Abstract
Surveillance is a subject on many lips. Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations, commentators around the world have questioned if anything remains undetected by the surveillance networks set up by the world’s most powerful nations. Documentation leaked by the former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractor has revealed electronic ears and eyes spreading across the planet, enabling the rapid transfer of massive amounts of data to an army of intelligence operators, aided by some of the fastest computing machines on earth and their capacious hard drives. While emblematic examples such as German chancellor Angela Merkel’s tapped Nokia handset evoke the gadget-oriented espionage of an early 007 movie, the sheer scale and sweep of the operations have caused the greatest concern for most members of the public. Not only has it become apparent how much private information transferred through mobile phones, e-mails, Web portals, and social networking websites can be tapped into by security agencies, but we now also know that intelligence operators do not always discriminate between enemies and allies in tapping operations—something that has come to light in the most embarrassing circumstances for the Obama administration.1
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Notes
See, among others, Ronald E. Doel, “The Earth Sciences and Geophysics,” in John Krige and Dominique Pestre (eds), Companion to Science in the 20th Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 391–417;
Kai-Henrik Barth, “The Politics of Seismology: Nuclear Testing, Arms Control and the Transformation of a Discipline,” Social Studies of Science 33:5 (2003): 743–781;
Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005);
James Roger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010);
Doel and Naomi Oreskes, “The Physics and Chemistry of the Earth,” in Mary Jo Nye (ed.), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 538–557.
On Sputnik, see for instance Rip Bulkeley, The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography of Space (London: Macmillan, 1991); and
John M. Logsdon, Roger Launius, and Robert W. Smith (eds), Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (London: Routledge, 2000).
On the IGY, see, for instance, Walter Sullivan, Assault on the Unknown. The International Geophysical Year (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977);
Mike Davies, City of Quartz: Excavating The Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1992); and more recently
Torin Monahan (ed.), Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).
A general survey is in Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, and David Lyon (eds), Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). A list of relevant centers devoted to surveillance studies is in (accessed January 20, 2013).
For a thoughtful reflection on the state of the field, see also Kirstie Ball and Kevin Haggerty, “Editorial: Doing Surveillance Studies,” Surveillance & Society 3 (2005): 129–138 (available at: , accessed January 20, 2013).
M. Dirnwoeber, R. Machan, and J. Herler, “Coral Reef Surveillance: Infrared-Sensitive Video Surveillance Technology as a New Tool for Diurnal and Nocturnal Long-Term Field Observations,” Remote Sensing 4:11 (2012): 3346–3362;
D. G. M. Miller, N. M. Slicer, and Q. Hanich, “Monitoring, Control and Surveillance of Protected Areas and Specially Managed Areas in the Marine Domain,” Marine Policy 39 (2013): 64–71. On biomonitoring,
see for instance: National Research Council, Human Biomonitoring for Environmental Chemicals (Washington DC: NRC, 2006).
For an analysis of the interdependence between observer and observed in the case of the first photographs of the earth from space, see Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
Robert Jervis, “Was the Cold War a Security Dilemma,” Journal of Cold War Studies 3 (2001): 36–60.
See also Charles L. Glaser, “The Security Dilemma Revisited,” World Politics 50 (1997): 171–201;
and Alan Collins (ed.), Contemporary Security Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18.
See, among many others, Ronald E. Doel, Tanya J. Levin, and Mason K. Marker, “Extending Modern Cartography to the Ocean Depths: Military Patronage, Cold War Priorities, and the Heezen–Tharp Mapping Project 1952–1959,” Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006): 605–626; Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War;
Ronald Rainger, “Constructing a Landscape for Postwar Science: Roger Revelle, the Scripps Institution and the University of California, San Diego,” Minerva 39:3 (2001): 327–352;
Gary Weir, An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists and the Ocean Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001).
See, for instance, important contributions to science studies such as David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences after World War II (London: Springer, 1993).
