Removing Knowledge
Peter Galison

Introduction
You might think that the guarded annals of classiﬁed information largely
consist of that rare document, a small, tightly guarded annex to the vast
sum of human writing and learning. True, the number of carefully archived
pages written in the open is large. While hard to estimate, one could begin
by taking the number of items on the shelves of the Library of Congress,
one of the largest libraries in the world: 120 million items carrying about
7.5 billion pages, of which about 5.4 billion pages are in 18 million books.1
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, andnow—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. So we biblio-owls of Minerva are counting sheets just as
the very concept of the classiﬁed printed page fades into its evening hours.
Undeterred, we might begin with a relatively small subset of the whole classiﬁed world, about 1.6 billion pages from documents twenty-ﬁve years old
or older that qualify as historically valuable. Of these 1.6 billion pages, 1.1
1. Assuming 3,000 pages per foot and 15 million pages per mile, the LOC contains
approximately 500 miles of shelf and thus about 7.5 billion pages. This averages 60 pages per
document, in contrast to the Joint Security Commission, which in 1994 estimated 3 pages perclassiﬁed document. I take this to have been superseded by the Department of Energy, Analysis of
Declassiﬁcation Eﬀorts, 12 Dec. 1996, http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doerep.html,which uses amean of 10 pages per classiﬁed document.
Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004)䉷 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/04/3101-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

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billion have been released over the last twenty years, with most opened sinceBill Clinton’s April 1995 Executive Order 12958. How many new classiﬁed
documents have been produced since 1978 or so is much harder to estimate—the cognoscenti disagree by several orders of magnitude—but there
isn’t an expert alive who thinks the recent haul is anything less than muchlarger than the previous twenty-ﬁve post–World War II years.
Some suspect as many as a trillion pages are classiﬁed (200 Libraries ofCongress). That may be too many. In 2001, for example, there were thirtythree 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 beingclassiﬁed as declassiﬁed). So the U.S. added a net 250 million classiﬁed pages
last year. By comparison, the entire system of Harvard libraries—over ahundred 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 ﬁvetimes as many pages are being added to the classiﬁed universe than are beingbrought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books andjournals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories
on the planet.2
If that were typical—or at any rate the right order of magnitude—thentwenty-ﬁve years of such actions would yield a very rough ﬁgure in the rangeof 8 billion pages since 1978. The fact that the number has been growing is
not to the point—even if it increased linearly from zero in 1978 to its current
rate twenty-ﬁve years later, that would only divide the total in two, “down”
to 4 billion pages. Indeed, however one calculates, the number of classiﬁ2. According to the Annual Report for ﬁscal 2001: Harvard College Library, eleven libraries
including Widener, net added 139,834 volumes for ﬁscal 2001. Librarians at Harvard estimate 30
volumes per three feet, so 10 volumes per foot or 300 pages per volume. In the ﬁscal year 2001 it
contained 8.9 million volumes; the total university library system net added 218,507 volumes to a
total of 14.7 million volumes.

P e t e r G a l i s o n is the Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science andPhysics at Harvard University. His main work explores the interaction among theprincipal subcultures of physics: How Experiments End (1987), Image and Logic(1997), and Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003). Several projects explore
crosscurrents between science and other ﬁelds, including his coedited volumes
The Architecture of Science (1999), Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998), andScientiﬁc Authorship (2003). In 1997, he was named a John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and in 1999 he received the Max Planck Prize.

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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004

