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COMMENTARY Open Access
The Secret in the Information Society
Dennis Broeders
1
#The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract Who can still keep a secret in a world in which everyone and everything are
connected by technology aimed at charting and cross-referencing people, objects,
movements, behaviour, relationships, tastes and preferences? The possibilities to keep
a secret have come under severe pressure in the information age. That goes for the
individual as well as the state. This development merits attention as secrecy is founda-
tional for individual freedom as well as essential to the functioning of the state.
Building on Simmel’s work on secrecy, this paper argues that the individual’ssecrets
should be saved from the ever-expanding digital transparency. The legitimate function
of state secrecy in turn needs rescuing from a culture of secrecy and over-classification
that has exploded in recent years. Contrary to popular expectation, the digital revolution
adds another layer of secrecy that is increasingly hidden behind the facade of the ‘big
usable systems’we work and play with every day. Our dependence on information
systems and their black-boxed algorithmic analytical core leads to a certain degree of
Weberian (re) enchantment that may increase the disconnect between the system, user
and object.
Keywords Secrecy .Georg Simmel .Information society.Surveillance .Transparency
Philos. Technol.
DOI 10.1007/s13347-016-0217-3
This paper is an adaptation of the author’s inaugural lecture, delivered on 30 October 2015, when he formally
took up his professorship on the chair of Technology and Society at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is
indebted to Willem Schinkel and Huub Dijstelbloem for valuable and much appreciated comments on earlier
drafts and to Linnet Taylor for translating the original Dutch text. The orginal lecture called ‘Het geheim in de
informatiesamenleving’(Broeders 2015) can be downloaded here: http://www.wrr.nl/fileadmin/nl/
Presentaties/Dennis_Broeders/Het_geheim_in_de_informatiesamenleving_Oratie_Dennis_Broeders_okt_
2015.pdf
*Dennis Broeders
broeders@fsw.eur.nl
1
Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
2
Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, The Hague, The Netherlands
1 The Secret as a Social Category
Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad on 20 June 2015 carried an article titled
‘Transparent citizens’. It was one in a series of articles that attempted to address
significant current political problems. In this case, it was the question, ‘who can still
keep a secret?’This is a question that is extremely relevant in today’s digital society.
How can a secret be kept in a world where everything and everyone is connected by
technology designed to map and to link together people, objects, movements, relation-
ships, tastes and preferences? It is also an interesting issue given the social character of
secrets. One cannot keep a secret by one’s self. More than that, at the individual level,
the difference between public and private is effectively meaningless. Strangely, secrets
are social phenomena. Robinson Crusoe, when he thought he was alone on his island,
had no need for secrets or privacy.
1
To keep a secret from yourself is—if possible at
all—more a subject for psychology than sociology.
The social aspects of secrets are a well-established theme in sociology that in a
theoretical sense is mainly linked to the work of the German sociologist Georg Simmel.
A great name in classical sociology, who in most assessments stands amongst the
greatest along with Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Simmel wrote at the start of the
twentieth century of a ‘sociology of secrets’, looking at the function, the workings and
the value of secrets for social life. The most important sociological meaning of secrecy
was, according to him, external, since it creates a relation between the secret’s owner and
the other who does not know it.
2
Children create a social relationship when they say ‘I
know something you don’tknow’. If it were really supposed to remain secret, they
would do better not to speak about it. A secret, then, has a value that is sometimes
intrinsic, but may also often be external and social. Or as Simmel—a sociologist after
all—would say, keeping a secret is a form of stratification. A secret is a possession that
will also be coveted by others—he called the secret a jewel or an adornment—and,
therefore, a symbol of the owner’simportance.
3
I know something you don’tknow.
Simmel did not hide his appreciation for secrets when he called it ‘one of man’s
greatest achievements’.