Other contributions from intelligence studies include: Jeffrey Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006);
Charles A. Ziegler and David Jacobson, Spying Without Spies: Origins of America’s Nuclear Surveillance System (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995);
Michael S. Goodman, Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
On the transition from human to scientific intelligence see also: Kristie Macrakis, “Technophilic Hubris and Espionage Styles During the Cold War,” Isis 101 (2010): 378–385.
The key reference here is Ronald E. Doel, “Scientists as Policymakers, Advisors, and Intelligence Agents: Linking Contemporary Diplomatic History with the History of Contemporary Science,” in Thomas Söderqvist, ed, The Historiography of Contemporary Science (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), 215–244.
See also David Van Keuren, “Cold War Science in Black and White: US Intelligence Gathering and Its Scientific Cover at the Naval Research Laboratory, 1948–1962,” Social Studies of Science, 31 (2001): 207–229.
John Krige, “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence,” in Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth (eds), Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs: Osiris 21 (2006): 161–181.
As the wording makes obvious, this point draws upon Naomi Oreskes, “A Context of Motivation: US Navy Oceanographic Research and the Discovery of Sea-Floor Hydrothermal Vents,” Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 697–742.
See on this Alan Needell, Science, Cold War and the American State: Lloyd V. Berkner and the Balance of Professional Ideals (Amsterdam: Harwood/NASA, 2000).
On the history of the DEW Line, see, for instance, P.W. Lackenbauer, Matthew Farish, and Jennifer Arthur-Lackenbauer, The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line: A Bibliography and Document Resource List (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, 2005).
Key references in the emerging and still contested field of transnational history include (among many others) Akira Iniye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” The American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031–1055;
Christopher A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational Histor y,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1441–1464.
Michael A. Dennis, ”Secrecy and Science Revisited: From Politics to Historical Practice and Back”, in Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Söderqvist, eds. The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Tecnology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (London: Routledge, 2006), 172–184.
See the essays in the edited collection Néstor Herran, Soraya Boudia, and Simone Turchetti (eds), Transnational History of Science: Special Issue of the British Journal for the History of Science 45 (2012).
John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). There are, of course, works detailing interactions between the US and Western European states, especially in space research.
See, for instance, Michelangelo De Maria and Lucia Orlando (eds), Italy in Space: In Search of a Strategy, 1957–1975 (Paris: Beauchesne, 2008).
See also John Krige and Arturo Russo, A History of the European Space Agency, 2 Vols. (Noordwijk: ESA, 2000) and
Lorenza Sebesta, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: U.S.-European Relations and the Decision to Build a European Launch Vehicle,” in Andrew J. Butrica (ed.), Beyond the Ionosphere: The Development of Satellite Communications (Washington DC: NASA, 1997).
On science and empire, see amongst many others Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order and the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006);
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000);
Michael Osborne, “Science and the French Empire,” Isis 96 (2005): 80–87;
and John Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Historians refer to this conception as a “Westphalian paradigm,” tracing it back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. For an overview of the Westphalian system, see, for instance, Paul D’Anieri, International Politics: Power and Purpose in Global Affairs, 2nd ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), 28–30. We follow Mario Telò in preferring the term “Westphalian paradigm” to “Westphalian system,” reflecting its continued conceptual applicability to the post-1945 world. Telò, International Relations: A European Perspective (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 2–3.
See, for instance, Sebastian Reyn, Atlantis Lost: The American Experience with Charles de Gaulle, 1958–1969 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
On CERN, see Krige and Dominique Pestre, “Some Thoughts on the History of CERN in the 50s and 60s,” in P. Galison and B. Hevly (eds.), Big Science: The Growth of Large Scale Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 78–99.
See, for instance, John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know. Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
John Krige, “Hybrid Knowledge: the Transnational Co-production of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment in the 1960s,” BJHS 45 (2012): 340.
On ICSU see Frank Greenaway, Science International: History of the International Council of Scientific Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the coexistence of territorial ambitions and international scientific cooperation, see, for instance, the case of Antarctica discussed in
S. Turchetti, S. Naylor, K. Dean, and M. Siegert, “On Thick Ice: Scientific Internationalism and Antarctic Affairs, 1957–1980,” History and Technology, 24 (2008): 351–376.