cation actions is increasing dramatically both as a result of a boosted defense, intelligence, and weapons lab budget and because we are living in a
climate of augmented secrecy. Figured another way, the supervising agency,
the Information Security Oversight Oﬃce (ISOO), reports a total expenditure in 2001 of $5.5 billion to keep classiﬁed documents secure. The Department of Energy costs are now about $0.30 per secure document per year.
Estimating by this economic measure, we would ﬁgure that about 7.5 billion
pages are being kept under wraps—a classiﬁed Library of Congress with anacquisition rate ﬁve times greater than the great library Thomas Jeﬀerson
bequeathed to this country over two centuries ago.
One last set of numbers: there are 500,000 college professors in the UnitedStates—including both two- and four-year institutions. Of course there areothers—inventors, industrial scientists, computer programmers—responsible for generating and conveying knowledge, especially technical knowledge. But to ﬁx ideas, four million people hold clearance in the United States,
plus some vast reservoir who did in the past but no longer do. Bottom line?
Whether one ﬁgures by acquisition rate, by holding size, or by contributors,
the classiﬁed universe is, as best I can estimate, on the order of ﬁve to tentimes larger than the open literature that ﬁnds its way to our libraries. Ourcommonsense picture may well be far too sanguine, even inverted. The
closed world is not a small strongbox in the corner of our collective houseof codiﬁed and stored knowledge. It is we in the open world—we who study
the world lodged in our libraries, from aardvarks to zymurgy, we who areliving in a modest information booth facing outwards, our unseeing backs
to a vast and classiﬁed empire we barely know.
One can trace the history of secrecy back to the ancient Babylonians
through medieval longbows and ﬁn de siècle invisible ink, from tightly
guarded formulae for Venetian glass-making to the hidden pouches of diplomatic couriers. Trade secrecy, state secrets, military secrets are all part ofthe background to the modern system. But this modern secrecy system has
its substantive start not in antiquity but in the vast infrastructure of WorldWar II. In part this new secrecy issued from the government, and yet in nosmall measure it emerged in the hands of scientists themselves as theylaunched a discipline of self-censorship on matters relating to the nucleus.
Out of the 2 billion dollar Manhattan Project and its subsequent evolution
into the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy)
came one sector of secrecy—with its twin classiﬁcation categories of Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data (FRD), this last for uninteresting historical reasons covering military applications of nuclear weapons
rather than their production or design. Alongside nuclear secrecy arose another fundamental category, National Security Information.

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At the pinnacle of the National Security Information world is the president who himself can classify or, more realistically, have his agency heads
classify. These agency heads in turn delegate that power to a relatively small
number of others—just over 4,000 for the whole of the United States—whobear the title of Original Classiﬁers. Only this initiated cadre can transforma document, idea, picture, shape, or device into the modal categories Top
Secret, Secret, or Conﬁdential. And of these 4,132 or so Original Classiﬁers,
only 999 (as of 2001) are authorized to stamp a document into the category
Top Secret.3
Those few people are the unmoved prime movers of the classiﬁed world;
it is they who begin the tagging process that winds its way down the chainof derivative classiﬁcation. For every document that subsequently refers to
information in those originally classiﬁed gains the highest classiﬁcation of
the documents cited in it. Like the radio tagging of a genetic mutant, theclassiﬁed information bears its mark through all the subsequent generationsof work issuing from it. More numbers: in 2001 there were 260,678 originalclassiﬁcations (acts that designated a body of work classiﬁed) and 32,760,209
derivative ones.4 A cascade of classiﬁcation.
But there is another way for documents to become classiﬁed. Under the
Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954, materials produced about nuclear
weapons–related activities are exempt from the blessing hands of the Original Classiﬁers. Nuclear weapons knowledge is born secret. No primal actof classiﬁcation is needed, no moment when they pass out of light into darkness, no justiﬁcation, no term of expiration is needed to wrap them in theprotective blanket of restriction. Nuclear knowledge becomes classiﬁed theinstant it is written down—even by someone who has no nuclear weapons(Q) clearance. If I think of a new scheme for channeling X-rays from a ﬁssion primary to a thermonuclear secondary and write that idea down, I am
(strictu sensu) forbidden from possessing the page I just created. (Technically, I could be arrested for espionage for reading or even possessing theletters or pictures in my printer, on my screen, or under my pen.) And yetin this world of natal secrecy there is a subtlety born in the holy matrimony
of industry and the weapons laboratories: an isotope-separatingtechnology
used to produce special nuclear materials such as U-235 or U-233. A separation technique—in some sense the heart of nuclear weapons of mass destruction—remains entirely in the open until just that moment when it
might demonstrate (as the Federal Register puts it) “reasonable potential
for the separation of practical quantities of special nuclear material.”5 At
3. See 2001 ISOO Report to the President, http://www.fas.org/sgp/isoo/2001rpt.html
4. See 2002 ISOO Report to the President, http://www.fas.org/sgp/isoo/2002rpt.pdf
5. U.S. Department of Energy, Oﬃce of Declassiﬁcation, “Restricted Data Declassiﬁcation
Decisions 1946 to the Present,” RDD–7, 1 Jan. 2001, http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/rdd-7.
html; hereafter abbreviated “RDD.”