4
That appreciation has, I think, two facets. First, he believes that
secrets make social life possible. Secrets are of fundamental importance for maintaining
relationships. Or, as Craig puts it in his reading of Simmel, ‘If I divulged every passing
thought, I doubt I would keep my friends for very long: by keeping parts of myself
secret, I maintain relationships.’
5
Anyone who tells nothing but the truth will soon find
themselves very lonely. Above all, the fact that people have secrets, or better put, the
fact that people are not fully knowable, is fundamental to the common trust that makes
possible everyday interaction between people who do not know each other. For
Simmel, that is a crucial element of modernity and urbanisation. In city life, people
are simultaneously more individualistic and more dependent upon others whom they do
not know.
Another element of modernity has to do with the changing arrangement between the
state and its citizens, and with the role and legitimacy of secrets in that relationship. At
1
Marx en Musschert (2009:7)
2
Simmel/Wolff (1950: 345)
3
Simmel/Wolff (1950: 338)
4
Simmel/Wolff (1950: 330)
5
Craib (1997: 163)
D. Broeders
the start of the twentieth century, Simmel saw a great shift with regard to secrecy on the
meta-level of ‘the state’and ‘the individual’—both in quotation marks. In the nine-
teenth century, so much light was cast on matters of state that traditional secrecy—until
then the norm for many state activities—was crumbling. At the same time, modern
urban life gave the individual more opportunity than before to become hidden amongst
the masses and to disappear. Simmel describes this dual development as follows:
Politics, administration and jurisdiction thus have lost their secrecy and inacces-
sibility in the same measure in which the individual has gained the possibility of
ever more complete withdrawal, and in the same measure in which modern life
has developed, in the midst of metropolitan crowdedness, a technique for making
and keeping private matters secret, such as earlier could be attained only by
means of spatial isolation.
6
In other words, the individual becomes free as she joins the masses. Through
specialisation and division of labour in modern life, many relationships become more
businesslike and impersonal. One can keep more private than before. ‘Stadtluft macht
frei’(the city air makes one free), one might say, although this mediaeval expression has
averyspecifichistoricalandlegalcontext.
7
Secrets are foundational to the bourgeois
society, where the individual can shield himself and create a private domain that is no
longer burdened with too much knowledge of the other. This allows for a private domain
screened from the public gaze.
8
In this formulation by Simmel, the state has become
more transparent. The Enlightenment brought the state’s secrets into the light of day. At
the same time, Simmel saw that the state was growing and diversifying and becoming
less easily made accountable on an organisational level, which created more opportu-
nities for secrecy.
Tod ay’s information society is an interesting case in terms of secrecy on the meta-
level, both of the individual and the state. In 2015 it is harder for individuals to keep
secrets and the government seems to have recovered its appetite for secrecy. Despite all
the reports and well-meaning research on ‘open government’and ‘open data’the
number of files, physical or virtual, marked ‘secret’or ‘classified’grows every day.
9
And it is at least a little worrying that government seems to permit the individual citizen
ever-fewer secrets. With regard to citizens, the mantra of government is ‘more informa-
tion’rather than less. Information, even personal information, does not always equal a
secret for everyone and at any time. Only when social tensions arise about information, it
becomes about secrecy: I want to keep something secret that someone else wants to
know. In the information society, secrets (in a sociological sense) are sometimes only
revealed as such when information is made public. The social dynamic of revealing
information means that some information is only retroactively realised to have been
considered a secret. The ability to hide information—and the secrets therein com-
prised—is a form of freedom that requires others to keep a suitable distance, not in
6
Simmel/Wolff (1950: 336–337)
7
The expresion ‘Stadtluft macht frei, nach Jahr und Tag’(city air makes free, after a year and a day) refers to a
mediaeval principle of law that serfs who resided in a city for a year and a day were henceforth regarded free
citizens of that city.