See Adamson, Camprubí, and Turchetti and Roberto Cantoni, “Oily Deals. Exploration, Diplomacy and Security in Cold War France and Italy,” PhD diss. submitted at the University of Manchester, 2014, chap. 4.
The most important references are Needell, Science, Cold War and the American State; and Ronald E. Doel and Allan A. Needell, “Science, Scientists and the CIA: Balancing International Ideals, National Needs, and Professional Opportunities,” Intelligence and National Security 12 (1997): 59–81.
Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War. See also Elena Aronova, Karen Baker, and Naomi Oreskes, “Big Science and Big Data in Biology: From the International Geophysical Year through the International Biological Program to the Long Term Ecological Research Program, 1957 to Present,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40:2 (2012): 183–224.
Simone Turchetti, “Sword, Shield and Buoys: A History of the NATO SubCommittee on Oceanographic Research, 1959–1973,” Centaurus 54 (2012): 205–231.
Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33,5 (2003): 635–666.
Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
David Hounshell, “The Cold War, RAND, and the Generation of Knowledge, 1946–62,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 27 (1997): 239.
Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the US, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 18 (1985): 149–229;
Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
For a critique, see Daniel J. Kevles, “Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945–1956,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 20 (1990): 239–264.
See Naomi Oreskes and Homer Le Grand (eds.), Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth (Boulder: Westview, 2002).
See, for instance, Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1999).
James Lovelock, Homage to Gaia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 169 and 173.
Gunnar Ellingsen, “Instrumentutvikling med NATO-bistand,” in Edgar Hovland (ed.), I vinden: Geofysisk Institutt 90 år (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2007), 112–115.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).
The most notable is Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the title of whose recent book accurately captures the essence of his views. Inhofe, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2012).
Kristine C. Harper, “Climate Control: United States Weather Modification in the Cold War and Beyond,” Endeavour 32,1 (2008): 20–26; Fleming, Fixing the Sky.
On geoengineering see Fleming, Fixing the Sky, and also Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
See, among many others, Rachel L. Finn and David Wright, ”Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Surveillance, Ethics and Privacy in Civil Applications,” Computer Law & Security Review 28, 2 (2012): 184–194;
and Kathleen Bartzen Culver, ”From Battlefield to Newsroom: Ethical Implications of Drone Technology in Journalism,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Exploring Media Morality 29,1 (2014): 52–56.
On this, see Jacob Hamblin, “Environmentalism for the Atlantic Alliance,” Environmental History 15,1 (2010): 54–75.
This includes key decisions on the banning of CFCs through the Montreal Protocol and the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. See Shardul Agrawala, “Context and Early Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change,” Climatic Change 39 (1998): 605–620.
See, for instance, Carina Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic: The Construction of an International Region (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27,3 (1986): 544–560
On risk perception, see for instance Wiebe Bijker, Roland Bal, and Ruud Hendriks, The Paradox of Scientific Authority: The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). Although the Kyoto Protocol was designed as a two tier system distinguishing between developed and developing countries in enforcing carbon emission cuts, it did not recognize damages to underdeveloped countries, something recently addressed as the 2012 Doha Climate Change conference. On this, see: Fiona Harvey, “Doha Climate Change Deal Clears Way for ‘Damage Aid’ to Poor Nations,” The Observer, December 8, 2012.
James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009).
For an overview on energy security, see for instance: Benjamin K. Sovacool and Marylin A. Brown, “Competing Dimensions of Energy Security: An International Perspective,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35 (2010): 77–108;
and Robert J. Lieber, “Energy, Economics and Security in Alliance Perspective,” International Security 4 (1980): 139–163.
On novel geophysical techniques, Louis A. Allaud and Maurice H. Martin, Schlumberger: The History of a Technique (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1978) and
Henry Faul, Nuclear Geology (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1954).
On signals intelligence, see, for instance, Richard Aldrich, GCHQ: Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: HarperCollins, 2011).
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Turchetti, S., Roberts, P. (2014). Introduction. In: Turchetti, S., Roberts, P. (eds) The Surveillance Imperative. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438744_1
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