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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004

precisely this moment of eﬃcacy it morphs into Restricted Data; as classiﬁer
Arvin Quist puts it in a document addressed to his fellow guardians of thefaith, the separation technology becomes “classiﬁed only when it reaches‘adolescence.’”6
In 1995, the National Research Council working with the DOE estimatedthat the DOE’s born and adolescent classiﬁed documents numbered some
280 million pages—an amount that would take its current compliment ofreviewers 9,000 years to review—if, against reality, not a line of new material
were added.7 However incomplete it is now, this nine-millennium stack is
ten times larger than the previous estimate given a few years earlier. Needlessto say, neither the DOE nor any other agency has the budget, the mandate,or the intention of catching up. In the last few years the rate of classiﬁcation
increased ﬁvefold, with no end in sight. Secret information is accumulating,at a rate that itself is accelerating, far quicker than it is being declassiﬁed.

The Classified Theory of Knowledge
With such a vast reservoir of learning under wraps, the Department ofEnergy must have—if not explicitly then at least implicitly—some sense ofwhat can and cannot be released. What, we may ask, is the theory of interdicting knowledge? Let us begin with a distinction imposed since 1945, segregating subjective from objective secrecy. Subjective secrets are said byclassiﬁers to display ﬁve key characteristics—they are compact, transparent,
arbitrary, changeable, and perishable. Compact means they can be expressed very brieﬂy; transparent, that they are readily understandable (“twoof the Abrams tanks are disabled”); changeable means that they typically
can be revised (“the 101st Airborne will conduct its ﬁrst drop at ﬁrst light”);
and they are perishable (normally after some decent interval, for example,
once the 101st has landed the fact that they did so loses its potency). Objective
secrets are supposed to contrast with each of these qualities separately—
they are supposed to be diﬀuse, technical, determinable, eternal, and longlasting qua secrets. That is, they may be far from expressible in a few words(a theory of neutron diﬀusion involves integro-diﬀerential equations andtakes volumes to express when it is put into useable form); they may not be
understandable to anyone without a technical training (no untrained observer simply grasps the details of ﬂuorocarbon chemistry); they are supposed to be determinable insofar as they can be deduced if the right question
is posed (the number of neutrons emitted in uranium ﬁssion can be foundwith enough eﬀort and equipment); and ﬁnally the objective secret is sup6. Arvin S. Quist, “Security Classiﬁcation of Information,” 2 vols., http://www.fas.org/sgp/
library/quist2/index.html, vol. 2, chap. 3; hereafter abbreviated “SC.”7. See National Research Council, A Review of the Department of Energy Classiﬁcation Policy andPractice (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 7–8.

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posed to be in some sense unchangeable (in the limit case a law of naturebut, if not that, then least as unchangeable as the ﬁnely articulated processof preparing equipment against the corrosive eﬀects of uranium hexafluoride). As such objective secrets are long-lasting secrets (see “SC,” vol. 2,
chap. 2).
In important ways, objective secrets pose the more diﬃcult problem,
though subjective ones can be quite deadly if exposed (Loose Lips Sink Ships).
Particular movements or strengths of troops or materiel seem more straightforward. But to accomplish the goal of secrecy—the blocking of knowledgetransmission—is an extraordinarily diﬃcult task. And given the resources
devoted to it, it is perhaps worth inquiring just what its principles are.
In other words, suppose we ask about the transmission of knowledge notby asking the usual social studies of knowledge question, How does replication occur? but instead by probing the staggeringly large eﬀort devoted
to impeding the transmission of knowledge. Already before America’s entry
into World War II, nuclear scientists began a self-imposed ban on publishing matters relating to nuclear ﬁssion. The eﬀect was immediate: Nazi scientists spent the war struggling to moderate neutrons (slow them down tothe point where they were eﬀective in causing ﬁssion) using heavy water(deuterium) rather than the vastly more useful graphite. This self-imposed
muzzle continued through the war, issuing in the founding document ofmodern secrecy, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. That act released certain
parts of the basic chemistry and physics of materials including uranium,
thorium, and polonium but kept a lid on the details of a vast amount oftechnical knowledge, including some basic physics. For example, in 1950 it
was permitted to say that the impact of a neutron on U-233, U-236, Pu-239,
or Pu-240 could release a gamma ray, but it remained forbidden to say just
how likely this reaction was. Only in 1956 would the process technology for
producing uranium metal and preparing alloys of uranium and thorium bereleased. More indirectly, the cost of highly enriched uranium (about$25,000/kg) was only declassiﬁed in 1955; presumably the mere quotationof a price conveyed certain information about how it was done (ordinary
metallic uranium was running about $40/kg) (see “SC,” vol. 2, chap. 2).
Indeed, one of the most classiﬁed parts of the ﬁssion bomb was the process by which highly enriched metallic U-235 was produced. It is instructive
to follow the sequence of declassiﬁcation orders from 1946 to 1952 showing
the gradual erosion of restriction on electromagnetic separation:
1946: Physics of electrical discharges in a vacuum, experimental data andtheory.
1946: “Electrical controls and circuits. . . . omitting reference to classiﬁed
installations.”