8
Horn (2011: 112)
9
See for example Curtin (2011)
The Secret in the Information Society
the least the government. In the information society, my thesis holds, the individual’s
ability to keep secrets diminishes and the volume of state secrets rises, but those state
secrets also become more vulnerable. Both developments are related to new technolo-
gies that themselves, in their turn, create a new layer of secrecy. Individual secrets, state
secrets and the secrets of technology itself are central to this paper.
2 The State’sSecrets
If secrets are important for individuals and for society itself, they are also important for
states. Indeed, for states secrets may be a matter of life and death. There is a rich
literature that discusses the role of secrets for states. Over the centuries state secrets
have played various roles and have been driven and justified by different political
logics. In an excellent overview, Eva Horn sets out the three most important forms of
political secrecy.
10
And, in good academic tradition, they have Latin names. State secrets
can be classed as mysterium,arcanum and secretum. These three terms not onlydenote a
historical evolution but also explain how state secrets are viewed in a political sense.
They highlight the role and legitimacy of state secrecy.
Mysterium comes from the middle ages and is a doctrine of political theology. It
carries an implication of the unknown and the unknowable—the ineffability of God,
the nature of the soul. The divine power of absolute monarchy has ineffable secrets that
may not be disclosed, nor should be disclosed. Arcanum refers to the secret element of a
more secular politic doctrine. The root of arcanum is arca, meaning chest or coffer. The
secret, then, is something that is put away, hidden from the sight of the outside world
that therefore knows nothing of it. Here, the secret is an instrument of power and of the
retention of power, and thus more functional than moral or ethical, although the two are
not mutually exclusive. The so-called Arcana imperii are doctrines of power with
historical roots that stretch from the power politics of Roman emperors to the practices
of some of today’s authoritarian regimes.
Secretum highlights the social element of secrecy—as we saw on the level of society
in Simmel’swork.Secretum defines the secret interms of social inclusion and exclusion.
Where arcanum signified keeping information out of sight—so that in the social sense it
simply is not there—secretum in contrast creates a relationship. A relationship between
the known and the unknown, and above all, a relationship between those who do not
know the secret and those who do, or who are presumed to know it.
11
In other words, ‘I
know something you don’tknow’also creates a social relationship on the state level, as
much between different elements of the state apparatus as in the larger sense of the
relationship between the state and its citizens. We live—as far as we know at least—in
the era of secretum. There are many known unknowns that the state—in our name—
keeps secret from us. We know that there are secrets, but we do not know their content.
They know something we do not know. This social relationship between state and
citizen is not without its tensions, when it comes to secrecy. In 2016 many citizens view
10
Horn (2011), see also Quill (2014)
11
Horn (2011:107–110)
D. Broeders
state secrecy with suspicion, which certainly has something to do with the expectations
that modern democratic politics has created for itself. In the words of Eva Horn:
A political culture that stresses transparency and moralizes the political cannot
accept the constitutive role of the secret; it will, at best, treat it as a regrettable
necessity.
12
A democratic and moral politics has difficulty justifying the functional and instrumental
use of secrecy. Anyone who follows the news is confronted with that on a daily basis. State
secrets increasingly have an unpleasant flavour of the abuse of power and tend to be
associated with corruption and the cover-up of mistakes. Revelations by journalists and
whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning confirm the public’s
suspicion that the state has ‘dirty little’and ‘dirty big’secrets. Certainly against a background
of moralistic politics, with the demand for clean hands and the public profession of norms of
open and transparent government, state secrets are increasingly viewed with suspicion.
So at first glance, it seems the state does not really want to keep fewer secrets. Certainly,
many kinds of information that were previously treated as pivotal for the power of the ruler
are now in the public domain. Philosopher Ian Hacking describes how the first censuses
and statistics were classified as state secrets and anxiously protected because that infor-
mation stood for power.
13
Today, national statistics agencies publish figures daily to show
the state of the country. But over other issues the curtains have been drawn: many more
documents and activities are seen as confidential or secret. And at the same, all kinds of
government agencies collect ever more information about citizens. For all government
roles, ranging from welfare provision to surveillance and control.
