in much ethnographic writing. While situating research on secrecy as a reflection of epistemological and ethical dimensions of cultural anthropology more broadly, this review simultaneously explores parallels between different anthropological traditions by focusing on descriptions of the media through which social relations involving secrecy are transacted. Attending to ethnographic accounts of the way secrets travel across different media and coexist simultaneously in various mediated states provides both a novel intellectual framework for surveying recent research and a basis for conceptualizing the anthropology of secrecy itself as a practice that involves intermedial and transmedial knowledge flows.

International audience ; Secrecy became a major research topic in the history of science only in the last twenty-five years. Historians have come to realize how suffused scientific practice is with issues of secrecy. Yet they too often consider secrecy simply as a manner of protecting intellectual property to gain economic or military advantage over competitors. With this special issue, we want to give a state of research on scientific secrecy, but we also want also to hint at the richness of historiographical work still to be done when the focus is shifted from secrets to secrecy as a dynamic social relation.

International audience ; Secrecy became a major research topic in the history of science only in the last twenty-five years. Historians have come to realize how suffused scientific practice is with issues of secrecy. Yet they too often consider secrecy simply as a manner of protecting intellectual property to gain economic or military advantage over competitors. With this special issue, we want to give a state of research on scientific secrecy, but we also want also to hint at the richness of historiographical work still to be done when the focus is shifted from secrets to secrecy as a dynamic social relation.

International audience ; Secrecy became a major research topic in the history of science only in the last twenty-five years. Historians have come to realize how suffused scientific practice is with issues of secrecy. Yet they too often consider secrecy simply as a manner of protecting intellectual property to gain economic or military advantage over competitors. With this special issue, we want to give a state of research on scientific secrecy, but we also want also to hint at the richness of historiographical work still to be done when the focus is shifted from secrets to secrecy as a dynamic social relation.

This paper surveys tax haven legislation and links the literature on tax havens to the literature on asymmetric information. I argue that the core aim of tax haven legislation is to create private information (secrecy) for the users of tax havens. This leads to moral hazard and transaction costs in non-havens. The business model of tax havens is illustrated by using Mauritius and Jersey as case studies. I also provide several real world examples of how secrecy jurisdictions lead to inefficient market outcomes and breach of regulations in non-haven countries. Both developed and developing countries are harmed, but the consequences seem most detrimental to developing countries.

This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles. Attending to the depth of state secrets, the Article shows, can make a variety of conceptual and practical contributions to the debate on their usage. The deep/shallow distinction provides a vocabulary and an analytic framework with which to describe, assess, and compare secrets, without having to judge what they conceal. It sheds light on how secrecy is employed and experienced, which types are likely to do the most damage, and where to focus reform efforts. And it gives more rigorous content to criticisms of Bush administration practices. Elaborating these claims, the Article also mines new constitutional territory – providing an original account of the role of state secrecy generally, as well as deep secrecy specifically, in our constitutional order.

This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles. Attending to the depth of state secrets, the Article shows, can make a variety of conceptual and practical contributions to the debate on their usage. The deep/shallow distinction provides a vocabulary and an analytic framework with which to describe, assess, and compare secrets, without having to judge what they conceal. It sheds light on how secrecy is employed and experienced, which types are likely to do the most damage, and where to focus reform efforts. And it gives more rigorous content to criticisms of Bush administration practices. Elaborating these claims, the Article also mines new constitutional territory – providing an original account of the role of state secrecy generally, as well as deep secrecy specifically, in our constitutional order.

Abstract: "This article introduces a collection of papers devoted to the study of secrecy in European politics across a range of EU and national settings and policy domains. Academic interest in secret politics - those aspects of public activity intentionally concealed from the public eye - and the governance of secrecy - the political processes and regulatory frameworks governing secret keeping - is growing. This interest reflects technological, social and political developments that appear to signal the end of privacy and the rapid expansion of political secrecy in European multi-level settings. As a consequence, the tensions between democratic accountability, with its transparency requirements, and political secrecy, which is typically justified on grounds of effectiveness of state action, have become more marked and more politicised. Engaging with these developments, the contributions to this collection draw on actor- and interest-centred perspectives that focus on actors' motivations in secret politics; institutional perspectives that focus on contestation over secrecy norms; and organisational perspectives that emphasise the diversity of secrecy cultures. Further research will benefit from paying special attention to a diverse range of inter-institutional and inter-organisational secrecy settings; to political contestation over secrecy and the regulatory regimes that govern it; and to the refashioning of public-private secrecy architectures." (Seite 825)

Government secrecy (GS) is a significant social, political, and policy issue and often presents as a barrier to civic participation, public right-to-know, historical understanding, and institutional accountability. This volume examines GS in a variety of contexts, including comparative examination of government control of information, new definitions, categories, censorship, ethics, and secrecys relationship with freedom of information and transparency. It investigates GS in terms of its current theoretical descriptions as power over and concealment of information (Bok 1983), a tampering of communications (Friedrich 1972), the compulsory withholding of knowledge, reinforced by the prospects of sanctions for disclosure (Shils), or Georg Simmels (1906) idea of secrecy creating the possibility of a second world. Following the introduction this book is divided into the following six sections: Government Secrecy: Theoretical Musings; Government Secrecy and the Media; Government Secrecy and Technology; Freedom of Information; Government Secrecy: Current Policy; and Ethics. Articles are sourced from around the world and include some from USA, Mexico, Africa, Israel and Britain.