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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004

1947: “Experimental and theoretical physics of [electromagnetic separation] provided they do not reveal production details or processes.”
1952: “Experimental and theoretical physics and chemistry, engineering
designs and operating performance of single electromagnetic process units
without identiﬁcation as components of the Electromagnetic ProductionPlant”(“RDD”).
Each step gave more detail, more about the internal wiring and construction of the machinery until, by the end, the major secret was simply thelabel of the documents as being for the separation facility at Oak Ridge.
But perhaps the best way to grapple with the secrecy system is to follow
the instructions. Suppose you are an Original Classiﬁer at the Departmentof Defense. The “Handbook for Writing Security Classiﬁcation Guidance”
is your bible, and it begins by reviewing the various arenas of classiﬁed material, from weapons, plans, and cryptology to scientiﬁc, technological, andeconomic matters aﬀecting national security. Then you are to ask yourself
these questions. First, Is the information owned by, produced by or for, or
under the control of the United States government? If yes, then check thatthe information falls in one of the regulated domains (such as cryptology).
If it still looks like a classiﬁcation candidate, then pose this question: Can
the unauthorized disclosure of the information reasonably be expected tocause damage to the national security? And if the information is of the destructive type, then the acid test is this:What is the level of damage (“damage,” “serious damage,” or “exceptionally grave damage”) to the national security expected in the event ofan unauthorized disclosure of the information? If the answer to thisquestion is “damage” you have arrived at a decision to classify the information Conﬁdential. If the answer is “serious damage,” you have arrived at a decision to classify the information Secret. If the answer is“exceptionally grave damage,” you have arrived at a decision to classify
the information Top Secret.8
You—the classiﬁer—should then designate the material secret for a periodof time less than ten years or, for a variety of reasons, you may want to justify
an extension beyond ten years. Just a few of such reasons to carry on withsecrecy: revelation of hidden information that might assist in the development of weapons of mass destruction, impair the development of a U.S.
weapon system, reveal emergency plans, or violate a treaty.
8. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence,“Department of Defense Handbook for Writing Security Classiﬁcation Guidance,” DoD 5200.1–
H, Nov. 1999, http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/52001h_1199/p52001h.pdf,p. 8;
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Next in this antiepistemology you have to do what anyone pursuing amore positive program would: establish the state of the art. This includes
of course published materials in the United States and abroad but also, andmore problematically, known but unpublished material including that possessed by unfriendly countries. By consulting with the intelligence services,
you will want to ﬁnd out what the foreign knowledge is of unpublishedmaterials in the United States. All this, however, is preliminary. Having established what is known, you must identify how classiﬁcation will add tothe “net national advantage,” that is, “the values, direct and indirect, accruing or expected to accrue to the United States” (“DD,” p. 12). Such advantage might derive from the suppression of the fact that the governmentis interested in a particular eﬀort or that it has something in its possession.
Or the capabilities, performance, vulnerabilities, or uniqueness of an object(or bit of knowledge) that the United States has. The net national advantage
might be in guarding surprise or lead time, manufacturing technology, or
associations with other data. The real heart of a classiﬁcation guide is theidentiﬁcation and enunciation of the speciﬁc items or elements of information warranting security protection. Regardless of the size or complexityof the subject matter of the guide, or the level at which the classiﬁcation
guide is issued, there are certain identiﬁable features of the information thatcreate or contribute to actual or expected national security advantage.
Getting at those “special features or critical items of information” andtying them to the net national advantage is the primary task of the classiﬁer(“DD,” p. 13). This is where the writer of the guide has to get inside theinformation being hidden. The questions are subtle. “Are the countercountermeasures obvious, special, unique, unknown to outsiders or othernations?” you should ask yourself. Or would knowledge of the countercountermeasures assist in carrying out new countermeasures? “What,” theguide demands, “are the things that really make this eﬀort work?” (“DD,”pp. 36–37). Here is the analysis of science and technology opened in manyof its aspects, all in the service of stopping the ﬂow of science. It puts me inmind of an experimental ﬁlm I once saw, a black-and-white sixteen-millimeter production, printed in negative, all shot within a single room ﬁlledwith tripods and lamps. As each light came on, it cast black over its portionof the screen. Here is something similar. Understanding the ways in whichthings work, are made, deployed, and connected are all used to interdict
transmission. Your job as a classiﬁer is to locate those critical elements thatmight lead to vulnerabilities—and then to suppress those that can be protected by classiﬁcation. The guide insists that secrets are not forever. You
must answer the question: how long can this particular secret reasonably
be expected to keep?