14
The enthusiasm of
government for gathering, sharing and cross-referencing more and more data about its
own people is only increasing with the advent of new technologies.
15
3 The Fight for Secrets Is the Fight for Freedom
Here, we come to another important aspect of secrecy. Secrets are also a form of freedom,
not least with regard to the prying eyes of the state. Isaiah Berlin spoke in his inaugural
address at Oxford about two forms of freedom: positive and negative. Negative freedom—
thedemarcationofaspaceinwhichapersonisfreetodowhatshewishesandtobewhom
she wishes without outside interference—is linked to the keeping of secrets. It is the
freedom to hold back information, even if there are others who want that information, or
even claim to have a right to it. One definition of freedom is defined by being able and
permitted to have secrets. If anyone needs to be convinced of this, I suggest you read
Orwell’s(1949/1989), which is more effective than any academic thesis. Here secrecy is
related to privacy. If we use privacy to demarcate between public and private, we can
connect this again to Berlin:
12
Horn (2011: 117)
13
Hacking (1990)
14
Surveillance scholar Lyon (2007: 3) maintains that all surveillance ‘moves somewhere on the continuum
between care and control’.
15
Prins et al. (2012); Lyon 2015
The Secret in the Information Society
It follows that a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of
public authority. Where it is to be drawn is a matter of argument, indeed of
haggling.
16
There is a struggle over where to draw the boundary, certainly in a time where our
technological environment is designed to record our social and economic lives as data. What
is our current era doing to the function and meaning of secrecy? What does it mean for
individual and state secrets? From these two things also follows a third category of secrets that
is growing more important in today’s information society: the secrets of technology itself.
4 The Social Individual as the Transparent Individual
It is often said that privacy is dead. Over. Something of the past. The large internet companies
have contributed to this. Scott MacNealy, one of the directors of Sun Microsystems, said
already in 1999 at a press conference: ‘You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.’
17
The end
of privacy is often ascribed to users themselves: they do not care about privacy any more. The
urge to keep things secret is decreasing and young people are adopting new norms with regard
to social behaviour. Research is showing, however, that the differences between age groups are
more nuanced
18
and currently—against the background of the rise of Big Data, the Internet of
Things and Snowden’s revelations—privacy is becoming more valued. Privacy is also a legal
instrument to protect information and secrets. But the way new technologies are becoming
integrated into our daily lives makes privacy an ambiguous category.
For some applications, we have absolutely no secrets: we don’t lie to our search
engine. We are more intimate with it than with our friends, family and lovers. We always
tell our search engine always exactly what we are thinking in the clearest possible terms.
19
Other applications tell on our secrets without our knowing it, or paying much
attention. Our smart phones—the uncannily popular Judas of our times—constantly
sends out our location, how long we spend there and which routes we take. Whoever
likes to read books on Amazon’s Kindle, may not realise that Amazon does not just
know which book they are reading, but also how long you spend reading them, how fast
you read and whether you finish a book or not. The Kindle sends all that information
home to the mothership.
20
And because so much data collection is hidden behind
consent forms, that make our digital lives so much more convenient, we click ‘agree’
more and more willingly.
21
We have absorbed the dominant business model of the
internet fully into our daily lives: the user gets a free email programme, web browser,
app or other service or product, and the provider hoovers up the digital details of the
user’s private activities, social contacts and networks. This creates a privacy paradox
16
Berlin (1958)
17
http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538
18
See for example: boyd (2014); Steijn and Vedder (2015)
19
Schneier (2015:22)
20
In Schneier (2015:28)
21
Schneier (2015: 30) as surveillance fades into the background it becomes easier to ignore. And the more
intrusive a system is, the more likely it is to be hidden. (…) In the near future, because these systems will be
hidden, we may unknowingly acquiesce to even more surveillance. See also Zuiderveen Borgesius (2015)on
the hollowing out of the concept of consent.