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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004

Epistemology asks how knowledge can be uncovered and secured. Antiepistemology asks how knowledge can be covered and obscured. Classiﬁcation, the antiepistemology par excellence, is the art of nontransmission.

Pressures to Declassify
With the end of the cold war in 1989–90—and the election of Bill Clinton—the executive branch pressed the agencies to release some of the vast
trove of secrets. Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary announced on 7 December 1993 that the DOE had begun to “lift the veil of Cold War secrecy” andto make visible some of the hidden data.9 Increasingly, scientists, scholars,
activists, and the DOE itself tried to displace an ethos in which justiﬁcation
was needed to release information to one in which it required justiﬁcation
to keep information classiﬁed. The arguments for openness were several.
Cost was one—as I mentioned, some $5.5 billion goes into maintaining thesecret storehouse. But that isn’t the only justiﬁcation. As the national security establishment itself has long recognized, overclassiﬁcation breedsdisregard for classiﬁcation procedures. Serious classiﬁers (as opposed to yahoopoliticians desperately looking to classify everything in sight) want the arenas of real secrecy to be protected with higher walls and the vast penumbral
gray range to be open.
Back in 1970, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Secrecy, headed
by Frederick Seitz, argued to the secretary of defense that there was vastly
too much secrecy—and that even a unilateral set of disclosures was preferable to the current system. An all-out eﬀort by the U.S. and the USSR tocontrol thermonuclear weapons failed utterly as the United Kingdom andChina followed soon on their heels. Conversely, when the nation decided
to open certain areas of technical research, the results were powerful. The
U.S. led in microwave electronics and computer technology, in nuclear reactors beginning in the mid-1950s, and in transistor technology.10 Examplesof secrecy gone amok are legion, including some $2.7 billion that sank likea stone into an unworkable special access program aiming to produce theNavy A-12 attack aircraft. Secrecy contributed too in the protection of unworkable programs like the one outﬁtted to build the Tacit Rainbow antiradar missile and the ($3.9 billion) Tri-Service Standoﬀ Attack Missile.11
Then there are the historians and journalists who clamor for access to
documents about the history of the national security state. These groups
join a chorus of others from legislators and lawyers to former atomic
9. Secretary of Energy Advisory Board website, http://www.seab.energy.gov/sub/openpanl.html
10. See Steven Aftergood, “Government Secrecy and Knowledge Production: A Survey of Some
General Issues,” http://ciaonet.org/wps/rej02/rej02b.html
11. See ibid.

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workers, soldiers, and ordinary citizens who have militated for a glimpseof records about radiological contamination, test sites, radiological experimentation on humans, and nuclear working conditions. Scientists
themselves—especially those the national laboratories want to recruit from
elite universities—want a degree of openness in which they can encounter
other ideas and publish their own. But my own judgment is that none ofthese constituencies would have made even the limited progress they madeduring the Clinton years had it not been for the insistence of industry demanding loud and clear that they no longer be excluded from the trove ofsecret (objective) information. Declassiﬁcation makes it easier and cheaper
for industry to produce—and, needless to say, opens the vast civilian and,within the constraints of export controls, the huge foreign military market.