D. Broeders
where most people say they are concerned about privacy, but behave in their everyday
lives as if they do not care about it at all.
22
Despite the fact that a small number of users
take different, and more anonymous, paths through the digital world, this does not seem
to be good news for secrets in the information society.
The digital world is also a temptation for governments. There is more information
than ever before and the possibilities for mapping out society are growing day by day:
not only through the state’s own data collection, but also indirectly through the wealth of
information gathered by internet companies. ‘Seeing like a state’
23
used to mean that
governments observed the world through official statistics and registrations that they
themselves collected on their people, their land and their properties. Although the state is
not always the largest gatherer of data and personal details, within government organi-
sation this information has become more fluid. Today’s information government allows
more information from its citizens to flow across the borders of ministries, registries,
organisations and legal restrictions.
24
Also, the boundaries between public and private
data become increasingly murky.
25
In some countries, the control of government over
citizens in the digital society goes even further. In authoritarian regimes, attempts to
control people extend to the minutiae of their online lives. Surveillance of communica-
tions and activities on the internet is business as usual for many authoritarian govern-
ments and is constantly being refined.
26
But in democratic countries as well, citizens are
becoming more and more transparent to their own and to foreign governments. Even
governments do their utmost to increase the transparency of their peers. The Snowden
revelations showed that the American security agency NSA and other agencies gathered
personal data on a global scale.
27
The rationale seemed to be that if you collect as much
of the digital haystack as possible—‘collect it all!’—so that the digital needle will
probably come with it. This will have implications for the connection between citizens
and government. For many citizens, it does not feel good that the government can see
deep into your life and the past, and sometimes make predictions about your future on
that basis.
28
The adage that ‘he who has nothing to hide has nothing to fear’cannot quite
remove the uneasiness.
29
Here, there is also a transparency paradox: the citizen becomes
ever more transparent to the government, while it becomes increasingly complex for the
citizen to understand which governmental organisations hold which information about
him or her. The government, in other words, is becoming more and more opaque. That is
also bad news for the citizen’s ability to keep secrets in the information society.
We must ask, then, whether the individual is able to keep his secrets safe in the
information society. Certainly with regard to the Goliaths that he is faced with: corporate
as well as governmental. Companies such as Google and Apple have become, according
to Bruce Schneier, the feudal overlords of the information society.
30
In exchange for
22
Norberg et al. (2007)
23
Scott (1998); see Taylor and Broeders (2015) on the issue of how commercially generated big data are used
as a foundation for country-level ‘data doubles’,i.e.‘seeing like a state’through mostly private digital data and
public-private cooperation in low and middle income countries.
24
Prins et al. (2012)
25
See for example Kitchin (2014)
26
Deibertetal.(2008,2010,2011)
27
Greenwald (2014)
28
See for example Amoore (2013)andPasquale(2015)
29
See Solove (2011) for a thorough deconstruction of this argument
30
Schneier (2013)
The Secret in the Information Society
their products and services, we turn over our digital lives to them and deliver ourselves
to the protection they offer. They determine our online security, access to our informa-
tion and the level of privacy that they find proper. We have been manoeuvred into the
position of the serfs of the digital age. They also shape our social world: ‘Facebook
defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want and Google defines what we think.’
31
Through this, social boundaries are constantly being redrawn: what is private, public
and commercial? And what is secret now? Berlin’s struggle over the boundary between
what is public and what is private is being fought right here. The user, the citizen, or
more simply the individual is increasingly transparent in the digital age. The city air
breathes less free if you are overseen by cameras, your phone can be surveilled and your
social networks can be laid bare in the most painful detail. If someone wishes to apply
the full arsenal of the digital age to zoom in on an individual, as some companies and
governments can do, they can throw light on dark corners that previously would have
remained hidden. Simmel stated that someone who has no secrets and says everything
out loud will probably keep few friends. How will the state—or its representatives—see
citizens if it can mine so much information about them? ‘Unknown makes unloved’,
goes a Dutch saying. Simmel suggests that the opposite will also encounter limitations:
knowing more about someone does not per se make them more loveable. Harvard’s
Yochai Benkler has said recently that imperfection is a core dimension of freedom
32
,
something that relates well—albeit in the negative sense—to the desire of governments
and corporations to know everything possible about everyone. For the individual, then,
this means that secrecy must be saved from transparency.
Although digital society offers many opportunities to throw sand in the works and
oppose what is going on
33
, large-scale revolt is very unusual. If we see secrecy as a form
of freedom, then we should also agree with Berlin’s assessment that the struggle for
Freedom with a capital F, in the sense of an abstract value is the struggle of a vanguard.
In this, NGOs such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Bits of Freedom and
hacktivist organisations such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous are in the lead, sometimes
within and sometimes (well) over the limits of the law. Many people are prepared to
offer their freedom on the altar of benefits such as security, welfare, power or another
item from a long list of more and less noble goals and values
34
, such as convenience in
the information society. Google, which dominates 90 % of the European search engine
market
35
, has become the irresistible bargain offer of the European information society.
Alternatives are available, but are still fairly modest in their offerings and market share.
The digital world offers a wealth of information and communication, but the user
contributes as well. As the internet economy cliché goes, ‘if something is free, you are
not the customer, you are the product’. The debate about the limits of this exchange and
the question as to what the boundary between private and public should be will only
become more important in the coming years.
31
Dyson (2012: 308)
32
See: http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/12/security-versus-freedom
33
See for example Marx (2003); Brunton and Nissenbaum (2011)
34
Berlin (1958): The bulk of humanity has certainly at most times been prepared to sacrifice this [freedom,
DB] to other goals: security, status, prosperity, power, virtue, rewards in the next world; or justice, equality,
fraternity, and many other values which appear wholly, or in part, incompatible with the attainment of the
greatest degree of individual liberty, and certainly do not need it as a precondition for their own realisation.^
35
http://uk.businessinsider.com/heres-how-dominant-google-is-in-europe-2014-11?r=US&IR=T
D. Broeders
5 The State’sSecrets
What does the information society do for the state’s secrets? Simmel’s expectation was
that the state would become more open and transparent under the influence of modern-
isation. The answer seems to be mixed: state secrecy expanded in many countries over
the twentieth century, but digitisation—which positions the government to peer deep
into the lives of its citizens—also forces the state to look at its own practices of secrecy.
State secrecy exists between two extremes. On the one hand, secrets, as noted earlier,
are a form of power. This was encapsulated by Hannah Arendt as ‘real power begins
where secrecy begins’.
36
On the other hand, the state simply needs secrecy to fulfil
some of its tasks and duties towards society, for example in the case of national
security. In the words of William Colby—a former director of the CIA—‘Secrets are
necessary to a free society.’
37
The choice, in other words, is not black and white. Drawing
an appropriate boundary between what the states may keep to itself and what should be
shared with citizens, then, is extremely important.
In contrast to Simmel’s expectations, the modern state has not lost its appetite for
secrecy. The American security agency NSA, over which there has been much to do, was
set up in 1952 by a secret presidential directive from Harry Truman. The organisation and
its mission remained secret until a scandal in the 1970s ‘outed’the organisation to the
general public.
38
In general, states have the tendency to keep more information secret and
to classify more. In the US Bruce Schneier speaks of a secrecy creep, and proposes that
secrecy has exploded.
39
But in Europe too, secrecy is gaining rather than losing ground.
Legal scholar Deirdre Curtin shows how secrecy regarding documents in the EU is on the
rise, and especially within the domain of Justice and Home Affairs. She speaks of a culture
of secrecy that leads to a rampant culture of overclassification. In America this is no small
problem—experts estimate that 50–90 % of the classified material in government is over-
classified, or should not be classified at all.