Trade Secret Legitimacy
But within the secret world managing the ﬂood of data has presented
ever greater problems. There is a nervousness in the classifying community,
a sense that the rising mountain of classiﬁed materials is unstable. The absence of a principled basis for classiﬁcation weighs heavily—and classiﬁcation itself makes it hard to provide such a systematic understanding.
Need-to-know compartmentalization leaves classiﬁers in diﬀerent domains
unable to communicate with one another, and each isolated branch forms
its own routines of hiding. When the Department of Energy commissioned
Oak Ridge classiﬁer Quist to do a massive study of security classiﬁcation,
he commented throughout his several volume report that there simply were
no principles on which classiﬁcation could be staked. And he wanted sucha foundation.
Trade secrets appeared to be the open society’s equivalent of national
security secrecy, and Quist—speaking both to and for the DOE—saw intrade secrecy law the possibility of establishing, at last, a ground. Addressing
the army of classiﬁers, Quist put it this way:
Our legal system’s roots go back millennia, thereby giving that system asolid foundation. Trade secret law is a part of that legal system. Trade secret law has developed over hundreds of years and has been a distinct
area of the legal system for over a century—principles of trade secret
law are widely accepted. Because trade secret law evolved as part of the“common law,” it has a ﬁrm basis in our culture. Our extensive body of
trade secret law has been developed by a very open process; the workings of our legal system are essentially completely open to the public,
and the judicial decisions on trade secrets have been extensively published and discussed. Thus, trade secret law rests on a solid foundation,is consistent with our culture, and is known, understood, and acceptedby our citizens. [“SC,” vol. 2, appendix A]

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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004

Establishing the isomorphism between the national security and trade secret then became the order of the day. For this was the holy grail: the exact
mechanism for the Teller-Ulam idea, the scheme that ﬁrst made possible
the detonation of a true hydrogen bomb, would remain a ﬁercely guarded
secret—one for which the government was willing to wage an all-out battle
in court against the Progressive (a rather small left-leaning magazine thatprinted an article describing the rudiments of the Teller-Ulam scheme). The
DOE’s declassiﬁcation guide RDD-7 reports the guarded release in 1979 of
the idea this way: “The fact that, in thermonuclear weapons, radiation froma ﬁssion explosive can be contained and used to transfer energy to compress
and ignite a physically separate component containing thermonuclear fuel.
Note: Any elaboration of this statement will be classiﬁed” (“RDD”). And soit has remained for over half a century. Just such secrets, says Quist, ought
to be understood by comparison with the holiest of trade secrets, that bestkept of all commercial formulae, “the recipe for Coca-Cola Classic威 has
been kept a secret for over one hundred years. It is said that only two CocaCola威 company executives know that recipe [which] is in a safe deposit box
in Atlanta, which may be opened only by vote of the company’s board of
directors. . . . We probably would not know if a national security secret was
as well-kept as the secret of Coca-Cola威” (“SC,” vol. 2, appendix A).
Schematizing Quist’s argument, the parallelism between the secrets ofnukes and nachos might go something like this:12
Characteristic
interest
deﬁnition

availability
knowledge insideorganization
secrecy measures
taken

National Security Secret(Objective)

Trade
Secretnational security
weapons-related “facts ofnature,” technical design
and performance of weapons; method, process,technique or device to create a weapon
must in fact be secretmust be distributed on aneed-to-know basis
U.S. v. Heine: exonerated
Heine on grounds that if
the U.S. had not protected
the (aviation) secrets inside the U.S. then could
not convict Heine for having sent information toforeign power

proﬁtsformula, pattern, compilation, program, device
method, technique, process that is of economic
value and derives its value
from secrecy
must in fact be secretmust be distributed on aneed-to-know basis
must take “reasonable”
measures that might include: restricted access,“no trespassing” signs;
guards; restrictive covenants; brieﬁngs; badges;
compartmentalization

12. The following chart builds on “SC,” vol. 2, appendix A.

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value of informationeﬀort to develop
secreteﬀort needed forothers to develop

former employees

must have actual or potential military advantage.
must constitute a suﬃcient eﬀort such that thisinvestment in development “is a factor in its
classiﬁcation”
must be such that the secret be not readily ascertainable by easy reverse
engineering, reference
books, trade journals, etc.
use classiﬁed solutions toclassiﬁed problems tosolve unclassiﬁed problems “outside the fence”

must have actual or potential economic advantage
must protect “the substantial investment of employers in their propriety
information [trade secrets]”must be such that the secret be not readily ascertainable by easy reverse
engineering, reference
books, trade journals, etc.
“former employees canmake use of general skills,
knowledge, memory ifthey do not include . . .
‘special conﬁdential
knowledge obtained fromthe employer which belongs to the employer’”

There are two fascinating aspects to Quist’s recourse to trade secret law.
First, of course, is the formal structure: he is able to develop a largely parallel
structure between security and trade secrecy. But perhaps even more interesting is a second feature. At the end of the cold war (the two volumes
appeared in 1989 and 1993 respectively) a senior classiﬁcation oﬃcer could
see security secrecy as in need of legitimation from something exterior to
the needs of the state. While the nuclear establishment could draw on the1946 Atomic Energy Act and its successor legislation, trade secrecy carried
the weight of a long history. And while the Atomic Energy Act was largely
isolated from other bodies of law, and so much of the AEC’s own comportment was shrouded in secrecy, trade secrecy law (so Quist argued)
emerged from open judicial structures. Because it was hammered out on
the anvil of common law, it was part of the wider culture in ways that thescientist and executive branch–created AEC never would be. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to imagine that such a search for justiﬁcation seemed necessary at the height of the cold war. Yet here is a case, made from inside theDepartment of Energy, for its secret practices to ﬁnd a grounding in thelegal ethos of the corporation.

Conclusion: Producing Ignorance
When the Establishment of Secrecy tries to block the transmission ofdangerous knowledge, it faces a fundamental dilemma. If it blanket classiﬁesThis content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 05 Jan 2016 16:41:13 UTC
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004

whole domains of learning (nuclear physics, microwave physics), the accumulated mass of guarded data piles up at a smothering rate. It impedes
industry, it interferes with work within the defense establishment, and it
degrades the very concept of secrecy by applying it indiscriminately. Yet
when the guardians of secrets try to pick and choose, to hunt for the criticalnumber, essential technique, or irreplaceable speciﬁcation, when they try
to classify this fact, that property, or those circumstances, they ﬁnd themselves in an impossible situation. They ﬁnd themselves struggling to halt or
at least stall the spread of vital, large-scale sectors of the technical-scientiﬁcsphere through the protocol-driven excision of bits of language and technique. It is as if they want to make an image unreadable by picking oﬀ justthe vital pixels one by one. Indeed such a digital metaphor may be morethan allusive. Faced with the proliferation of electronically registered data,
the government is now embarking on a massive eﬀort to recruit AI (artiﬁcial
intelligence) to automate the classiﬁcation (and declassiﬁcation) of the ﬁber-optic pipes of digital secrets pouring out of the national laboratories
and their aﬃliates.
Philosophically, this puts us, oddly ﬂipped (and through a deadly pun),in the footsteps of early twentieth-century philosophy, when Bertrand Russell and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein were struggling to articulate a visionof language in which communication would be reduced to the assembly of
isolated atomic propositions. These elemental bits of meaning “Red patch
here now” or “Smell of ozone 12:00 noon in this room” were to be assembled
into the molecular and from then into ever more complex concatenations.
The eﬀort failed back in the early 1900s because facts never did remain
within their conﬁnes; as even its staunchest advocates eventually conceded,facts could not be deﬁned without theory, and theory, ever-spreading, refused to congeal into the isolable knowledge-islands of which seventeenthcentury natural philosophers dreamed.
For both practical and theoretical reasons, the atomic statements of the2003 Department of Energy are no more likely than Russell’s atomic statements of 1903 to stay in their place. At some level, even the DOE and its
sister agencies know this. DOE exempts prototype development of isotope
separation technology from the maws of classiﬁcation because the DOE
desperately needs industrial and university-based work to produce eachnext generation of devices that will spew out the special materials for nuclear
weapons. Think of tunable die lasers. But then, just as the lasers actually
start sorting the U-235 from the U-238, the secrecy lid slams down and theknowledge becomes adolescent classiﬁed. Too bad for us, though, because
the techniques, skilled operators, businesses, journal articles, and graduate
students are by then on the hoof. Is it a surprise that the West Germans