40
States naturally want to make sure that anything marked as secret, stays secret. In the
digital society that is no simple task. If the NSA at the start of its existence was a good
example of an arcanum—no one knew that it existed—since 2013 it has become a
secretum that is cracking at the edges. The digital era also puts government secrets at
risk. Private Chelsea—at that point still Bradley—Manning copied around 250,000
secret documents from the US State Department onto a DVD on which he had written
‘Lady Gaga’in pen, and handed it over to the whistleblowers at WikiLeaks.
41
Edward
Snowden did not even work for the American government but for Booz Allen Hamilton,
an American consulting firm that worked for the NSA. How many documents he took
from the NSA’s servers is unknown, but according to Keith Alexander, then director of
the NSA, the number could be as high up as a million.
42
The era of Big Data, then, also
36
Arendt (1973:403)
37
Colby (1976:4)
38
Glennon (2014: 75)
39
Schneier (2015:99)
40
Curtin (2011:18–19)
41
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/how-us-embassy-cables-leaked
42
http://www.afr.com/technology/web/security/interview-transcriptformer-head-of-the-nsa-and-commander-
of-the-us-cyber-command-general-keith-alexander-20140507-itzhw
The Secret in the Information Society
applies to the leaking of government secrets. No one can get 250,000 paper documents
out of the building unseen, but with bits and bytes, it is another storey.
This means that states need to think hard about how to keep secrets in the digital age.
Peter Swire, a member of the commission tasked by President Obama with looking into
the functioning of the US intelligence services
43
, has said that in the digital era, secrets
are not likely to remain secrets for as long as they used to. He called this the ‘declining
half-life of secrets’.
44
Technologicaladvances,thefactthatintelligenceservicesworkin
public-private partnership far more often (instead of relying on employees with a self-
professed lifelong calling), and the multiplicity of sources they use, make the secrets
they keep vulnerable. The collection of information is less the issue than keeping secret
the fact that you are collecting it, which is getting much more difficult. And it matters a
great deal politically whether today’s paper publishes the storey that German Chancel-
lor Willy Brandt was wiretapped by the Americans in the 1970s, or a storey that the
same is done to Angela Merkel, the current German Chancellor, who will pick up the
phone to call the White House.
For the state, then, it seems that the secret must be saved from over classification and
secrecy itself. Perhaps it is the nature of the information society that will force the state to
make hard choices about state secrecy. Otherwise the enthusiasm for gathering and
keeping secret information threatens to overwhelm the legitimate function of state
secrecy. That suggests that democratic constitutional states need to take a serious look
at what the government really wants to categorise and treat as secret. For the collection
of personal data there is the privacy mantra, ‘select before you collect’,andforsecrecy
maybe there should be a government mantra of ‘select before you protect’.
6Technology’s Black Box
The last secret is concealed within technology itself. Modern information technology,
which puts pressure on individual as well as state secrecy, also has its own secrets. It is
a commonplace in the Science and Technology Studies literature that technology is not
a neutral instrument. Technologies have their own dynamics and interact with their
social environment. Technology is often seen as a black box. What exactly happens
inside it is not so easy to figure out. A good example of a black box technology in the
time of big data is the use of algorithms in the analysis of large-scale databases. At a
time when the amount of data is growing exponentially and is expected to create both
economic profit and new knowledge, algorithms are essential. An algorithm is a
specific series of steps that turn input data into outputs: it generates an output. An
algorithm processes a given dataset in order to draw information out of it: from your
Google search results and the Amazon books that fit your preferences to the potential
fraudsters and terrorists in government data analytics. Programming algorithms in-
volves coding in choices: which data should be picked up or not, which categories and
profiles should be created, and how they should be weighted. These choices are made
by people—designers and programmers—and increasingly also by algorithms them-
selves. Algorithms are increasingly capable of learning, something termed deep
43
Clarke et al. (2013)
44
Swire (2015)
D. Broeders
learning or machine learning, and as they are allowed to process increasing amounts of
data—which is the case with big data—they become themselves more complex. Google
search does not work through a single algorithm, but around 200 that together determine
what comes up first in your search results. These algorithms are becoming ever more
important in our daily lives: Google’s algorithm determines how I see the world, and
those of the intelligence and security services determine whether I am seen as a risk.
Algorithms themselves are often secrets. Firms categorise them as corporate secrets
and governments classify them because they create insight into their method of
operation.
45
They are kept secret because sharing them creates the risk of people
gaming the system. If you know what they are searching for, you can avoid that
pattern—like the criminal or fraudster who escapes digital capture. Or, reversely, you
can embrace the pattern—like the website that wants to appear at the top in the page
with search results. The thriving market for so called ‘search engine optimization’is
testimony to the reality of gaming the system. This secrecy however obscures all the
choices, weightings of risk and other values that combine in the algorithm and
database. They are shut away from view and cannot be questioned. From outside, it
looks as if there is a closed system that produces results with mathematical precision
and authority. Bowker and Star write in their classic work on classification that
information architecture—and the politics that lie hidden within it—is hard to analyse:
Good useable systems disappear almost by definition. The easier they are to use,
the harder they are to see. As well, most of the time, the bigger they are, the
harder they are to see.
46
The big black boxes—and all the secrets that they enclose—disappear behind the
façade of a good useable system. How their results are produced becomes obscured,
while the effect of those results on people’sliveskeepsgrowing.‘Computer says
no’is the digital version of the deus ex machina.
Modern digital technologies, then, have a mystery, literally in the sense of the
mysterium as discussed earlier. That is something that has changed little over time.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber discussed the disenchantment of
the world.
47
Rationalising society would, according to him, take the mystery out of the
world because new technologies ‘can, in principle, master all things by calculation’.
48
That is not to say that Weber thought modern technology itself was comprehensible for
anyone. He argued instead that there was a ‘knowledge or belief that if one but wished
one could learn it at any time’. In practice, however, disenchantment would lead to
division of labour and specialisation of knowledge meaning that most people did not
understand how a lift, tram or computer worked. That was for experts. Freely translated
to our digital age: for most people ICT is a mystery, but for experts the zeros and ones
of the algorithm have no secrets. According to sociologist Stef Aupers, however, this is
45
Pasquale (2015); Gillespie (2014)
46
Bowker and Star (2000:33)
47
Web e r ( 2004:12–13)
48
‘That in turn means the disenchantment of the world. Unlike the savage for whom such forces existed, we
need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control the spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and
calculation achieve our ends. This is the primary meaning of the process of intellectualization.’Webe r ( 2004:
13).
The Secret in the Information Society
not the case. The ICT specialists that he interviewed in Silicon Valley all emphasised
‘the opaque and unpredictable nature of contemporary digital technology’.
49
For these
experts too, the mystery of technology seems to be greater than commonly assumed.
The simplicity and tranquillity of the Google home page conceals around 200 algo-
rithms. The number of people at Google who can see all of them, and understand them,
is probably extremely limited. It would not surprise me if there were none. But it is, in
the words of Bowker and Star, a good useable system. But certainly, one that has its
own secrets.
7 Conclusion
The secret is a somewhat forgotten but vital sociological theme into which we should
enquire more, especially in light of the fast changes in our digital society. With more and
more of our lives lived and/or tracked online, the future of secrecy is not bright. Simmel’s
enthusiasm—the secret is one of man’s greatest achievements—hasanoppressiveechoin
the words of Sissela Bok: ‘With no control over secrecy and openness, human beings
could not remain either sane or free.’
50
Spiritual health and freedom are high stakes that
merit more of an academic effort to understand and think through the political and social
complex of digitisation, secrecy, privacy and transparency.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and repro-
duction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a
link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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