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Peter Galison / Removing Knowledge(with no nuclear weapons program) were able (in the mid-1970s) to export
the technology to apartheid South Africa which immediately began assembling and eventually detonating a nuclear bomb? Or for that matter is itreally astonishing that DOE’s claim that they could contain any elaborationof the Teller-Ulam idea eventually failed?
Back in 1966 when Thomas Pynchon published his great Crying of Lot
49, he sketched a paranoid and disjointed society, a universe so obsessedwith concealment and conspiracy, with government and corporate monopoly control of information, that the causal structure and even the raw
sequence of events hovered perpetually out of reach. Now that the secretworld has begun to exceed the open one, Pynchon’s fantasy stands evernearer to hand. In the midst of his protagonist Oedipa Maas’s eﬀorts tounderstand what is happening to her, she stumbles across a cryptogram
scrawled onto a latrine wall, inscribed into postage stamps, present—if one
looks carefully—just about anywhere. It was, as she soon discovers, the oldpost horn, symbol of the late medieval Thurn and Taxis state monopoly
postal system. But there is a twist. Pynchon’s post horn has a mute jammed
into it; communication is blocked.13
Secret societies with private communication desperately tried to counterthe monopoly on information; Pynchon’s world crawls with disaﬀected engineers trying to patent Maxwell’s demon, would-be suicides, and isolated
lovers all seeking to break the out-of-control monopoly of knowledge transmission. Mad as it sounds, is it madder than it must feel to the radio astronomers who discover that important bits of what they know about theirbest instruments have long been clear to the National Reconaissance Organization (NRO) and NSA? That one of the main objects of astrophysicalinquiry (gamma ray bursters) emerged not in the groves of academe but
through secret eﬀorts to monitor potential Russian violations of the Nuclear
Test-Ban Treaty using satellites built to ﬁnd H-bomb detonations on the far
side of the moon?
Contra the logical positivists and their allies, it is precisely not possible
to reduce meaningful language to discrete enunciations. Communication—at least meaningful, veriﬁable communication—cannot be rendered
into a sequence of protocol statements. But such a conception of knowledge
is exactly what lies behind the classiﬁers’ imaginary. To block the transmission of knowledge—to impede communication about the most deadly edgeof modern science and technology—the security services of the UnitedStates (and for that matter NATO, the Warsaw Pact, China, and dozens of
13. See Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966; New York, 1999).

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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004

other countries) have chosen to list facts, circumstances, associations, andeﬀects that would be banned from utterance.
At the root of this theory of punctiform knowledge excision stands a
fundamental instability. To truly cover an arena of knowledge one is drawn
ever outwards, removing from the public sphere entire domains until one
is in fact cutting out such a vast multiple of the original classiﬁcation thatthe derivative censorship covers 330 million pages per year—and growing.
Even that number is one kept “low” by beating down the classiﬁed domain
by its inverse—the classiﬁcation of particular points. But then one is caught
in the manifestly peculiar position of trying to stanch knowledge ﬂow bypunctiform excision.
On the one side, an unaﬀordable, intractable, holist antiepistemology,
on the other a ludicrously naive punctiform one. If this were just a theoretical matter it would be fascinating but delimited. It is not. At stake forthe national security establishment is the broad interference that compartmentalization is causing, manifest most recently in the world-changingfailures of intelligence leading up to 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction thatwere or weren’t in Iraq. Industry chafes under the restriction of classiﬁcation, and vast resources are needed to defend excessive retention of information. For universities the eﬀects of the new order of secrecy are justbeginning to be felt. The Patriot Act restricts laboratory access to people
coming from certain countries—a direct clash with universities’ own statutes that expressly forbid denying access to certain categories of laboratories
on the basis of race, creed, or national origin. More broadly, for all the conceptual and practical problems with classiﬁcation behind the fence at Los
Alamos or Livermore, the problem of restricting research in the open university may be far greater. But it is not just the rights and culture of universities that are at stake. Billions of dollars have been spent on projects thatscientiﬁcally or technically would not have—could not have—survived thegimlet-eyed scrutiny of international and open review. Whatever their strategic use or uselessness might have been, the atomic airplane and the X-ray
laser were not just over budget, they were over a doomed set of assumptions
about science and technology.
In the end, however, the broadest problem is not merely that of the weapons laboratory, industry, or the university. It is that, if pressed too hard andtoo deeply, secrecy, measured in the staggering units of Libraries of Congress, is a threat to democracy. And that is not a problem to be resolved byan automated Original Classiﬁer or declassiﬁer. It is political at every scale,from attempts to excise a single critical idea to the vain eﬀorts to remove
whole domains of knowledge.

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